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FootBiz newsletter #154: Eagle Football in administration, will Everton face UEFA demotion?
Plus: PSG set to get their stadium, UEFA freeze Euro 28 tickets, VAR poll
Ed Malyon
March 31, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Last Friday morning, London's High Court confirmed what had been coming for years — the ugly end of Eagle Football.
Insolvency firm Cork Gully was appointed administrator of Eagle Football Holdings Bidco Limited — the intermediate holding company amid the web of entities through which John Textor controlled his stakes in Olympique Lyonnais, Botafogo and RWDM Brussels. The appointment was triggered by Ares Management Corporation, the American private credit firm that had lent Textor more than €400m, primarily to finance the acquisition of Lyon in 2022. Ares cited "events of default under its financial agreements." Textor was, for the final time, completely out.
The administration of Eagle Bidco is technically limited to the holding company — not the clubs themselves. Which is good news in footballing terms as in many leagues, like England, there are points deductions for going into administration or the local equivalent.
Instead, Lyon, Botafogo and RWDM Brussels continue to operate normally, or as normally as things get in a zombie version of a failed enterprise. Cork Gully is actively seeking buyers for the stakes, with interested parties invited to make contact. Ares and Michele Kang, as the main secured creditors, have the option of a debt-for-equity conversion — effectively taking ownership of the clubs rather than seeking cash repayment. Whether that happens, or whether third-party buyers emerge, is the central question of the coming weeks but there have been whispers that Ares were willing to sell their debt for around 15% of its value.
Textor had a vision, just not one that he could execute on
The immediate backdrop is well-documented, especially for longtime FootBiz subscribers, so we won’t recap the twists and turns of the last five years. More recently though, Textor's removal as director of Eagle Bidco was confirmed in late January, hours after he arrived at a Lyon board meeting and attempted — unsuccessfully — to oust two independent directors and wrestle back control from Kang. Ares notified him of his termination the same day. Textor has alleged that Kang and Ares entered a "secret" side agreement to take Lyon from him, characterising the administration as "predatory" and "unilateral." Ares has rejected this, saying it will "defend its position through proper legal channels."
What has sharpened significantly in recent days is the legal complexity at club level. Botafogo has announced it will take legal action against Lyon to recover sums it claims are owed from a series of controversial transfers announced in the summer of 2024 — including Luiz Henrique and Igor Jesus — were never actually registered with the LFP, according to L'Équipe. Both players quickly ended up elsewhere: Zenit Saint Petersburg and Nottingham Forest respectively. Textor himself maintains that Botafogo was the financially strongest club in the group and that it was Lyon, not Botafogo, that was the drain — sending cash and players to France while being left with unpaid intra-group receivables. A separate lender, PRPF LLC, is simultaneously suing Lyon for $63m over a restructured transfer deal connected to the same Igor Jesus transaction.
Botafogo's own position is not straightforward either. The club carries a FIFA transfer ban for an unpaid fee to Atlanta United for midfielder Thiago Almada, who has also since been sold on. A Brazilian court has confirmed Botafogo cannot trade players or sell assets without board approval while Eagle Football Group reported a net loss of €200m for the financial year to June 2025. The €200m proceeds from the forced sale of the Crystal Palace stake to New York Jets owner Woody Johnson last summer were, per multiple reports, returned directly to Ares — doing nothing to reduce the operational burden at club level.
Botafogo was Eagle’s biggest success, but even that has unravelled
There is a pointed irony in how this ends.
Textor spent five years arguing that publicly-traded multi-club groups shipping players blindly around the world was football's future. And for a vanishingly brief moment in time the sporting record supported him — Botafogo's Brasileirão and Copa Libertadores double in 2024 was remarkable, while Crystal Palace's FA Cup win in 2025 had little to do with him but may not have happened without his investment when it was needed.
But the problem was always that the model as he constructed it was built on leveraged private credit at punishing interest rates, secured against assets whose valuations were always partly speculative, across multiple jurisdictions each capable of generating friction at the worst moment. When Lyon wobbled, the whole structure began to go with it. That clubs formerly under his umbrella are suing each other to resolve this mess is testament also to how poorly managed it was, disorganised and surviving simply by moving money around at the last possible moment. His plan was to quickly achieve sporting success funded by the private markets and then drag it onto the public markets — he just never got there, and it never seemed likely he’d be able to.
The 777 Partners collapse followed the same trajectory for (some of) the same reasons. Eagle at least enjoyed a couple of nights of champagne-soaked success along the way. On that point though, the question is whether Botafogo’s success was done with their own money, given reports that Lyon were paying the salaries of some Botafogo players, and whether it was fair.
On the financial side, the question now is whether Cork Gully can find buyers quickly and cleanly enough that the clubs emerge relatively unscathed — and what the lesson is for the next wave of investors who believe private credit and multi-club ownership can be combined without limit.
So far, the lesson appears to be: they can't.
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By the way, if you’re a reader who is interested in the business of sports (seems likely that’s a lot of you), I wanted to highlight this job opening at sportbusiness, who are looking for someone to write a weekly newsletter “covering how teams, clubs, franchises and federations around the world monetise their match days, events and stadia.”
Good luck if you throw your hat in the ring!
