The 2024-2025 season of the Portuguese football league kicked off this Friday, with champions Sporting hosting Rio Ave. Rio Ave has recently become 80% owned by the richest man in Greece, Evangelos Marinakis, who has a fortune estimated at 3.6 billion dollars. But this is not the only case, with other clubs going through similar processes.

According to ECO, Evangelos Marinakis bought 80% of Rio Ave's Sociedade Anónima Desportiva (SAD), with the Vila do Conde club joining a group of teams that it owns, namely Olympiacos (Greece) and Nottingham Forest (England).

But there are more foreign millionaires investing in Portuguese football clubs. This is the case, for example, with Famalicão. In 2019, the Israeli group Quantum Pacific Group acquired 85% of the club's SAD, through Quantum Pacific Management Ltd. Idan Ofer is the main owner of Quantum Pacific Group, an industrial conglomerate that controls Quantum Pacific Shipping. With a net worth estimated at 20.3 billion dollars, Idan Ofer is ranked 96th on the list of the richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, V. Guimarães is 29% owned by foreign millionaires, in this case by the richest man in Egypt, Nassef Sawiris, through the V Sports fund. Sawiris is, for example, one of the owners of the English club Aston Villa and also holds a 5% stake in the company Madison Square Garden Sports, listed in New York, owner of the NBA New York Knicks and NHL Rangers teams. He also owns 6% of the German sports equipment giant Adidas, with assets valued at 8.8 billion dollars.