Are football stocks a good investment? The Pelé Index has an answer
The 'Pelé index' has tracked every listed European football club since 1998. A portfolio manager explains what almost three decades of data reveal about owning a piece of the beautiful game.
The 2026 World Cup kicked off this week, and for the next month, football will be impossible to ignore: 48 teams, 104 matches and billions of viewers.
For millions of supporters, owning a stake in their club would be the ultimate act of devotion.
For a few dozen clubs across Europe, this is actually possible, as their shares trade on public markets and anyone with a brokerage account can buy in.
The harder question is whether they should.
The Pelé Index sharply underperformed global stocks
Aegon Asset Management runs the "Pelé Index", a light-hearted but serious piece of research that tracks every European football club with publicly listed shares, going back to 1998.
Named after the Brazilian football legend, the index turns a fan's daydream into a simple investment test: if you had treated Europe's listed clubs as an investment, how would you have done?
The answer is not kind.
In the 2025/26 season, the index returned just 0.4%, against 27% for global equities and 17% for European shares.
Extend the comparison back to 1998, and the picture becomes even starker. The Pelé Index has lost roughly 11% in total, while global equities have returned about 678% over the same period.
In practical terms, €1,000 invested in a basket of football clubs back then would be worth about €892 today.
The same €1,000 in a global equity fund would have grown to roughly €7,784, nearly nine times as much.
How the Pelé Index is built
The index holds 18 European football clubs whose shares trade on a public exchange and weights each by market value, so the biggest names dominate.
Manchester United is the largest constituent at 25%, followed by Juventus and Turkey's Fenerbahçe SK.
The line-up stretches across nine leagues and runs from household names to clubs few outside their home city could identify.
Alongside the giants sit Scotland's Celtic FC, Portugal's SL Benfica and FC Porto, France's Olympique Lyonnais, Germany's Borussia Dortmund, and smaller Danish clubs such as Brøndby IF and Silkeborg IF.
Combined, the clubs have a market value of roughly €7.1bn.
One country's absence stands out: Spain. Despite being home to two of the sport's biggest clubs, LaLiga is not represented because no Spanish clubs are publicly traded.
Why football is a bad investment
Asked why football stocks have consistently lagged broader markets, Jordy Hermanns, portfolio manager and investment strategist at Aegon Asset Management, points to the way clubs are built rather than to any single bad season.
An ordinary listed company exists to maximise shareholder value. A football club exists to win matches, score goals and thrill its supporters.
"These objectives are not only different, they are often in conflict," Hermanns said.
In practice, the biggest decisions at a club — transfers, wages, stadium investment — are driven by the chase for trophies, not by financial discipline or return on capital.
In his view, that structural misalignment explains the long-term underperformance better than any individual season or period of bad luck.
Could bigger clubs, or those in wealthier leagues, beat the trend? Hermanns replies that even here, the data offers little comfort.
The index spans 18 clubs across nine European leagues, from globally recognised names such as Manchester United and Juventus to the small Danish side Brøndby IF, yet differences in scale, brand, or geography do not systematically explain returns over time.
"The beautiful game deserves your heart, but your investment portfolio deserves your reason," Hermanns said to Euronews.
Juventus offers a warning
The cautionary tale of the period is Juventus.
When Cristiano Ronaldo joined in 2018, the shares briefly topped €10 on dreams of shirt sales and European glory.
Today, the shares trade just below €2 and are down 35% this season after the club finished sixth in Serie A.
Even one of the most high-profile transfers in football history failed to deliver lasting gains for shareholders.
Can clubs escape the trap?
Hermanns is not optimistic.
Breaking the pattern, he argues, would take a genuine shift: a sharper focus on returns, management incentives tied to shareholder outcomes, and a more sustainable balance between ambition on the pitch and discipline off it.
However, pressure from fans, media and rivals constantly pulls the other way.
"This is not just a cyclical issue but a structural one," he said. Football clubs may be irreplaceable cultural institutions, he added, but they have rarely been good investments.
Nearly three decades of data point to the same conclusion: football clubs may inspire loyalty on the pitch, but they have rarely rewarded investors in the market.
