Ireland’s Ramblers Latest Soccer Club to Gain U.S. Owner
Soccer ownership has become a celebrity playground for stars like Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhenney, and Will Ferrell. But a small Scottish franchise, Caledonian Braves F.C., is rewriting the playbook on modern ownership, having raised almost $2.75 million from a group of thousands of investors that includes NBA and NWSL players.
The team’s founder and chairman, Chris Ewing, isn’t a household name like Reynolds and McElhenney with Wrexham AFC or Ferrell with his stake in Los Angeles Football Club. He’s a former footballer who played for Motherwell in Scotland and launched Glasgow-based Edusport Academy, which in 2019 spawned the Braves.
The Braves play in the Scottish Lowland League, which is the fifth tier of Scottish Football and features teams competing for a chance to go to the Scottish Professional Football League. The Braves have quietly grown in popularity over the last few years, but their notoriety exploded in the last 10 months or so, driven by NBA and NWSL players entering the picture.
As of last May, the Braves had roughly 3,000 investors who had invested about $1 million total through the platform WeFunder. In less than a year, the team more than doubled its money and tripled its total investor base: Ewing has raised nearly $2.75 million total from close to 9,000 individual investors, according to its WeFunder page.
The total valuation of the team is around $10 million, and Ewing says he owns roughly 60%. While the most recent investment round is closed, Ewing hints they might open it back up, because as many as 700 people have expressed interest but missed out.
The Braves boast investors from 55 different countries, although the majority come from the U.S., Ewing tells Front Office Sports. “People in America love ambition, and they respect people like me being front and center, being honest, and being a little self-deprecating as well,” Ewing says.
The star power came into play about two years ago, says Mujtaba Elgoodah, who serves as special advisor to four-time NBA champion and National Basketball Players Association executive director Andre Iguodala.
Elgoodah and his investment partner, Nassir Criss, came across the Braves about two summers ago and were intrigued by the opportunity. They assembled an investment group including Elizabeth Ball, Kristen Hamilton, and Hailie Mace of the NWSL’s Kansas City Current, and Ryan Rollins of the Milwaukee Bucks.
Having spent five years working for the Golden State Warriors—including as manager of team development when they won the 2022 NBA title—Elgoodah says he was fortunate to watch the “methodical” Steph Curry up close and see how former Warriors GM Bob Myers and Joe Lacob, co-executive chairman and CEOs, handle their business.
“We really tried to lean into that with the Braves, getting Chris to understand that everything we do—from the training room to on the field, to our presence online to how we handle social media—it all starts with how we treat people and the culture we create,” Elgoodah says.
‘Custodians of the Club’
The Braves investor group also features Isaiah Covington, a performance coach for the Boston Celtics; Deven Hurt, co-founder and CEO of sports stock market company Prediction Strike; Kevin Abrams, senior VP of football operations and strategy for the NFL’s New York Giants; and DJ Saul, CEO of Khalifa Kush, the cannabis brand founded by rapper Wiz Khalifa. The investor base also includes NASA scientists, a professional opera singer, a pro axe thrower, and a decorated U.S. Marine, according to Ewing.
“The amount of people we have is outrageous,” Ewing tells FOS.
Beyond financial backing, investors play an active role in shaping the club. (Ewing calls them “custodians” of the club.) They’ve chosen everything from the name of the team’s current stadium, Alliance Park, to the name of the club itself and its logo.
The investors may be choosing the name of a new stadium at some point in the next few years, if everything goes according to plan. Alliance Park, a roughly 30-minute drive from Glasgow, is a small arena with a total capacity of 500.
The club is looking for land closer to Glasgow, and may have already identified its target. “We might make an offer,” Ewing says. “If we do, the process would be to crowdfund the stadium. I think it would be the first time that’s been done in Scotland, or even the U.K.”
The Braves envision an arena with as many as 10,000 seats, or up to 20 times more than Alliance Park. Criss says the aim is to build the stadium in the next two or three years.
Not everyone is as bullish as Ewing on the team’s value growth prospects. During a panel earlier this month on global investment in sport at the International Sports Convention in London, Henry Baldwin, managing director at 258 Group, which manages business for British pro boxer Anthony Joshua, expressed skepticism about the Braves ownership model when Ewing told his story in the Q&A portion.
Baldwin wondered if it’s the right move to bring retail investor money into such a club. “You mentioned it’s a fifth division team in Glasgow,” he said, noting that 3 million pounds for a 30% stake “might be quite a high valuation.” He added: “The concern would be, where does that leave the people who put the money in?”
David Castelblanco of private equity giant RedBird Capital Partners, which has large stakes in AC Milan and Liverpool, spoke on the same panel and voiced similar concerns to Baldwin. (RedBird IMI is the majority investor in FOS.)
“The issue with a football club is that you may get the capital that you need today to grow and develop your plan,” he said. “But in the future, if you have to go get more capital, basically this very disparate base of investors that have rights—and they’re there forever—may be a difficult thing to deal with as you raise capital in the future.”
The Goal of Promotion
More important than whether the team is too highly valued is how well it plays. Can they play well enough to be promoted? The club has vastly improved this season, already matching last year’s win total. It’s in third place with 12 wins, 9 draws and 5 losses, after finishing the 2023-24 campaign in 12th place. They played the team in second place, Celtic B, to a draw on Saturday.
“This year we’ve probably done better than we could have expected with such a young squad,” Ewing says, alluding to the fact that about three-quarters of its players were born in 2000 or later.
“The reality is we won’t win the league this season, but we will finish higher than we ever have in our short history,” he says.
The next two or three years will be crucial for the Braves as they seek their goal of promotion, which is a goal that provides hope for the players, fans, and investors alike.
“When you talk about pro sport, any sport, it should be inspiring,” Ewing says. “There should be that element of hope, meritocracy, risk and reward—these things that go together to create fandom. That’s what we’ve done here. We said, ‘let’s actually give people skin in the game.’ For a $100 minimum investment, you have the opportunity to be an owner.”
