The glory days in Malaga’s recent history was a run to the last eight of the Champions League in 2013.
That team, which lost in agonising circumstances to two goals after 90 minutes from Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund, featured star players such as Isco, Roque Santa Cruz, Javier Saviola, Julio Baptista and Joaquin.
It’s not been plain sailing for the Spanish side since, and they are currently mid-table in Spain’s second division.
But for Malaga fans, there has been promising news that Fenway Sports Group (FSG), the owners of Liverpool, is exploring a deal to purchase the club, as revealed by The Athletic.
So, why is FSG interested in Malaga, who currently owns the club and what would Liverpool’s owners be getting?
Dermot Corrigan and Chris Weatherspoon have the answers…
Who are Malaga?
Malaga have bounced between the first and second tiers of Spanish football for much of the club’s history — their highest finish in La Liga was fourth in 2011-12, and they currently sit 15th in the Segunda Division.
The Costa del Sol club’s biggest achievement is reaching the Champions League quarter-finals in 2013 under coach Manuel Pellegrini.
Isco was one of the stars of that Malaga team in 2013 (David Ramos/Getty Images)
Since then, Malaga have suffered serious financial and institutional issues — they were relegated to the Segunda Division in 2018, and spent the 2023-24 season in the third tier.
Malaga’s 30,000-capacity Estadio La Rosaleda has been suggested by the Spanish federation to host games at the World Cup 2030 — however that will require significant investment and expansion.
Who currently owns the club?
Malaga’s current ownership is complex and has been the subject of judicial intervention.
After the Qatari Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani became president in 2010, more than €200million ($242m, £166m) was spent on players including Isco, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Enzo Maresca and Santi Cazorla.
Van Nistelrooy at his Malaga unveiling (Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images)
Even as that star-studded team was seconds from reaching the Champions League semi-finals, financial problems in Al Thani’s stewardship had emerged, and the bigger names soon moved on.
Al Thani also had plans for a €100million luxury marina and hotel complex in nearby Marbella, which never came to pass. As the club struggled to pay its bills, BlueBay Hotels group entered as an investor, and legal disagreements soon emerged between Al Thani and BlueBay.
As the legal struggle continued, judge Maria de los Angeles Ruiz took control of the club away from Al Thani in February 2020, and appointed local lawyer Jose Maria Munoz to run its day-to-day operations. That has involved swingeing cuts to squad budgets and its off-pitch operations, especially when the team dropped down to the third tier in 2023.
In 2021, RedBird Capital partners, the investment group that owns Serie A club Milan, bought a small number of the remaining ‘independent’ shares, reportedly to be able to attend club shareholder meetings and be well placed to take advantage of any future share offerings. Reports in Malaga last week said Red Bird had returned those shares to their previous owners.
In January 2024, Spain’s Supreme Court found that BlueBay Hotels were the legal owners of 49 per cent of Al Thani’s company, NAS Spain 2000, through which he first bought the club.
Al-Thani with the Real Madrid president Florentino Perez (Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images)
According to club sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, Al Thani currently has ‘direct or indirect’ control of just over 50 per cent of club shares. BlueBay now owns 47 per cent of the shares — through NAS Spain 2000.
If FSG were to buy out Al Thani, they would then be business partners with BlueBay, which is owned by Spanish entrepreneur Jamal Satli Iglesias.
The remaining three per cent of club shares are held by fans and small shareholders.
What makes them such an attractive proposition?
FSG believe this is an opportunity to restore Malaga to the upper echelons of the Spanish and European game and there is huge potential for the only professional team in Spain’s sixth-largest city with a population of around 600,000.
The team also has a loyal fan base — even when playing in the third tier last season, attendances at its rustic La Rosaleda stadium regularly topped 20,000. That strong support helped the team, coached by long-time club servant Sergio Pellicer, to get promotion back to Segunda in 2023-24, despite the ongoing off-pitch turmoil.
Malaga is also a well-known tourist destination, and the Costa del Sol area is home to a wealthy expat community, bringing opportunities for VIP matchday revenues and international marketing.
(THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images)
The city is also on the provisional list of host cities for World Cup 2030, although that will require a redevelopment of its La Rosaleda stadium, which is jointly owned by the Andalusian regional government, Malaga provincial government, and Malaga city hall.
Public support could be available to fund the redevelopment, which has been budgeted at €230million, but no firm details have been made public.
During redevelopment work, the team would likely play some seasons at the multi-purpose Estadio Ciudad de Malaga, where the current capacity of just over 10,000 could be expanded to around 20,000.
