MSCI State of Private Credit & Equity Markets
Overview of the report
This inaugural MSCI report examines five structural forces reshaping private markets in 2026:
- Stress in private credit,
- A liquidity drought in private equity,
- The AI capital build-out,
- The rise and stress testing of evergreen funds,
- The blurring of traditional asset-class boundaries.
Taken together, the report paints a picture of a private-markets universe that has grown faster than its supporting infrastructure, and where the bill for years of loose capital deployment is beginning to arrive.
While the report makes no direct reference to sport, in my opinion, its findings have profound and under-appreciated implications for English football, which has become deeply embedded in the private-capital asset class over the past decade.
Private equity firms, credit funds, sovereign wealth vehicles and family offices now control or hold stakes in clubs across the Premier League, Championship and beyond. The structural stresses documented by MSCI directly threaten the financial models underpinning many of those ownership arrangements.
The liquidity drought and PE exit problem
The report’s most striking finding for football is the distribution drought in private equity.
Private-equity distributions have historically averaged around 20% of valuation annually. In 2025, that rate was just 12%, as funds struggle to find meaningful exits. This is not a temporary dislocation. Structurally, holding periods have been rising since 2000, as companies are able to stay private longer. As of September 30, 2025, weighted average holding ages across key asset classes are at all-time highs.
For English football clubs owned by PE-style vehicles with defined fund lives, this creates a direct and immediate problem. A private equity fund typically has a 10-year life, with a 3–5 year investment horizon. When distributions fall and exits dry up, general partners face pressure to either sell assets at unfavourable prices or find alternative liquidity mechanisms.
Amid the slowing of traditional exit routes such as IPOs, general partners have become creative about returning cash to their investors. The volume of transactions in the secondary market reached a record US$ 240 billion in 2025, up 48% from a year earlier, with roughly US$ 115 billion coming from GP-led deals, an increase of 53% from a year earlier.
For clubs, this means the scenario of a forced or distressed secondary sale becomes materially more likely, potentially transferring ownership to buyers whose motivations and financial capacity are less scrutinised than an original general partner-backed acquisition. The collapse of 777 Partners’ ownership bid of Everton, resolved only by the last-minute intervention of the Friedkin Group, is an instructive real-world illustration of what happens when a highly leveraged private-markets owner loses access to capital.
The report’s data suggests such scenarios are becoming structurally more common, not less.
The continuation vehicle risk
Between 2016 and 2020, the ratio of contributions to continuation vehicles relative to distributions from private-equity funds 10 years or older averaged just 6%. From 2021 through the quarter ended September 30, 2025, the average jumped to 20%, reflecting a noticeable uptick in GP-led secondary activity.
The growing use of continuation vehicles is a double-edged sword for clubs. While such structures can extend an ownership arrangement beyond the original fund’s life, buying time to find the right buyer or improve valuations, they simultaneously dilute limited partners relationships, add layers of fee structures, and signal to sophisticated market observers that the original investment thesis has not delivered on its promised timeline.
For a football club, prolonged ownership uncertainty creates instability in recruitment, infrastructure planning and commercial strategy.
Private credit stress and football’s debt dependency
English football’s financial model, particularly at the Premier League and upper Championship levels, has become increasingly dependent on private credit. Leveraged buyouts of clubs, stadium financing, player acquisition facilities and working capital loans have all been sourced from private credit markets. The report documents serious and worsening stress within those markets.
Three years of elevated base rates have strained borrowers’ ability to absorb higher interest burdens. Among loans in private-credit funds, 15.7% have been marked below 80% of principal, a rough threshold for distress, and more than 10% are now marked below 50%, a level typically associated with deep distress or risk of restructuring.
Football clubs, which generate revenues that are highly correlated with sporting performance, league position and broadcast cycles rather than with interest rate environments, are particularly vulnerable to persistent rate-driven stress. A club that borrowed heavily at floating rates during the 2020–2022 era of near-zero rates now faces a materially higher debt service burden. The revenue base, even for Premier League clubs, is finite, and the top-line growth assumptions embedded in many leveraged acquisition models have not materialised at the pace required.
