The domestic threat: Why multi-club ownership is a homegrown crisis too

It took a long time for international governing bodies in football to acknowledge that multi-club ownership (MCO) represents a serious threat to sporting integrity. Conventional wisdom pins the delay on the transnational nature of MCO, but that is a misapprehension of the problem. MCO is not just a transnational phenomenon; it is also, even more problematically, a reality at a national level in many countries. 

Research conducted for Play the Game highlights dozens of instances of entities directly controlling at least two clubs in the same country. If groups exerting indirect influence on professional clubs were also taken into account, we'd be talking about hundreds, not dozens, of cases. Examples include:

• In Canada, the SixFive investment fund owns two professional soccer franchises, Pacific FC and Vancouver FC.
  
• In Spain, an agent specialising in the recruitment of young African footballers, Jose Daniel Jiménez Pozanco, bought four lower division clubs so he could use them as training schools and springboards for his protégés. 
• In Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government, through entities such as the sovereign fund PIF, owns an 80% stake in Newcastle United and controls at least eight clubs in Saudi Arabia itself.

There are also examples in South Korea, Italy, India, Afghanistan and Indonesia among others.

Mexico is home to at least four MCO groups

Then there is Mexico.

Mexico is a special case; some might even say it is a basket case. There, multi-club ownership is commonplace within the domestic game, with at least four separate groups directly controlling eleven Mexican professional football clubs. 

The rest of the world was made aware of this when Club León and Clúb de Fútbal Pachuca, two of the three Liga MX clubs which have qualified for this summer's first edition of the new, enlarged FIFA Club World Cup, were found to belong to the same organisation, Grupo Pachuca. This group is one of the largest MCO groups in the world and also owns clubs in Spain, Chile and Uruguay. 

The absurdity of the situation is such that Léon and Pachuca, who regularly play against each other in Mexico, cannot compete in the same FIFA tournament, as this would be in breach of article 10.1 of the FIFA Club World Cup regulations, which specifically deals with MCO.

This led to a legal challenge against FIFA at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which, ironically enough, was filed by Costa Rican champion Liga Deportiva Alajuelense on 6 February 2025, the very same day León and Pachuca faced each other in the closing tournament of Liga MX. FIFA informed Grupo Pachuca on 21 March 2025 that only one of its clubs would be allowed to take part in the Club World Cup.

Yet, Grupo Pacheca is not the most egregious example of how the Mexican domestic game has become a playground for MCO investors. There is one inescapable name in Liga MX: Grupo Caliente, the shirt sponsor of twelve of the eighteen clubs which compose the top tier of the country's football league, as well as the "official partner" of the national team. 

Grupo Caliente is owned by a sports betting company

But Caliente is much more than a "proud partner" of all these teams: it owns two of them outright, Club Tijuana, known as 'Xolos' (whose emblem is a hairless dog called Hermoso, now dead, who belonged to Caliente's owner Jorge Hank Rhon), and Querétaro FC. The third of Caliente's football assets is Dorados de Sinaloa, who play in the Liga de Expansíon MX, the Mexican second division. All three franchises are relatively recent additions to the Caliente portfolio, Club Tijuana being the first addition in 2007. 

The catch is that Grupo Caliente is not just any kind of owner: it is also Mexico's number one gambling and sports betting company, controlling half of the country's market and generating an estimated 400 billion Mexican pesos (18.5 billion euros) per year. It operates hundreds of physical bookmaker shops and casinos and, since 2014, has developed a hugely successful online presence in partnership with Isle of Man gaming software company Playtech. 

The question is: How is it possible that a giant of the gambling industry could be allowed to build a portfolio of professional football franchises in a country where match-fixing remains a major problem (seven players were suspended for a combined 57 years in February 2025) and where multi-club ownership was prohibited over a decade ago?

Grupo Caliente's owner is considered a criminal by the US administration

The personality of Caliente's owner and the political influence yielded by his family for generations may have something to do with this. 

Jorge Hank Rhon is the son of the late Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a former mayor of Mexico City, governor of the State of Mexico and two-time cabinet member of the federal government, among other distinctions. From 2004 to 2007, Jorge himself served as mayor of Tijuana, the city where Caliente was founded and operates a 60-hectare complex with a race track, a golf course, dozens of shops and casinos, a private zoo and Xolos' own stadium, Estadio Caliente. 