Has anybody else considered buying out Al Thani and taking control of Malaga before?
FSG is not the first to see the potential in Malaga.
In 2023, the Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi said during a visit to the city that the Qatar Sports Investments (QSi) group, which owns PSG, were also interested in buying the club.
Last week, PSG’s owners confirmed to The Athletic that the group is interested in adding Malaga to their portfolio, with a spokesperson saying: “QSI is exploring a range of investment opportunities across Europe and America currently”.
Also reportedly interested was a local group led by former Spain basketball international Jose Manuel Calderon, once of NBA teams LA Lakers, New York Knicks and Dallas Mavericks.
Calderon while playing for Dallas Mavericks (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
However, with the legal issues over the ownership of the club’s shares so tangled, no takeover has moved forward.
Another complication is an ongoing judicial investigation into potential misappropriation of club funds during Al Thani’s presidency. Al Thani has denied all wrongdoing, and regular social media posts through the years have suggested conspiracies against him involving UEFA, La Liga, the Spanish federation, the Spanish media and local authorities in Malaga.
In recent days, daily posts from Al Thani have suggested that further developments are close.
Some build stories to distract.
We build silence to prepare.#JusticeForMalaga— Abdullah N Al Thani (@ANAALThani) March 31, 2025
What do Malaga fans think of being part of a multi-club group?
Following the excitement of Al Thani’s early years, Malaga’s fans have been through the wringer over the last decade.
The Qatari became deeply unpopular with the club’s supporters and they staged regular protests against his presidency. There has also been frustration at judicial appointment Munoz’s running of the club in recent years, including the firing of many long-serving club staff and the sale of promising local youth teamers to other clubs.
“Speaking as a fan, not as coach, but as a ‘malaguista’, we need what is best for the club,” said coach Pellicer last week when asked about QSI potentially taking over Malaga. “Whatever strengthens the club is welcome.”
Malaga’s 2024-25 official La Liga salary limit is €11.8m — eighth-highest of the 22 Segunda clubs. Yet the total value of the playing squad, according to Transfermarkt, is €11.9m, or 19th of the 22.
An unfortunate 94th-minute own goal consigned them to a 2-1 defeat at Real Oviedo on Sunday, and left Pellicer’s team six points above the relegation zone with nine games remaining.
“People are craving stability and any owner will be better than Al Thani, so fans will be open to a new and serious owner coming into the club,” one Malaga supporter told The Athletic on Monday.
“I’m delighted that there are potential funds interested in buying Malaga,” said Munoz on Monday. “Malaga at the moment is a tempting sweet, ripe for the picking. But it’s not up to me — someday, someone will come with the document and say they have bought the club.”
What is La Liga and the Spanish FA’s view of a club being absorbed into a multi-club group?
La Liga and the Spanish federation have no issue with teams being part of multi-club groups — top-flight side Girona have been part of City Football Group since 2017, while Leganes’ owners Blue Crow also have clubs in Mexico, Czech Republic and Dubai.
Girona qualified for the 2024-25 Champions League (David Ramos/Getty Images)
In 2023, when QSI’s interest in buying Malaga was made public, La Liga president Javier Tebas said: “I’d have no problem if they buy the club, once they follow our financial controls.”
What is FSG’s financial situation?
Fenway Sports Group is routinely held up as an exceptionally valuable sporting empire, with Forbes pricing the group at $12.95billion in 2024, pitching them as the world’s third-most valuable sporting group at the time.
A little under half of that amount was attributable to Liverpool, and during their time at the helm FSG have restored the Anfield outfit from a dire financial position to one of fairly rude health, especially by the exacting standards of English football. Across FSG’s time on Merseyside, Liverpool have pretty much broken even, and The Athletic expects the club to post a profit in 2024-25, alongside breaking the £700million revenue barrier (the only other English to have done so to date is Manchester City).
(Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Liverpool benefited from £127.3m in owner funding last season, though it came via FSG selling a stake in the business to Dynasty Equity. It is believed, though not certain, the stake sold was only in FSG Football, rather than the wider group. If so, that valued the football arm — which at this stage is effectively just Liverpool — at £4.24bn. That’s more than 18 times what FSG bought the club for in October 2010, and not too far shy of that Forbes valuation.
