How Do You Sell a Football Club?
Leicester City's owners are not just selling a stadium, a training ground and football teams. They are selling a story.
How do you sell a football club that won the Premier League ten years ago but now finds itself in League One?
You begin, apparently, by not mentioning the League One part.
Leicester City's Thai owners, King Power, are looking for a buyer after 16 years in charge. An eight-page brochure prepared by US investment bank Citigroup presents what it calls a "rare opportunity" to acquire a club with an excellent record of winning promotion to higher divisions.
That is one way of describing Leicester's recent history.
Another is that the club has suffered three relegations in four seasons and fallen from the Premier League to the third tier of English football.
Both descriptions are technically true. Only one belongs in a sales brochure.
This is what makes the proposed sale interesting beyond football. It offers a remarkably clear example of how corporate stories are constructed. Facts do not always have to be hidden or falsified. They can simply be arranged, emphasised or omitted until the version placed before us bears only a selective resemblance to the whole.
The club as an investment opportunity
King Power bought Leicester City for about £35 million in 2010. What followed was one of the most extraordinary periods in English football history.
Leicester won promotion to the Premier League in 2014. Two years later, a team widely expected to be fighting relegation became champions at odds famously quoted as 5,000-1. The club later reached the Champions League quarter-finals, finished fifth in the Premier League twice and won its first FA Cup in 2021.
Those achievements deserve their place in any account of King Power's ownership. They were real, historic and, for Leicester supporters, unforgettable.
They also feature prominently in the document now being used to attract potential buyers.
According to reports, the proposed sale includes the men's and women's teams, the King Power Stadium, Leicester's Seagrave training complex and Belgian sister club OH Leuven. The physical assets are valued at more than £200 million, including a reported valuation of £121 million for the training ground. Citigroup also forecasts turnover of more than £97 million for the 2026 financial year.
Presented this way, Leicester City looks like an established sporting institution with substantial assets, modern facilities, a globally recognised name and a history of reaching the highest level.
All of that is true.
But it is not the whole truth.
What does not make the brochure
The brochure reportedly makes no reference to Leicester City's current position in League One.
It promotes the club's history of winning promotions without dwelling on why so many promotions have been necessary. It celebrates the Premier League title and FA Cup but apparently excludes the severe decline that followed them.
The club lost more than £180 million during the years in which it moved between the Premier League and Championship. Its 2025 accounts included £103.6 million in bank loans. In February 2026, Leicester received a six-point deduction after an independent commission found that it had breached financial rules for the three-year period ending in 2024.
These are not minor details. They are part of the explanation for how a recent Premier League champion came to be playing in League One.
There is nothing unusual about a seller presenting an asset in the most favourable possible light. Anyone selling a house takes photographs on a sunny day, tidies the rooms and avoids making the subsidence the centrepiece of the listing.
But a football club is not simply another asset.
It carries the identity of a city, the loyalty of generations and the weekly emotional investment of thousands of people. Those supporters cannot sell their attachment when ownership changes. They remain, whoever happens to control the balance sheet.
That gives the language of the brochure an uncomfortable edge. A collapse experienced by supporters as years of poor decisions, financial losses, points deductions and relegations becomes, in investment language, an "excellent track record of winning promotions".
Failure has been repackaged as potential.
The price of success
It would be too easy to reduce the King Power era to either a fairy tale or a cautionary tale. It has been both.
The Srivaddhanaprabha family did not arrive, extract a quick profit and leave the club burdened with the purchase price. King Power invested heavily, provided Leicester with success beyond anything most supporters could reasonably have imagined and converted large amounts of debt into equity. Reports suggest that, apart from relatively small maintenance loans, the club is now largely free of owner debt.
The death of chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter crash outside the stadium in 2018 also created a bond between the family, the club and the city that cannot be represented in a financial prospectus.
This is not a simple story of good owners suddenly becoming bad owners.
It is a story of how quickly success can alter expectations and encourage risk. Leicester came close to establishing itself outside the traditional group of England's wealthiest clubs. Maintaining that position required high spending, continued Premier League income and consistently successful recruitment.
Once results deteriorated, the financial structure that had supported the ambition became much harder to sustain. Relegation reduced income. Players had to be sold. Managerial changes followed. The club briefly returned to the Premier League, fell again and eventually dropped into League One.