Smaller private-credit funds have shown materially higher write-down rates than their larger peers. As of Q3 2025, nearly 20% of loans in small funds were marked below 80% of principal, compared with 13% for large funds. Notably, the gap has widened over the past two years.
This is highly relevant because Championship and lower-Premier League clubs tend to attract financing from mid-market and smaller credit managers rather than the large, well-capitalised direct lenders. The report’s data implies that the credit risk profile of loans from smaller funds is deteriorating faster, meaning clubs in the second tier of the pyramid are potentially exposed to creditors who are themselves under mounting pressure, making covenant waivers, maturity extensions and restructuring negotiations significantly more fraught.
Software sector contagion and broader redemption spiral
Anthropic’s announcement in January of a series of open-source plug-ins for Claude Cowork rattled financial markets. Shares of exchange-listed business development companies, which primarily extend private-credit loans, declined 11% between January 30 and March 11. Semi-liquid private-credit funds fielded a wave of redemption requests, setting off concern about strains on private credit more broadly.
Although this episode was triggered by AI-related fears about software businesses, it illustrates the systemic transmission mechanism: once confidence in net asset values breaks down in semi-liquid structures, redemption requests cascade rapidly.
Football clubs are not software companies, but they sit within multi-asset credit portfolios. A fund managing private-credit exposure to a diversified portfolio that includes both software borrowers and football-related debt may face redemption pressure driven entirely by concerns unrelated to the sport, yet the response (selling or writing down assets to meet redemptions) impacts the club’s financing environment directly.
Evergreen fund stress
Across unlisted asset classes, U.S. evergreen structures now exceed US$ 500 billion in assets under management, with assets growing by more than 30% in the year ended September 30, 2025. Retail investors account for roughly one-fifth (20%) of assets under management in evergreen funds.
The broadening of the investor base in private markets through evergreen structures has been partly responsible for the influx of capital into football ownership and football-related debt over the past five years. Wealth management platforms have channeled retail and high-net-worth capital into evergreen vehicles that in turn deploy into private equity and credit. Some of that capital has found its way into football.
The same features that drew a new generation of investors to evergreen funds are now being tested, as expectations of private-market liquidity collide with the reality of redemption gating.
When gates go up on evergreen funds, as the report confirms has been happening across some of the largest funds, the general partner’s ability to make new investments is constrained, follow-on capital for existing portfolio companies dries up, and in extreme cases the fund may be forced to seek liquidity by disposing of assets.
For a football club that has come to depend on its owner’s fund making periodic capital injections, for stadium development, transfer activity or working capital, the sudden unavailability of that capital is existential.
The report highlights the perverse incentive dynamic that makes this risk acute: outdated net asset values created an incentive for investors who worried that values were actually lower than the last report to redeem holdings, sparking even more redemption requests and a wave of headlines about problems in private credit. Football club valuations, particularly those held in evergreen structures, are inherently difficult to mark frequently and objectively. This opacity creates exactly the conditions for the confidence collapse and redemption spiral documented in the report.
Fundraising crisis haves and have-nots
Sixty-one percent of general partners in MSCI’s survey ranked fundraising as their top challenge. Since 2021, the share of capital raised by the 50 largest private-asset managers industry-wide has climbed by roughly 4.3 percentage points, to just over 36%, while the rest of the industry’s share fell to 64%.
The concentration of fundraising among large, established managers has direct implications for the English football ownership landscape. The clubs whose owners have access to the largest, most diversified capital pools, those backed by sovereign wealth funds or major alternative asset managers with diversified product suites, are insulated from this dynamic. But clubs owned by smaller or emerging managers, or by single-fund vehicles, face a structurally more difficult environment.
When a smaller GP cannot raise a successor fund, it faces a binary choice: sell the portfolio company (the football club) at whatever the market will bear, or maintain the investment in a zombie fund with no new capital, no carried interest incentive, and limited ability to attract new personnel. Neither outcome is conducive to stable, long-term club stewardship.
Smaller general partners cite difficulty in securing access to limited partners and in addressing concerns around first-time fund risk. Many football club acquisitions over the past decade have been structured through first-time or early-vintage vehicles, often created specifically around a single opportunity or a narrow mandate. These are precisely the vehicles most exposed to the fundraising drought.
