🚜 Ipswich Town are Worth How Much!?

I have two shoutouts before we get going.

Firstly, shoutout to Lando Norris.

If you told me in July that Lando would win the F1 Championship I wouldn’t have believed you. If you told me in July that Lando would win it by just 2 points I also wouldn’t have believed you! If you told me that Lando was going to win it ahead of Max Verstappen(!) I definitely would have believed you!

What a choke by Oscar. What a resurgence by Max. What an insane last 8 races of the season. Cannot wait for next season without DRS!

Now, my second shoutout is to every single one of you who have sent me screenshots of The Long Play being in your YouTube Recap summaries! What a humbling feeling to see that.

We are still less than 2 years deep on this journey. To see where we’ve come is insane. Thank you to everyone who watches and shares, I love you all.

Today, we speak on Ipswich Town. They have once again become one of the most interesting investment stories in all of English football…

For those that don’t remember, in February 2021, long-time owner Marcus Evans decided to sell Ipswich to a company called Gamechanger20 for around £40m.

G20 had an interesting ownership structure. 90% of it was owned by ORG, an American pension fund from Arizona!

In 2024, Bright Path Sports Partners, a US private equity firm, acquired some of ORG’s stake at a valuation near £250 million. A big increase in value for Gamechanger20 in only a few short years.

Last week, they sold some more. This time at a valuation of £350m!

Three hundred and fifty million pounds.

The valuation is insane so I looked at the last three sets of published accounts

• 2023 - 2024: £37.3m

• 2022 - 2023: £21.75m

• 2021 - 2022: £23.0m (estimated)

The average annual revenue across the three years sits at £27.4m.

When you place a £350m valuation against that it tells us that Ipswich was valued at a 12.8x revenue multiple which is… very high for a sports team, let alone a Championship club!

But this is only half the picture.

Ipswich’s next set of accounts will show a Premier League season, and revenues will likely jump to circa.£140m. If you build that into my model and re-average the last three years, the blended figure becomes £66.4m, which puts the valuation at a much more respectable 5.3x.

I say this frequently but I have long expected valuations to taper by now. Instead, we are seeing another example of asset values showing no slowdown at all. Even clubs without Premier League status are attracting valuation multiples that look more like growth-stage tech than sport!

In addition, the Ipswich case highlights why American investors continue to target European sports assets. Promotion and relegation introduce jeopardy, but they also create genuine asymmetric upside that simply does not exist in most US leagues. You can buy a club with £20m revenues one year and see it generate £140m the next, purely through sporting performance. The entry fees remain comparatively low as well. The next NWSL expansion team starting in Denver in 2026 cost $115m. That league does not offer anything close to the revenue swing or global exposure that English football can create. Ipswich have been run well, but the scale of their valuation jump says more about the appetite and risk profile of American institutions than it does about the club’s accounts.

Speaking of that risk appetite, isn’t it refreshing that a pension fund is making such an investment? US pension funds see Premier League assets as investable and scalable in a way British pension funds simply do not. Either they have enough capital to allocate a small portion to “riskier” opportunities, or they have a much clearer grasp of the long term return profile of football assets. Whichever it is, it signals a more progressive and confident approach to risk than we usually associate with pension capital.

Must be the American way!

The reaction to the Saudi Series continues to amaze me. The emails, the DM’s the comments are so heartwarming to read.

In 2026 TLP goes to a different level. Memberships gives you access to more. On January 1 Members will have all of this waiting for you:

• Saudi Series Episode 1 - Out on YouTube Now

• Saudi Series Episode 2 - Out on YouTube December Now

• Saudi Series Episode 3 - Out on YouTube December 15

• Saudi Series Episode 4

• Saudi Series Episode 5

• Saudi Series Episode 6

• Saudi Series Episode 7

• Saudi Series Episode 8

• Extra Member-Only segment from the Nike video

• Extra Member-Only segment from the Academies video

• A full personal Q&A about my journey, career and life

This is your starting library on day one, a fully built vault of content before a single new video goes live in 2025.

In addition, you will also get 12 months of access to extra content for the next year.

Don’t forget, you can become a member HERE. For the next three weeks Memberships are cut price!

Now before we leave, I leave you with a fantastic podcast from the first non-Saudi person to own a Saudi Pro League team.

What brilliant insights shared.

See you next week.