Sergio Ramos, center-back for such football clubs as Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, has taken a further step towards the purchase of a stake in his first club, Sevilla FC.
According to the anonymous sources of The Athletic, Ramos and the consortium he has been leading for the past few weeks have submitted a letter of intent (LOI) to the club, which has granted three months’ exclusivity during which to complete the purchase. The consortium, whose bid is for about €400 million (Palco23 puts it at €450m), will now be performing its due diligence on Sevilla’s accounts and finances.
According to The Athletic’s sources, the club’s debt could stand at about €180 million. The sustained a loss of €81.8 million in 2023/24. It took on a loan of €108 million, through Goldman Sachs, in March 2024.
Ramos is serving as the consortium’s public face but not its primary source of capital. He has been seeking investors with the help of JB Capital Fund (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), a firm dealing mostly in US real estate.
One of the investors found is Five Eleven Capital, which appears to be registered in Zurich, to run on capital derived from the US and to center its operations in Madrid. By its own description, Five Eleven is “a football holding that creates a network of independent businesses and clubs which operate autonomously but remain interconnected […].” Its founder and Managing Director, Martín Ink, is the co-founder of a company called Legends, which in the summer of 2023 opened the world’s largest football museum, also called Legends, at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, with backing from LaLiga, UEFA and FIFA.
Ramos, 39, has had a close and strained relationship with Sevilla FC. He came up through its youth program and made his professional debut with the club before moving for the next 16 seasons to rival Real Madrid, where he antagonized the Sevilla ultras known as Biris Norte.
Ramos was most recently with CF Monterrey (the “Rayados”) in Liga MX, the Mexican professional league. Having left the club this past December, he is at present a free agent without club ties. Should the Sevilla deal go through, his horizons for professional play will shrink. LaLiga bars investors in its clubs from competing in the league.
