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Real top Forbes football rich list

For a club that has won more La Liga and Champions League titles than any other team on the planet, the past two seasons have been disappointments for Real Madrid, which finished behind arch rival Barcelona in the Spanish league standings in back-to-back years and crashed out of European competition in the quarterfinals each time. Yet for all of the hand-wringing among the team’s exacting fans, business has never been better for Los Blancos.

During the 2024-25 season, Real Madrid posted $1.27 billion in revenue, up 12% from its mark the year prior, already a record for a soccer club. In fact, the new figure just edges the Dallas Cowboys $1.23bn from the 2024 NFL season for the highest revenue total for a sports team ever measured by Forbes (without adjusting for inflation).

So even with Real Madrid sitting out Saturday’s Champions League final—where Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain will battle for an extra $29 million in prize money—Los Blancos are the world’s most valuable soccer team for the fifth year in a row, and the tenth time in the past 13 editions of Forbes’ annual ranking. Real Madrid is now valued at $9.5 billion—a $2 billion lead on No. 2 Barça, which last season became the only other soccer club ever to have surpassed $1 billion in revenue (excluding player trading).

Despite the Spanish dominance at the top, La Liga has only one additional club represented among the 30 most valuable soccer teams, leaving it behind England’s Premier League (11), the United States’ Major League Soccer (seven) and Italy’s Serie A (four) in its representation in the valuation ranking. Germany’s Bundesliga also has three clubs among the top 30, and France’s Ligue 1 and Portugal’s Primeira Liga each have one to fill out the list.

The biggest driver of valuations right now is the influx of American investors desperate to break into sports ownership. This season, more than half of the clubs in the Premier League were majority-owned by Americans or U.S.-based firms, and Americans or Canadians controlled nine of Serie A’s 20 teams, as well as three clubs in La Liga after Apollo’s purchase of Atlético. U.S. investors have also begun to buy up teams in lower divisions and in other countries.

“There are just so many Americans with cash who like sports, and the American market is kind of closed off to a lot of these owners,” one European soccer insider says. “If you’re an American millionaire from North Carolina, you’re probably priced out of your local USL club, and you’re definitely priced out of an MLS club—that is like cash billionaires now.

“But if you can buy an English football club—maybe even though they’re all the way down the system—at one times revenue, when a USL club is probably trading at anywhere from seven to 15 times revenue, that’s probably a no-brainer.”


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