Sitting on a valuable asset doesn’t necessarily mean FSG is cash-rich, and in truth they’ve been fairly tight with the purse strings at Anfield. That £127.3m injection was the first time since 2015-16 that Liverpool had received funding from their owners and, across their time in charge, the total amount the club has received from on high is £263.6m, a long way behind several other English clubs. Yet that’s more a product of the sustainability model FSG have employed than any inability to fund Liverpool.
In their first six years at the club, FSG injected £173.3m in cash, providing the funding needed to get the club moving in the right direction and, crucially in the long term, to support development at Anfield.
While financial disclosures of the group’s wider activities are thin on the ground, it’s highly unlikely they’re searching behind the back of the sofa. In January 2024, a group led by FSG’s principal owner John W. Henry invested $1.5-3bn in golf’s PGA Tour. What’s more, the cash required to buy and run a club in Spain’s second tier is an order of magnitude lower than many of FSG’s other ventures.
What are the financial benefits of buying Malaga to FSG?
In the first instance, it’s worth considering how much FSG might have to invest to make a success of things in Andalusia. Malaga are back in the Segunda Division after a year exiled in Spain’s third tier, and their cost base accordingly pales in comparison to Liverpool’s.
After coming under judicial control in 2020, Malaga booked four consecutive annual losses, yet the club’s combined pre-tax deficit in that period was just €17.7m (£14.4m, using today’s rate), with most of that coming at the beginning of the decade. That’s not great for Malaga right now but would hardly be deemed ruinous at FSG’s level. Last season, buoyed by player sales, the club broke even.
A look at the wage bills of the Segunda’s recently promoted clubs is instructive of how much might need to be spent at Malaga to propel the club back into La Liga. In the last three years, seven of nine clubs promoted to the top tier have done so with staff costs between €14m and €30m, though one of the outliers was Espanyol, who were promoted last season with a €44.5m wage bill. Espanyol benefited from a €25.4m La Liga distribution that included Spain’s equivalent of a parachute payment. By comparison, the rest of the second tier received €5-7m from the league (in 2022-23, Malaga’s distribution was €6m).
FSG would have to contend with clubs with greater turnover than Malaga but the gulf is not so large as if they were to buy, say, an EFL Championship club in England. The likelihood of meaningful profit in Spain’s second tier is slim, but the uplift in Malaga’s value were they to get back to La Liga — and stay there — could be significant.
Importantly, any would-be buyer of Malaga will benefit from already strong support. Those high third-tier attendances were a big part of the club’s finances not nosediving, and the size of the local population makes for an obvious growth area.
One longer-term uncertainty that FSG would have to deal with is the situation at La Rosaleda, though even here there may be sizeable upside potential. With public funding seemingly on offer for the redevelopment, there’s a chance FSG could assume control of a club that enjoys the spoils of a venue they haven’t had to bear the (full) cost of improving, albeit that would be dependent upon any agreement they came to with local government.
(Fran Santiago/Getty Images)
What effect could there be on Liverpool?
The presumption about multi-club organisations (MCOs) is that clubs will trade players at will, with the largest clubs in the group lending their up-and-comers to the smaller sides, in exchange reaping the benefits of any stars that come through clubs occupying football’s lower rungs.
Yet, as detailed by Twenty First Group’s AJ Swoboda in The Athletic’s recent podcast series on MCOs, the evidence for that actually happening is scarce.
Where Liverpool would be more likely to benefit is behind the scenes. Through bringing a club from mainland Europe under their control, FSG could more easily put boots on the ground from a scouting perspective. Warm-weather training, that favoured mid-season voyage of many clubs, would presumably be made a lot cheaper for Liverpool if their owners had ready access to facilities in the south of Spain.
Broader cost efficiencies could be possible too, through shared knowledge and staffing. UEFA rules do require clubs to adhere to a ‘reporting perimeter’ that ensures all costs which go towards a club’s footballing operations are appropriately recorded, something FSG would need to be wary of if they did buy another club.
Be it Malaga or anyone else that FSG choose to take the plunge with, Liverpool will plainly remain the jewel in the group’s footballing crown. Liverpool fans need not worry about their side falling down the priority list. More likely any multi-club venture undertaken by FSG would be done so in the hope of improving Liverpool’s lot.
That being said, any purchase would necessarily require investment in the early stages, much as the buying of Liverpool did. FSG doubtless have the resources to do whatever they choose in that regard, but any Liverpool fans hoping they’ll change tack and start pouring money into their club are likely to be disappointed. The buying up of other clubs would make a move away from Liverpool’s sustainable model even less likely than it already is.
(Malaga’s team ahead of their 2013 Champions League quarter-final against Dortmund. Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images)