Hank Rhon, a populist politician with a reputation for extravagance, was arrested twice in a day in 2011 following a dawn raid by the Mexican military on his estate, during which 89 firearms (two of which had allegedly been used in murders) and 9,000 rounds of ammunition were discovered and confiscated; but his huge popularity in the Tijuana region ensured that he was swiftly released and did not face any charges. 

He also ran into trouble when trying to smuggle a White Siberian tiger through the US-Mexico border and was once arrested at Mexico City airport for being in possession of animal skins and ivory from endangered species. 

He has been the subject of persistent allegations about his connections with the drugs trade, the Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix cartel in particular, and has been accused of using his gambling empire to launder money for traffickers, an accusation which was given substance by a 1999 report by the US National Drug Intelligence Center.

This report, which was authenticated by the Clinton administration, stated that the Hank family, father and sons, "[posed] a significant criminal threat to the United States". The report went on to say that case information indicated that Jorge Hank-Rhon launders money, distributes cocaine and meets with prominent drug traffickers through his businesses.

"Jorge is more openly criminal than either his father or his brother and is regarded as ruthless, dangerous and prone to violence against his enemies," the report reads.

Jorge was also linked to the assassination of Hector "El Gato" Felix Miranda, a Tijuana journalist who'd been a critic of his father Carlos and who was shot by security guards employed at the Caliente racetrack. No prosecution ensued in any of these cases. 

His brother Carlos, one of Mexico's richest billionaires and the chairman of one of its largest banking concerns, Banorte, is also said to have been a close associate of the notorious capo of the Juárez cartel Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the man who served as inspiration for the Mexican crime drama Señor de los Cielos.

The Mexican FA has failed to enforce its vision of one club per owner

Less dramatically, but even more bizarrely, multi-club ownership was banned by the Mexican FA (FEMEXFUT) in May 2013 after it had turned a blind eye to it for the best part of two decades. A 'decalogue' was published, of which the first commandment was: "the Liga MX´s vision is that every owner possesses only one club". 

That 'vision' was to be implemented within five years, with a review to follow. Yet, seven months later, in the clearest possible breach of the 'decalogue', Grupo Salinas, which already owned Club Morelia, was allowed to purchase Club Atlas on the condition that they would get rid of one of their two Liga MX clubs within five years. 

Grupo Salinas did, in fact, sell Club Atlas in 2019 - but to another MCO entity, Orlegi Sports, who already owned Liga MX franchise Santos Laguna. That same year, 2019, also saw Grupo Caliente take control of their third club, Queretaro FC, which they then ceded to other investors, only to take it back after appalling crowd trouble led Liga MX to kick out the new owners and return the franchise to Hank Rhon - a series of events, unfortunately, all too believable in the wild environment of Mexican club football.

Homegrown MCO groups could be the lesser of two evils

Yet, despite all the evidence, there has been no real pushback from local, regional or global organisations against breaches of MCO regulations at the national level, be it in Mexico or elsewhere.

In Mexico's case, it appears that FEMEXFUT opted for what they believed to be a lesser evil. There were far too few credible investors who would be willing and able to invest in a professional club in Mexico, and Liga MX (and Liga de Expansión MX) badly needed investors. 

FEMEXFUT wanted to avoid a repetition of what happened to Querétaro in 2014, when the club was seized by the Mexican authorities after its then-owner Amando Yañez was investigated for fraud and money-laundering. 

Allowing concerns such as Grupo Salinas, Orlegi Sports, Grupo Pachuca and Grupo Caliente to build up sports asset portfolios (Caliente also owns an American football team and a baseball franchise) would keep shadier investors at bay and guarantee a degree of stability in a league where bankruptcies are common, and clubs routinely change names and locations because of financial difficulties. 

Grupo Caliente was obviously problematic on a number of levels, be it the Hank Rhon family's chequered record and its toxic connection to sports betting, but they at least had the money to keep the franchises afloat. In that context, MCO could be seen as a tentative solution, with that caveat: the 'solution' might be even more problematic than the problem it set out to solve.