Football's Biggest Stars Redefine Ownership: Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé and More
Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, Luka Modrić, Vinícius Júnior, Thibaut Courtois. For two decades they’ve defined the game on the pitch. Now they’re quietly redrawing its map from the boardroom.
What started as a retirement fantasy for ageing stars has become a live project for players still at the peak of their powers. Fifth tiers, fallen giants, reborn minnows – Europe’s footballing undergrowth is filling up with some of the most famous names on earth.
Messi goes home – via the fifth tier
In April, UE Cornella – a modest fifth-tier club tucked into the south-west of Barcelona – dropped a bombshell: Lionel Messi had completed a 100 per cent takeover.
No consultancy role. No honorary title. Full control.
Cornella’s statement framed it as a homecoming of sorts, saying the deal “reinforces Messi’s close ties to Barcelona and his commitment to the development of sport and local talent in Catalonia – a connection rooted in his years at FC Barcelona and sustained ever since.” Messi followed up with a video message to players and staff, introducing himself as their new owner and backing their promotion push. They fell short in the play-offs, but the effect was immediate.
On the pitch, the project will take time. Off it, the impact was instant. Cornella’s Instagram exploded into the hundreds of thousands of followers, turning a small Catalan club into a global curiosity overnight. The academy Messi has bought into already carries a solid reputation: Jordi Alba came through there, as did current Barça talent Gerard Martin and Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya. Messi is expected to use that base to drive more investment into Catalan youth.
This is his first European club, but not his only badge. Alongside Inter Miami team-mate Luis Suárez, Messi also co-founded Deportivo LSM in Uruguay’s fourth tier – another small, ambitious project with his fingerprints on it.
Ronaldo picks his platform
Cristiano Ronaldo has never hidden his next ambition. “If I can be a club owner, why would I be a manager, sporting director or CEO?” he asked after turning 40, before stating he wanted to own “several” clubs.
The first step came in February. Through CR7 Sports Investments, he bought a 25 per cent stake in UD Almería, a Spanish Segunda side with one foot in the elite and the other in uncertainty.
“It has been a long-held ambition of mine to contribute to football, beyond the pitch,” Ronaldo said. “UD Almeria is a Spanish club with strong foundations and clear potential for growth.” The club remains primarily controlled by a Saudi investment group led by Mohammed Al-Khereiji, who hailed Ronaldo as “the greatest to ever play the game” and a man who “knows the Spanish leagues very well.”
He certainly does. Nine years at Real Madrid, four Champions League titles, two La Liga crowns and a record goal tally have given him a deep familiarity with the terrain he’s now investing in.
Almería’s potential is clear enough. They were in La Liga as recently as 2024 and were a goal away from bouncing straight back, losing 2-1 on aggregate to Málaga in the play-off final. The response has been aggressive: highly rated coach García Pimienta – a La Masia product after 20 years at Barcelona’s academy – has come in, along with seven new signings aimed at securing automatic promotion in 2026-27.
Ronaldo even found himself in a surreal split-screen moment in August. In Lisbon, Almería faced Al-Nassr in a pre-season friendly. The Portugal captain, on holiday after the World Cup, watched from the stands as the team he plays for lost 2-0 to the club he now co-owns.
Vinícius Júnior and the rebirth of Alverca
Vinícius Júnior took a different path. In February 2025, the Real Madrid winger joined a group of investors to buy between 70 and 80 per cent of Portuguese side Alverca for a reported €10 million.
The timing could hardly have been sharper. Three months later, Alverca sealed a second straight promotion and returned to the top flight for the first time since 1998.
Their story is brutal and romantic in equal measure. Relegated from Liga Portugal in 2005, the club folded, only to be reborn a year later and start again from the regional depths. The Vincintin family steered that long climb but were eventually forced to sell because they already owned Santa Clara – and league rules prevent dual ownership.
Vinícius stepped in, but from a distance. His agent, Thassilo Soares, is now the majority shareholder, and day-to-day power lies there. “Our relationship with Vinícius is remote,” sporting director Fernando Malta told The Guardian via Get French Football News. “We say he is the club’s most famous fan.”
That “fan” has already been through the gates. Vinícius visited the Complexo Desportivo for the first time early last season when Alverca hosted Benfica, a reminder of how far the club had come. They finished 10th in their first campaign back among the elite, helped by a staggering 35 signings in one season.
Malta is realistic. He does not see Alverca challenging Porto, Sporting CP or Benfica for the title any time soon. Survival and player trading remain the twin pillars. “We are not a big club in terms of size, so we need to be creative in our scouting and use of data,” he said. “The club’s main objective is staying in the top division but the second is selling players.”
Even so, Vinícius’ name opens doors. The club can now lean on the star power of Eduardo Camavinga and American rapper Travis Scott, who are involved in communication and marketing. For a once-defunct provincial club, that is a different universe.
Mbappé’s harsh lesson at Caen
Kylian Mbappé’s move into ownership came with a romantic twist – and a brutal reality check.
