12 October 2026 · By Ruben Jongkind

What exactly did Messi buy with CD Eldense?

On 1 October CD Eldense, a second-division club from Elda, a town of 55,000 in the province of Alicante, announced that Lionel Messi is buying the whole club. I know the region well: I have friends in Elda, famous for its shoemaking, and family nearby. Most of what has been written since asks why the greatest player of his generation wants a club whose best league finish is seventh in the second division, in 1963. At ONEFORTHEGAME we asked the question we ask for every investor we work with: what is actually being bought, and which part of it has to perform for the price to make sense?

The headline figures first. Football Benchmark, as reported by The Athletic, puts Eldense's operating income for 2024-25 at €9.3m and its squad value at €11.7m, with staff costs at 66% of revenue and no historic debt. The stadium belongs to the municipality. The reported price is €10m to €15m. On the pitch, the seasons since 2021 read like this:

Two promotions in two years, a relegation and an immediate return, for a club that had not played in the second division for six decades. However, almost none of the players who made it stayed for long, and almost none of them came from Elda.

Why Eldense?

Messi has not explained the purchase himself. People close to him told The Athletic that the shirts caught his attention first: Barcelona supporters founded the club and it has worn blue and garnet ever since. In April he had already bought UE Cornellà, a fifth-tier club on the edge of Barcelona. Eldense is a single promotion away from La Liga, Spanish second-division clubs are cheap, and since most only make money in the top flight, the investment case is probably promotion. His name can attract players and sponsors, and at a small club he can build his own story, as Gerard Piqué has at Andorra.

These are all good reasons to buy a club. None of them is an asset that grows by itself. Football Benchmark makes the same point: the price rests on Segunda status, recurring revenue and the squad, not on property or anything else that lasts. So what in Elda could grow?

Five pillars

We look at every club through the same five pillars of football value.

1. Player assets. Over six summers the club signed 131 players, about 22 a year. This summer it signed 18, all free agents or loans. In ten years it received €900,000 in transfer fees. At least a dozen former regulars now play in Segunda and one in La Liga, and almost all of them left for nothing when their short contracts ended. In other words, Eldense rents its €11.7m squad value.

There are two ways to create serious value here. One is scouting potential: the overlooked seventeen- to twenty-one-year-olds, the late-born, the late developers. The other is developing it, with one way of playing, daily coaching and real minutes. Ideally you do both. Eldense has taken a third route, experienced players who can perform in this league tomorrow. It took the club up twice, but it puts the technical leadership under constant pressure. Every summer a new squad has to be assembled, every bad run raises the question of whether they signed the right players, and in a building phase that pressure lands on exactly the people who should be building. The experienced player brings points this season and leaves when his contract ends. The developed player brings fewer points in his first season and a fee when he leaves.

And the pathway from inside is closed. Since 2021 the first team has played about 218,000 player-minutes. Players from its own B team account for 45 of them. Thirteen of the sixteen B-team players with recorded birth dates were born between January and June. What Messi bought here is a squad on loan. Recommendation: two- and three-year contracts for every player under 23, a homegrown minutes target, and birth quarters recorded in every age group.

2. HR assets. The staff took a fourth-tier club to the second division twice in five years. That is rare. The people who did it rarely stayed. Since June 2021 Eldense has had seven head coaches, and the six who left lasted ten months on average. All three coaches who won promotion were gone within a year of it; the last, Claudio Barragán, was dismissed four matches into the new season. The sporting department behind the promotions resigned together in October 2024, its successor lasted six months, and the former technical secretary came back. Above them, three owners in five years. Is there a philosophy or methodology that survives all this? The methodology coordinator changed between the last two seasons, and the club describes no model of play of its own. Each new coach brings his own. Messi bought staff who know how to win promotions, in an organisation that has never kept them. There is potential, but the foundation still has to be laid, and it starts with continuity.

3. Organisational assets. Eldense owns almost nothing it plays or trains on. The stadium is municipal, with exclusive use granted in 2023 for two years, extendable. That summer the club spent €1.5m bringing it up to Segunda standard, on a building it does not own. The first team trained on natural grass for the first time in November 2023, after the club paid €160,000 to lay the annex pitch. The training complex has two grass pitches and multipurpose rooms still awaiting renovation. An 18,000-seat stadium announced in 2023 has not been built. Add three owners in five years and a sporting department that resigned on a single day, and Messi has bought an organisation that is rebuilt every time the owner changes. Value here starts on paper: a long agreement with the town and a written club model.

4. Brand and geography. The colours, the story and the owner's name can be lost or copied. The town cannot. Elda and Petrer form one town of about 90,000 people. Petrer alone counted 5,104 children under fifteen in 2021, and Elda is half as large again. The nearest large academies are forty kilometres away, and Alicante, Murcia and even Valencia are within reach. The club plays none of these children. This is the one pillar where Messi bought more than he paid for, and it is worth nothing until those children wear the shirt. The club itself has no big brand; Messi brings it. The commercial strategy has to be built around a unique selling point that connects to the football, and that is a challenge.

