Insight
How trade shows and the Premier League appear to be mysteriously linked
From Chelsea to CloserStill, American private equity is scooping up football clubs and trade show companies with vigour. Phil Soar looks at the numbers, and finds both have grown in value at a strikingly similar rate. Why?
verwhelming is probably
O the best adjective to describe what has happened in the summer of 2026. In three short months, private equity spent $ 5.6bn on major trade show assets( CloserStill, Hyve, Emerald, Questex) – more than was spent on businesses in our industry in the previous eight years. As Barış Onay says, this is because PE has become intent on buying " In Real Life."
Excluding the Messen, of the 10 largest trade show companies in the world, seven are now owned by private equity – and all but one of those investors are based in the USA( the exception is Easyfairs, with Inflexion and COBEPA).
Hence the comparison with the English Premier League, where 11 of the current 20 members are owned by USA investors. Not all are private equity – the Glazers at Manchester
Below: Chelsea ' s sale to Clearlake was the biggest Premier League cash transaction so far
United and the Kroenkes at Arsenal are personal funders. And the comparisons don ' t end there: the overall value of our bigger trade show groups and the Premier League clubs seems to have moved in a peculiar lockstep over the past two decades.
What happened? Twenty years ago, none of this was true. So what happened?
Even 25 years ago, the buyers of major UK football clubs were still fans with an emotional attachment to their club – I was one, co-buying Nottingham Forest. But things changed, and one major factor was television. Soccer had been shown in the USA since 1992, but it was in 2013 that NBC bought the Premier League rights. The key was time zones – a traditional 3pm kick off in Liverpool is breakfast time on the East Coast. Soccer didn’ t clash with major US sports and NBC could show sport all day. Within five years, soccer viewing figures had overtaken ice hockey.
Why the Premier League specifically? Two reasons. One was simply the English language. And the other was competitiveness. Bayern have won 11 of the last 12 Bundesliga, Paris St Germain have won 12 of the last 14 in France, Spain has meant Real or Barcelona. Bayern versus Mainz, or Real versus Cadiz were just not interesting fixtures.
Gradually the appeal began to dawn on Wall Street, often because investors ' own children were getting up early to watch games. And the assets looked cheap by comparison: the Seattle Seahawks are widely expected to sell for $ 9bn this year, the highest ever paid for a US franchise, while the Glazers paid just £ 265m in cash for Manchester United in 2005. A prime US sports asset sells for 10-12 times annual revenues; a European soccer club, 3-4 times. Soccer looked cheap – and it led to a feeding frenzy. www. exhibitionworld. co. uk Issue 4 2026 41