Valuation integrity and risk of over valuation
MSCI’s analysis suggests that venture-capital drawdown funds may have been overvalued during the pandemic, and that even buyout funds may now be approaching overvaluation.
Football club valuations have followed a similar trajectory. The post-pandemic era saw a sharp escalation in club valuations driven by inflated comparable transaction multiples, optimistic broadcast revenue projections and the availability of cheap leverage. Many of the acquisition prices paid for English football clubs between 2020 and 2023 now look difficult to justify against current operating realities.
A biased net asset value may surprise limited partners, but it does not affect the profit or loss they make on their investment. Evergreen funds have changed this dynamic. Investors can subscribe to or redeem from the fund at the stated net asset value, making its accuracy paramount.
For football clubs held in evergreen or semi-liquid structures, where ongoing capital is deployed at net asset value, persistent overvaluation creates a dilution dynamic that is damaging to existing investors and deters new ones. Once the valuation gap becomes apparent, through a forced secondary transaction, a relegation shock or a credit event, the re-rating can be sudden and severe, triggering the exact redemption cascade described throughout the report.
AI investment reallocation and competition for capital
The report identifies the AI build-out as a dominant force reshaping private-capital allocation priorities. AI-related investments represent about 16% (US$ 739 billion) of the roughly US$ 4.5 trillion in global private-equity assets. Construction of data centers worldwide could require an estimated US$ 5 to 7 trillion this decade to keep pace with surging demand for compute power.
This represents a fundamental reallocation of private-capital attention and appetite. Investors who might previously have viewed an English football club as an attractive alternative asset, offering brand value, media rights upside and inflation-linked revenues, are increasingly being drawn toward AI infrastructure, which offers more immediate and quantifiable growth prospects. The opportunity cost of capital allocated to football is rising.
Data-center investments generated annualised returns of 23.8% from Q2 2011 to Q3 2025, outpacing global private equity (18.1%), private infrastructure (12.5%) and public equities (10.1%) by a substantial margin. Against this backdrop, maintaining a premium valuation for a football club asset, whose returns are inherently volatile and sporting-outcome-dependent, becomes harder to justify to sophisticated limited partners.
Blurring of asset-class boundaries and hidden risk concentrations
Private-credit funds often carry meaningful equity exposure, while thematic investments such as data centers span infrastructure, real estate, private equity and beyond. Fund classifications alone offer an incomplete view of underlying risks.
This observation is acutely relevant to football. The financing structures around English football clubs are frequently multi-layered: a PE fund holds equity, a separate credit vehicle holds senior secured debt against stadium or media rights, a second-lien or mezzanine tranche sits with another manager, and working capital is provided by yet another facility. All of these may sit in funds managed by the same GP group, or by interconnected general partners whose limited partners overlap significantly.
When stress emerges, from relegated prize money, cost over-runs on stadium projects, or a key commercial deal not renewing, the cross-fund exposures can create a correlated liquidity shock that is far more severe than any single fund’s exposure would suggest. The report’s point about the need for a factor-based total-portfolio view applies with particular force to the complex capital structures of modern English football clubs.
Compound risk for English football
Drawing the report’s themes together, the risk to English football clubs is not one-dimensional. It is a compound of several simultaneous pressures:
The distribution drought means PE owners cannot realise returns to reinvest in their clubs and have diminishing incentive to inject further capital to grow valuations in a sluggish exit environment. The credit stress means refinancing maturing facilities is costlier and more complex, particularly for smaller clubs relying on smaller credit managers with higher write-down rates. The evergreen fund redemption pressure means capital sources that seemed permanent are discovering they are not. The fundraising concentration means only the largest managers retain easy access to new capital, leaving clubs backed by smaller general partners in a structurally weaker position. The AI capital reallocation means the competition for institutional attention has intensified at exactly the moment football needs to renew and expand its investor base.
The infrastructure supporting private markets has not kept pace with the quantum of capital flowing into them. English football absorbed a large share of that capital in the years when it was plentiful. The reckoning being documented in this report is, in a meaningful sense, football’s reckoning too, and the governing bodies, clubs and advisers who fail to recognise the structural nature of this shift risk being caught entirely unprepared.