Valencia are 19th of 20 in LaLiga, with one win from 10 games (BBC Sport). At minute 19 of home games, the fans chant for the owner to leave. On Friday, a group of American billionaires looked at all of that and reached for the chequebook.

In plain English, some of the richest people in American finance have just bought a big chunk of a famous Spanish football club in the middle of a terrible season. The question is whether they have bought a bargain or a very expensive problem.

Pitchwise Holdings, a US group led by former MLS player Corey Woolfolk and sports executive Ann Rodriguez, is buying 42% of Valencia CF from Meriton Holdings, the company of Singaporean billionaire Peter Lim (Valencia CF). The deal values the whole club at €1.25bn including its debts, and Pitchwise will put €100m of new money into the club.

The names behind it are serious. KKR co-founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts are investing personally, so this is "not a KKR move", alongside Penner Sports Group, the Walton-Penner family vehicle that owns the Denver Broncos.

The Lim family keeps majority control and Peter Lim's son Kiat stays as president. Spain's foreign investment regulators and its National Sports Council still have to approve the deal (Cuatrecasas).

Nobody has said what Pitchwise is paying Lim for his shares. Marca reports Meriton could receive up to €425m, and Las Provincias puts it at close to €400m (Las Provincias). Those are reports, not confirmed figures.

What we do know:

So the club in 19th is priced at roughly double the multiple of the club in second. Usually you pay extra for a winner. Here you pay extra for a building site.

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The building site is the whole point. Work on Nou Mestalla, a new 70,000-seat stadium, began in 2007, stopped in 2009 when the money ran out, and restarted in 2025 with a €322m financing package. The club plans to move in next season (The Athletic). The current Mestalla holds 49,000 (Valencia CF), and Levante-EMV reports the club is close to selling the old site for nearly €160m (Levante-EMV).

More seats mean more tickets, more hospitality and more sponsorship, in one of Spain's biggest cities. Apollo is making a similar bet at Atlético, where an €800m sports and entertainment district is planned next to the stadium (The True Business of Sports). The playbook is simple. Buy at the bottom, finish the building, sell the comeback.

Pitchwise pays a premium and does not get the keys. The Lims keep the majority, the presidency and, so far, the fans' fury.

The €100m arrives as a loan that turns into shares, which dilutes the roughly 44,000 supporters who own about 8.5% of the club (The Athletic). Las Provincias reports that LaLiga's spending rules mean only about €12m of the new money can go on new players this winter, giving the sporting director around €15m in total with €3m left over from the summer (Las Provincias). And a 70,000-seat stadium in the second division would be the most expensive empty room in Spain.

Peter Lim has not sold Valencia. He has sold a place in the queue to buy it.

At about 12 times revenue, for a minority stake in a team in the relegation zone, Pitchwise is overpaying for the football club and paying a fair price for the concrete. It is a clever property bet with one big flaw, because the people the fans want gone are still holding the keys.