In June 2024, his company Interconnected Ventures, through its investment arm Coalition Capital, completed a majority takeover of SM Caen. Mbappé, who almost joined Caen as a youth in 2012 before choosing Monaco, reportedly put €15m of his own money into the deal.
The club called it “a significant step in the club's strategic development” and said it strengthened their “natural ambition to remain among the historic places in French football.” At that point Caen were in Ligue 2 and chasing promotion.
The slide that followed was stark. Caen finished the 2024-25 season in 18th and dropped into the Championnat National – the third tier – for the first time in 41 years. Results nosedived, popular coach Nicolas Seube was sacked, and the relationship with supporters frayed. One banner after a damaging defeat to Clermont Foot cut through the noise: “SMC is not your toy.”
Mbappé’s reality: being Real Madrid’s talisman and running a professional club at the same time is a brutal juggling act. He has struggled to manage both.
Yet he did not retreat. Late last year he made a bold call, appointing former Arsenal and France defender Gaël Clichy as head coach. Clichy steadied the ship and pushed Caen up the table, even if they missed the play-offs in May. This summer, Mbappé also approved the arrival of former Caen and Paris Saint-Germain midfielder Mathieu Bodmer as director of football. L’Équipe reported the pair did not speak before the appointment, underlining the distance between owner and operations.
Still, Caen now feel more stable, and the target is clear: get back to Ligue 2 at the first serious opportunity.
Modrić and Swansea’s American dream
Luka Modrić’s ownership move came with a jolt of disbelief in south Wales.
Shortly before ending his glittering 13-year spell at Real Madrid last summer, the Croatian midfielder became a minority investor and co-owner at Swansea City. His introductory message did not need embellishment: “Hi Swansea fans, I’m Luka Modric and I’m excited to be part of the journey. My goal is to support the club’s growth in a positive way and to help to build an exciting future.”
For Swansea’s American owners – Andy Coleman, Brett Cravatt and Jason Cohen – this was the marquee name they had been chasing. The Wrexham effect, fuelled by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, had shown what a global figurehead can do for a club’s profile. Modrić, now playing in Serie A for AC Milan, already knew Swansea from his Tottenham days, having faced them home and away in 2010-11. The Guardian has reported that his decision came from a desire to learn the business side of football.
He has not treated it as a vanity stake. Modrić has dug into Swansea’s long-term strategy and even volunteered to speak directly with transfer targets. For now, he remains a background presence at the Swansea.com Stadium, but once his playing days end, that is expected to change.
The ripple effect has been enormous. Snoop Dogg followed Modrić into the ownership group within months, with Martha Stewart joining in December. Chief executive Tom Gorringe summed up the shift: “It puts us in a different league in terms of some of the things that we are able to do.”
Now the ambition is to move into a different league in the literal sense. Swansea have been out of the Premier League for nine years and missed the Championship play-offs in 2025-26 by nine points. As the new campaign looms, having Modrić on call for insight and influence could be decisive.
Courtois builds a network
Thibaut Courtois might be the busiest of the lot.
Still one of the world’s top goalkeepers at 34, the Real Madrid and Belgium No.1 has quietly stitched together a three-club portfolio in less than a year, all through NxtPlay Capital, the company he co-founded with Gonzalo Vilar.
The first move came in February, when Courtois joined an already star-studded group at Le Mans that included Novak Djokovic and Felipe Massa. Through NxtPlay, he invested in a club fighting its way back – and watched them celebrate a return to Ligue 1 for the first time since 2010.
Three months later, NxtPlay became co-owners of CD Extremadura. The Spanish club have rattled off four straight promotions since 2022 to reach the Primera Federación, Spain’s third tier. The trajectory is steep, the ceiling still unclear.
Then came the emotional one. On June 1, KRC Genk announced Courtois’ return as a minority investor and their first external corporate shareholder, following the club’s conversion into a limited liability company. This is where his professional story began, and he did not hide what it meant.
“I have pursued excellence all my life. At KRC Genk, I feel that same fire and ambition,” he told the club’s website. “This investment truly feels like coming home. Through this commitment, I want to help the club continue to grow and strengthen its sporting ambitions. From Limburg to the top of Europe.”
NxtPlay now holds a seat on Genk’s board, with Vilar handling the role while Courtois focuses on Madrid. But his influence is already felt in the club’s commercial planning. Every club he and NxtPlay have chosen carries room to grow, and the pattern is clear: this is the early phase of a multi-club model, the kind that City Football Group, Red Bull and BlueCo have already turned into empires.
The new game
From Cornella to Caen, Alverca to Almería, Swansea to Genk, the sport’s biggest stars are no longer just passing through towns and cities as visiting heroes. They are wiring themselves into the foundations.
Some projects are surging. Some have already hit turbulence. All of them point in the same direction: the era of the player-owner is no longer a thought experiment. It’s here, it’s messy, and it’s only going to get louder.