5. Stakeholder influence. The fans are loyal and few. Season-ticket holders fell from more than 4,000 after the 2023 promotion to 2,305 at the end of the first renewal phase after relegation, in a stadium of 5,776. As a sociedad anónima deportiva with a single owner, the club gives its supporters no formal say. The town has more. The council has backed the club for twelve years and tripled its subsidy to €150,000 in 2023, but in 2024 a €1.4m payment for the stadium works stalled in local politics, and with it the club's spending limit. Ownership has been the least stable stakeholder of all: while Messi's purchase was being finalised, a Madrid court seized 15.8 per cent of the shares over a €1m loan from the former owner to the former president. The stakeholders mean well but carry little weight. Nobody has the standing to hold a long-term plan in place when results turn, and a famous name raises expectations faster than any academy can deliver. Recommendation: announce the development plan before the first bad run.

Put the five side by side. Pillars one and three are empty, pillar four is full and unused, and pillars two and five decide whether the gaps get filled.

What similar projects in the past show

Clubs that grew value from a small town did not start with money. They followed an order resting on six conditions: a vision; people who think strategically and share one methodology from the first team to the youngest age group; an owner who backs that vision when results turn; a community that takes part; the infrastructure to develop players every day; and an organisational structure built around talent development that outlives any one person.

FC Volendam, 2019–2023. In 2018-19 Volendam finished sixteenth in the Dutch second division, in a mostly empty stadium, in a town of 35,000, on a turnover of maybe €3.5m. We could not buy experience, so we developed it. In 2019-20 and 2020-21, 62.6 per cent of the squad came from the club's own academy. In 2022 the club was promoted, and in 2022-23 it stayed in the Eredivisie with the league's youngest squad and thirteen homegrown players, more than any other club. Attendance rose 122 per cent and turnover tripled to €10.6m. Micky van de Ven, now a starter for the Netherlands, made his debut at eighteen and went via Wolfsburg to Tottenham for a reported €35m, with a sell-on for Volendam. Denso Kasius went to Bologna, Derry John Murkin to Schalke, and three goalkeepers we played before they were ready to Serie A, the Bundesliga and an English club that paid £3.4m for one of them. Lequincio Zeefuik and Givairo Read, from the same era, now play for the Dutch under-21s. The young players were never the hardest part. The hardest part was for the community to stick to the vision.

Bodø/Glimt, 2012–2025. In 2012 Bodø/Glimt, from a town of 50,000 north of the Arctic Circle, played in the Norwegian second division. We know one of the brains behind what followed well. Øyvind Iversen, the club's head of development, visited us at Ajax regularly with Bodø's leadership and coaches. They took some of those ideas, added others, made them fit their own situation and worked on that vision relentlessly for a decade. In 2016 the club was relegated once more. In 2018, back in the top flight, it had Kjetil Knutsen as head coach, Frode Thomassen as chief executive and a budget of about €4.2m. Since then it still has the same leadership, has won four Norwegian titles, beaten Roma 6-1, reached a Europa League semi-final, and last season beaten Manchester City and Inter in the Champions League. I myself had the honour as an invitee to watch one Champions League match in Bodø sitting next to Mr. Iversen. Income for last season was expected to pass €70m, more than sixteen times the 2018 budget, and player sales brought in about €80m against €38m spent. Fifty thousand people queued online for 480 tickets for the semi-final against Tottenham. And the region stays in the plan, in writing: players from northern Norway are to play 35 per cent of league minutes.

Neither club started with money. Both followed the order: vision and people first, then players, and the brand last. Eldense starts with more than either: a bigger town, no debt, a second-division place and an owner the whole world knows. What it lacks is the order.

What are Messi's options?

Messi has not that many options we believe. He could get experienced players and work towards promotion; Eldense has done that for five years, with two promotions and one relegation, so certainly a possibility. He can invest in the brand too, but the brand for now is his own, and it leaves when he does. Or he can build the club in the order that has worked everywhere we have looked. That is our suggestion, and it is the hardest of the three in the short run. The first seasons will look worse than the alternative, and every bad run will tempt the owner, the board and the town back to the quick fix.

We know, because we made those mistakes ourselves. The hardest part was keeping everyone behind the vision when results turned.

For twenty years we have said that what is good for the children is, in the end, good for the football community, and Eldense shows why the order matters to an investor too. Every reason Messi had to buy this club, the colours, the division and the name, can be lost or copied. A boy from Elda or Petrer who makes his debut at nineteen and is sold at twenty-three cannot be copied. He is the one asset in Elda that grows in value.

So look again at the blue and garnet shirts that first caught Messi's eye. They were brought to Elda in 1921 by people who loved a club that, more than any other, has been built on children from its own academy, including a boy from Rosario who arrived at La Masia at thirteen. If his new club learns that from his old one, he will have bought far more than his €10m to €15m. If it does not, it remains to be seen what will happen.

Working out what an owner is really buying, and which of a club's assets will still be there in ten years, is the work we do every day with clubs, federations and investors. A confidential conversation starts through our contact page.

ONEFORTHEGAME

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