King Power's success did not end with the Premier League title. Leicester later won the FA Cup and Community Shield, reached a European semi-final and returned immediately to the Premier League after the first relegation. What makes the present position so extraordinary is not a decade of continuous decline, but the speed with which sustained success gave way to three relegations in four seasons.
When stability becomes inertia
There is little evidence that Aiyawatt simply lost interest in Leicester City after his father's death.
Alongside the continued sporting success, Leicester completed the Seagrave training complex, King Power maintained its financial support and substantial shareholder debt was converted into equity. Aiyawatt also continued the charitable and civic work associated with his father.
In an interview in January 2026, he described Leicester as being like his son. He spoke about watching matches from Thailand in the early hours and being unable to sleep after poor performances. That does not sound like indifference.
The more difficult possibility is that Aiyawatt inherited his father's club as an emotional obligation, but found himself unable to reproduce the combination of leadership, judgement and circumstances that had enabled Vichai's project to work.
Affection, loyalty and financial commitment are not the same as effective governance.
For much of King Power's ownership, Leicester valued continuity. Susan Whelan served as chief executive from 2010 until 2025. Jon Rudkin became director of football in 2014, having worked at the club since 1996. Aiyawatt had already been closely involved before succeeding his father as chairman in 2018.
During the successful years, that stability appeared to be one of Leicester's greatest strengths. The same leadership group had helped deliver promotion, a Premier League title, European football and the FA Cup. Success validated the structure and the people within it.
But conditions changed while the structure largely remained.
Key recruitment figures departed. Player trading became less effective. Expensive signings failed to improve the team. Contracts were allowed to run down, the wage bill grew and the squad became increasingly difficult to renew. Yet authority remained concentrated around a small group of long-serving executives.
This is one of the dangers of exceptional success. When a leadership team has achieved something everyone considered impossible, who inside the organisation possesses the authority to tell it that its methods are no longer working?
Leicester changed managers repeatedly, but the people responsible for the longer-term football and financial decisions remained largely in place. The club did not begin creating a new technical-director structure until late 2025, after two Premier League relegations. Even then, Rudkin was retained and subsequently appointed chief football officer.
Stability had hardened into institutional inertia.
The warnings from the stands
Leicester's organised supporters had already recognised that was happening.
After the 2023 relegation, the Foxes Trust submitted questions about how the club was being run and what lessons the leadership had learned. According to the Trust, an initially offered meeting was repeatedly delayed and its questions went unanswered.
At that stage, considerable goodwill towards King Power remained. Supporters remembered what the Srivaddhanaprabha family had given the club and the city. The predominant demand was not for the owners to leave, but for them to explain what had gone wrong and demonstrate that it would not happen again.
Two years later, following another Premier League relegation, the Trust issued a statement with the title: "Nothing changes, if nothing changes."
Its criticism extended beyond results. It described a growing divide between the club and its supporters, a lack of communication from senior directors and a fan-engagement structure that did not produce meaningful engagement. The questions raised after the first relegation had still not received satisfactory answers.
Other supporters moved from questions to organised protest. Project Reset argued that too much authority had been concentrated among two or three senior figures and that decisions had become reactive, inconsistent and detached from any clear guiding principles. Significantly, its initial criticism distinguished Aiyawatt from the executives around him. The belief was not necessarily that he should sell, but that he was being failed by a leadership structure he needed to change.
That distinction weakened as the decline continued.
Following relegation to League One, 4,413 supporters responded to the Foxes Trust's 2026 end-of-season survey. Almost 93 per cent were dissatisfied with Jon Rudkin's appointment as chief football officer. More than 90 per cent rated recruitment poorly, while 94 per cent considered the management of player contracts poor or very poor. Almost 92 per cent were concerned about the club's future financial security and 82 per cent felt disconnected from Leicester City.
By then, criticism had reached the ownership itself. More than 92 per cent rated its recent performance poor or very poor, and three quarters supported a change of ownership.
That progression matters. Supporter anger was not an instantaneous rejection of King Power or an act of ingratitude for the achievements of the past. The Trust first asked for answers, then communication, then leadership change. Only after those requests produced little visible response did a substantial majority conclude that ownership itself might have to change.
The Trust's reaction to the proposed sale reflects that history. It remains grateful for King Power's contribution to Leicester's greatest period, but says responsibility for the subsequent decline rests with the current hierarchy. Its conclusion is stark: "Our club has lost its way."
