The English soccer club Sheffield United, which completed one of the Premier League’s worst campaigns ever last season, has secured new ownership from U.S. backers.
The English Football League has approved the sale of the club to COH Sports, Sheffield announced Thursday. Sheffield currently plays in the EFL’s Championship, the second-highest level in the English pyramid. It was relegated after winning just three times in 38 games in the 2023–2024 Premier League season.
The U.S. group is led by Stephen Rosen, the cofounder of the private equity firm Resilience Capital Partners, and Helmy Eltoukhy, the chairman of the biotech firm Guardant Health Inc.
“This was the last outstanding matter, and we look forward to moving forward to completion as soon as possible,” reads a statement from Rosen and Eltoukhy. “We want to see the club building on its strong start to this season and believe that only a rapid completion will allow us to support [manager] Chris [Wilder] and the team in securing the best result in the January [transfer] window.”
The Americans are taking over the club—which has been up for sale since at least May 2023—from the Saudi owner United World Group and its founder, Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Sheffield currently sits at the top of the EFL Championship. Should it hold its position through the spring, Sheffield would be back in the top flight. The club has bounced between the two since 2017.
With the deal, Sheffield becomes the latest English club, particularly outside of the Premier League, to obtain U.S. owners. It’s become a trend popularized by clubs like Ipswich Town and Wrexham, which have been promoted since Americans took over. In the third and fourth tiers of English football, about a quarter of teams have some kind of U.S. ownership, attracting foreign investors who want to be involved, but don’t want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars (or even $1 billion) for a Premier League club. For all of the top four flights, more than a third of clubs have U.S. owners in some capacity.
