A.Gain: the owners of Atletico Madrid and Leeds United that you’ve never heard of
A.Gain owns chunks of Leeds United and Atletico Madrid and has just launched a $150m fund to accelerate its take on multi-club ownership.
These are heady days for Bobby Aitkenhead, a former college basketball player who also represented his native Guatemala. He is co-founder and one of the managing partners of A.Gain’s sports fund, which has minority investments in both Leeds United and Atletico Madrid.
On Sunday, Leeds took a break from their promising fight to stay in the Premier League to face Chelsea in an FA Cup semi-final. Tomorrow, Atletico host Arsenal in the first leg of their Champions League final. Aitkenhead was at Wembley to witness a narrow defeat and will be at the Metropolitano in Madrid.
Those two clubs are only the start, however. A.Gain – formerly IDC Ventures – also has a majority stake in Colombia’s Deportivo Cali and is targeting a diversified portfolio featuring shares in seven or eight teams. Earlier this month it formally launched its fund with the aim of raising $150m to $175m.
“We thought it was very important to have a few deals locked in. It was going to be hard to put this thesis out there, raise money, and then go try to do the deals,” Aitkenhead tells Morning Wire.
“We have three other deals that are in the oven, and hopefully at least two will close. And from there we think that the strategy works.
“The ideal strategy is seven to eight clubs. But with five you’re diversified, and you’ve got the minimum financial profile you wanted. Then we can hopefully scale the seven clubs from there.”
A.Gain’s twist on multi-club ownership
A.Gain’s aim is to have minority stakes in “five elite names like Leeds and Atletico in the major leagues in the world” whose owners it trusts to deliver growth. At Leeds, that is 49ers Enterprises; at Atletico it is Apollo Sports Capital. Both deals were done in the last few months.
In addition, it wants larger stakes in two or three “alpha clubs” in need of investment, where “the transactions are smaller, you’re taking on more risk, but you can attain much greater return as well”. Deportivo Cali, which A.Gain acquired last year, is one such club.
It is a twist on the multi-club ownership model, which tends to have one mega club being fed by satellites and is, A.Gain believe, a unique proposition. Aitkenhead and fellow managing partners Richard Lee and Reeta Holmes have contributed 20 per cent to the fund.
The investment thesis is simple: sport experiences will continue to boom, especially as AI increases leisure time, and the biggest brands stand to benefit – but only if they are well run.
“In football, we found a lot of dispersion between valuations, between possibilities in each of the clubs, huge dispersion between how clubs are managed in the same leagues,” Aitkenhead says.
“That gives you an opportunity to expose yourself into assets that are getting transformed, that are evolving into institutional quality and, through the tailwinds of all that work, providing significant returns, if you get that right.”
Why A.Gain chose Leeds and Atletico
So far, so good. Leeds look likely to stay up after overcoming a mid-season blip, while Atletico are in the last four of Europe’s elite club competition. Deportivo Cali, a former club of Colombia legend Carlos Valderrama, are safely in mid-table.
“We think of Leeds as the sleeping giant of Europe,” says Aitkenhead. “There’s so many data points, like when they were in the Championship they sold more shirts than five Premier League clubs combined.
“When I finally got to go to a game, it [Leeds] felt like Atletico – real loyal fans, hard-working people that love their team, love their city, and show up in masses of families, from grandparents to young kids. It really represents the city.
“We’ve been fortunate to go to a lot of stadiums in the UK, Spain, World Cups. And the feeling at Leeds has got to be up there in terms of the energy.”
A.Gain was attracted to Atletico Madrid by the club’s progressive approach to value creation via their modern stadium and the surrounding sports city project, and their renewed ambition to challenge the duopoly of Real Madrid and Barcelona in LaLiga.
“The thesis around the investment and the returns don’t depend on Atletico becoming the second or first club for some period. But it doesn’t mean that the club isn’t going to try, and that there is real planning and real effort to not sit there at three,” he says.
Deportivo Cali, meanwhile, was “a unique opportunity” to save a club in “massive distress” that was “going to disappear”. A.Gain spotted the opportunities in real estate and talent development, with Cali one of Colombia’s talent hotbeds.
‘Living the dream’ but ‘not a passion project’
At a recent Leeds game, Morning Wire joined Aitkenhead, Lee and portfolio manager Santos Nagore. The three enjoyed pre-match drinks at The Peacock pub opposite Elland Road and exchanged gifts with club legend and ambassador Steve Hodge, with whom they have become friends.
Afterwards, Aitkenhead took a taxi straight to Heathrow to fly back to his home in Madrid, where Atletico were playing the following day. It is put to him that jet-setting from one football club directors’ box to the next looks a lot like living the dream.
“Yes, this is sort of living a dream,” he says. “We are passionate about sports. We’ve all been athletes to the highest extent we could until our 20s, competed fairly significantly for where we were from, but never made it to the big leagues, any of us.
“We are big, big sports fans, and to be able to invest into the category, specifically football which we love and enjoy so much, is really a dream come true. However, we are managers. We manage our own money first and then invite other families to invest with us.
“So this could never be a passion project. It had to 100 per cent be a financially driven, impact-driven project.
“For us to be able to put together a product that is unique, diversified and that has the likelihood of outsized returns with downside protections in football, which we love and appreciate so much, is definitely very meaningful and very fun.”