Liga MX Team Querétaro Sells For More Than $120 Million To American-Led Group

Forbes

a day ago

In its 75-year history, Querétaro F.C. has never won a title in the top division of Mexican soccer, finishing 12th among the 18 teams in Liga MX this year. But six weeks after the conclusion of the season, the club, based in Querétaro, about three hours northwest of Mexico City, has scored a major victory.
On Thursday, a group led by Marc Spiegel, founder and managing member of Atlanta-based investment firm Innovatio Capital, closed its purchase of Querétaro from Jorge Alberto Hank of Grupo Caliente, Mexico's largest sports betting company. The deal values the club at more than $120 million, a person with knowledge of the terms tells Forbes .
Innovatio, which was formed two years ago and is making its first investment, declined to name additional investors beyond the Fonseca Group, an agency that blends talent representation with private equity, but indicated that they include several experienced North American sports and entertainment executives. ​​Spiegel, who founded waste management firm Rubicon and first entered the sports world when he launched the NIL collective at the University of Louisville in 2022, will serve as Querétaro's chairman.
'We've looked at over 200 different investments across the world, multiple continents,' says Spiegel, who made a bid to buy England's Charlton Athletic in 2023 before deciding a money-losing club didn't fit his investment thesis. 'A number of people that I talked to had mentioned Mexico, and we hadn't really looked at it that much, but when we dug in, we saw the most potential of any league that we've looked at.'
The deal could soon be followed by the sales of three more Liga MX teams, which are all expected to trade at higher prices than Querétaro. The clubs have been on the block to eliminate a cross-ownership issue within Liga MX, where four groups have each maintained significant stakes in two rival teams simultaneously: Grupo Caliente (which owned Querétaro and Tijuana), Grupo Orlegi (Atlas and Santos Laguna), Grupo Pachuca (León and Pachuca) and Grupo Salinas (Mazatlán and a share of Puebla).
Removing those conflicts of interest would help satisfy FIFA rules that do not permit multiple teams with common ownership to participate in its interleague competitions. (For instance, León and Pachuca both qualified for this year's Club World Cup, but León was ultimately barred from the tournament.) The motivation for the divestitures, however, has more to do with a Liga MX investment being negotiated by New York-based Apollo Global Management, which ranks among the world's largest investment firms and manages more than $700 billion in assets.
In 2022, Apollo pitched Liga MX on a roughly $1.25 billion investment in exchange for 20% of the profits from the league's non-Mexican media rights over the next 50 years, Sportico reported at the time. Apollo finally reached an agreement with Mexican Football Federation president Juan Carlos Rodríguez last December, with the NFL's venture arm lined up to participate in the investment and a new revenue-sharing proposal in place that had reportedly expanded beyond media rights to include streams such as ticket sales (albeit at a lower percentage).
Resistance from a handful of teams—reportedly including Querétaro—prevented that deal from reaching a vote at the Liga MX owners' meeting in December, and Rodríguez, who had said the arrangement would require unanimous approval, resigned in response. Several media reports at the time suggested the deal was dead, but a league insider tells Forbes that negotiations have continued with Rodríguez's interim replacement, Liga MX president Mikel Arriola. A revised deal is expected to come to a vote at the next owners' meeting this winter, with other private equity firms believed to be circling in case the Apollo transaction collapses.
Apollo declined to comment for this article. Liga MX and the Mexican Football Federation did not respond to a request for comment.
Stronger corporate governance—including the elimination of cross-ownership—is believed to be a continued point of emphasis in the negotiations, spurring teams like Querétaro to sell now rather than wait for a mandate and risk losing leverage as the clock ticks down.
Apollo's other major aim is believed to be a reorganization of Liga MX's media rights and sponsorships. For example, Spain's La Liga groups those deals under a commercial entity, which sold a stake to private equity firm CVC Capital Partners in 2021 in an arrangement similar to what Apollo initially proposed. (Major League Soccer also once had a similar deal with Providence Equity, until 2017.)
That setup would require an overhaul of the broadcast rights in Mexico. Unlike other top professional leagues in soccer—and in virtually every other sport—Liga MX does not offer a national package of media rights, instead allowing each individual team to partner directly with networks. In part, that is a remnant of a system in which broadcasters have wielded major influence, even controlling teams in the cases of Club América (spun off from Televisa in 2024) and Mazatlán and Puebla (which, through Grupo Salinas, share ownership with TV Azteca).