Supporters had watched stability become inertia from the outside. Their warnings grew louder as those on the inside appeared increasingly unwilling or unable to hear them.
Brendan Rodgers and the visible problem
Brendan Rodgers' departure in April 2023 illustrates the point.
Rodgers had led Leicester to consecutive fifth-place finishes, their first FA Cup, the Community Shield and a European semi-final. By the beginning of the 2022-23 season, however, the squad had weakened. Kasper Schmeichel left, Wesley Fofana was sold to Chelsea and Wout Faes was effectively the only major summer arrival.
Rodgers publicly complained that the team had not received the help it needed in the transfer market. He also said that expectations surrounding Leicester were no longer aligned with the club's finances.
He was not blameless. Performances declined, confidence disappeared and his repeated public comments about the squad's shortcomings probably did little to restore belief. After five defeats in six matches left Leicester in the relegation zone, the board dismissed him with ten games remaining.
The managerial change did not prevent relegation.
In retrospect, Rodgers looks less like the cause of Leicester's collapse than its first prominent casualty. Removing him addressed the visible problem without repairing the machinery underneath it.
The board had retained him because it believed continuity and stability would bring recovery. When that failed, it changed the manager but not the deeper structure responsible for recruitment, contracts, wages and financial planning.
Managers changed. Players changed. Divisions changed. The underlying decision-makers largely did not.
This does not make Aiyawatt uncaring, nor does it erase what the same executives achieved. It makes the story more human and perhaps more instructive. A son tried to continue his father's extraordinary project, surrounded by people who had helped create its greatest successes. Their loyalty to one another and to the established model may have made it harder to recognise when that model had stopped working.
The eventual decision to sell may therefore represent something more complicated than a loss of interest. It may be an acknowledgement that commitment, money and memory are no longer sufficient to reverse the decline.
What is actually being sold?
The reported £200 million-plus figure appears to be based principally on Leicester City's physical assets rather than a specific valuation placed on its football teams.
That distinction is important.
A stadium has land value. A training ground has construction and development value. Turnover can be forecast. Commercial rights can be measured. Even players can be assigned estimated transfer values.
But the element that makes those assets valuable in the first place cannot be owned in quite the same way.
It is the support.
Without the people who buy tickets, shirts, subscriptions and food, a football stadium is simply a large structure that is expensive to maintain. Without inherited loyalty and communal identity, the badge is only a piece of intellectual property.
The supporters generate much of the value, yet they will have little influence over who eventually purchases it.
That is the contradiction at the heart of modern football ownership. Clubs are treated as private commercial assets, when much of their true value is social, emotional and communal. Owners can buy and sell the legal entity. They cannot manufacture the generations of attachment that give it meaning.
A rare opportunity, but for whom?
Leicester City could be an attractive acquisition. It has a modern stadium, an exceptional training facility, a large supporter base and a recent history that proves how far the club can rise. A credible and patient new owner could rebuild it.
But supporters have reason to be cautious.
The next version of Leicester City's story will not be written for them. It will be written for investors and will emphasise growth, underused potential, commercial reach and the possibility of returning to the Premier League. The language will be optimistic because optimism helps justify the price.
The more important questions concern what happens afterwards.
Will a buyer regard the club as a long-term responsibility or a distressed asset? Will the purchase be funded with the buyer's own capital or with debt ultimately attached to the club? Will investment strengthen the football operation, or will the stadium and training ground become assets to be leveraged? What happens if the promised promotion does not arrive quickly?
Those questions matter far more than the glossy account of past trophies.
Leicester City's brochure demonstrates something we see throughout business and finance. Numbers may appear objective, but the selection and presentation of those numbers tell a story. What is excluded can be as revealing as what is included.
King Power can legitimately point to a Premier League title, an FA Cup, European football and facilities that many larger clubs would envy. Leicester supporters can point just as legitimately to three relegations in four seasons, huge losses and a place in League One.
One is the story of an opportunity.
The other is the story of how that opportunity came to exist.
A prospective buyer should probably read both.
Sources: BBC Sport, Sky Sports on the proposed sale, Reuters, The Guardian's interview with Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, Sky Sports on Brendan Rodgers' departure, The Guardian on Leicester's financial-rule breach, the Foxes Trust's 2025 relegation statement, 2026 supporter survey and response to the proposed sale.
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.