'The current situation is a fragmented landscape that doesn't help fans, and it doesn't help the teams, and it doesn't help the league,' Ed Malyon, a general partner at Innovatio, tells Forbes . 'Centralization of media rights would be a huge turning point in the league's history.'
Given that television fees have been the primary factor driving up sports team revenue and valuations over the last decade—just look at the NFL's deals for a minimum of $125.5 billion over 11 years, or the NBA's 11-year, $76 billion package—a new media rights bundle could dramatically shake up Liga MX's business. It would also come at an opportune time, with MLS stuck in a partnership with Apple TV that is widely seen as disappointing and with many European soccer leagues recently seeing their fees stagnate or even decline.
Meanwhile, Fox Corporation recently acquired Mexico's Caliente TV, and Amazon announced a partnership with the Mexican federation that included an increase in the number of Liga MX games streaming on Prime Video—suggesting there is an appetite for the league's inventory if the market opens up. 'We like this trajectory more,' Spiegel says.
An Apollo deal could also give Liga MX investors a lasting advantage over Europe if it were to permanently eliminate the league's promotion-relegation system, in which the bottom club in the standings at season's end is demoted in favor of the top team in the second division. In 2020, the Mexican federation agreed to suspend relegation for six seasons, to help stabilize Liga MX during the Covid-19 pandemic. Clubs in the second-tier Liga Expansión are currently waging a legal battle to reintroduce the opportunity of promotion, but Apollo is believed to have demanded an end to the system as a condition of its investment, which would reduce the risk for the owners of top-division teams.
Against that backdrop—and with a long line of investors who are eager to own a sports franchise but can't necessarily afford billion-dollar price tags—Liga MX has begun to attract new investor interest. For instance, an American-led group featuring actress Eva Longoria bought about half of Club Necaxa in 2021, and a year later, a subsequent stake sale valued the club at more than $200 million, according to Sportico . Wrexham AFC owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought in in 2024, and now, they and Longoria are producing an FXX docuseries featuring the club that is set to premiere next month, importing the Welcome to Wrexham model to Mexico.
Good Show: Guillermo Allison and Querétaro have the advantage of playing in Liga MX, which has historically attracted more American TV viewers than MLS.Liga MX's valuations still trail far behind MLS, whose 29 teams (setting aside expansion club San Diego FC) are all worth at least $415 million, with an average of $690 million, according to Forbes estimates. (Just this month, Sportico reported that the Columbus Crew had sold a 10% stake at a $900 million valuation.) Liga MX clubs look even more like a bargain given that Forbes' 2025 MLS team values had an average revenue multiple of 9.3; by contrast, Querétaro is valued at roughly 5 times 2024-25 revenue, a person with knowledge of the deal tells Forbes , and the forthcoming sales are expected to be priced between 6x and 7x.
Liga MX has other advantages over MLS as well. For starters, it is unquestionably the top sports league in its soccer-mad domestic market, and even in the U.S.—and amid the messy media rights landscape—Liga MX draws more TV viewers than MLS. And while Forbes estimates that 16 MLS teams operated at a loss last season, the majority of Liga MX clubs are believed to generate positive cash flow.
'It's a good product with less cost,' says Adrian Madero, a senior vice president at the Fonseca Group. 'It starts from the infrastructure—you can build a state-of-the-art stadium for 25,000 people in Mexico for less than $50 million. There's no way you could do that in America. And if you're in the hole for $800 million, then you need to start charging more for tickets and more for beer, and it's just a cycle of more expensive operations.'
Spiegel's group is also optimistic about the local outlook for Querétaro, which plays its home games in a fast-growing metropolitan area of 1.5 million that is a manufacturing and data center hub. A rumor has circulated online that a sale could lead to the club being relocated to another city, but Malyon says the new owners have never even discussed a move.
'You look at what's going on in that city and that state in terms of economic development, in terms of quality of life, in terms of population growth, people moving there from different parts of not only Mexico but also outside of Mexico—I liken it to what's happened with Austin, Texas,' Spiegel says. 'And as you look at the number of international businesses that have a presence there, those are opportunities for partnerships.'
Malyon believes the group's data model—evaluating every dribble, pass and shot in a game—can improve player analysis and development, and better on-field results would boost ticket sales. Meanwhile, Madero thinks Querétaro has low-hanging fruit with its merchandise, sponsorships and licensing.
'It's a unicorn of an opportunity,' Madero says, 'because we're investing in Liga MX at the tipping point of getting the right corporate governance, the right mentality of growth, the right way of doing business.'
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