Real Madrid has been named the world’s most valuable soccer team for the fifth year in a row, with Forbes putting the Spanish club at $9.5 billion in its 2026 ranking. The club’s value is $2 billion clear of second-place Barcelona, a gap that underlines how far ahead Madrid sits off the field even after another season of frustration on it.
That is why the ranking matters now. Madrid posted $1.27 billion in revenue in the 2024-25 season, a 12% rise from the year before, and the figure was already a record for a soccer club. It also edged the Dallas Cowboys’ $1.23 billion from the 2024 NFL season for the highest revenue total ever measured by Forbes without inflation adjustments. In the same 2024-25 season, Barcelona became the only other soccer club to pass $1 billion in revenue excluding player trading.
Real Madrid had won more La Liga and Champions League titles than any other team on the planet before the ranking was published, yet its recent results have not matched that history. The club finished behind Barcelona in the Spanish league standings in back-to-back years and crashed out of European competition in the quarterfinals in back-to-back years. Even so, its business machine kept expanding, and the numbers in Forbes’ latest list show that the club’s commercial reach is still growing faster than its sporting disappointment.
Forbes said the 30 most valuable soccer teams now average $2.9 billion, up 21% from last year’s record $2.4 billion. The list is led by European clubs, but English and North American leagues have broader representation than La Liga, which has only one additional club besides Madrid and Barcelona among the top 30. The Premier League has 11 clubs on the list, Major League Soccer seven, Serie A four, Germany’s Bundesliga three, France’s Ligue 1 one and Portugal’s Primeira Liga one.
Napoli was the notable omission. The Italian club had recently drawn an unsolicited offer of about $2.3 billion from Underdog Global Partners, though the firm told investors that anything read in the press should be treated as pure speculation at this stage. Napoli’s 2024-25 revenue excluding player trading was $197 million, and at a multiple of 3x to 4x it would be worth less than $800 million, far below the level of the biggest names in the sport.
The wider market helps explain the spread. Atlético de Madrid’s sale to Apollo Sports Capital closed in March 2026 at roughly $2.95 billion including debt, about six times the team’s revenue in the previous season. Forbes values five Premier League teams at between 6.0 times and 8.3 times trailing-year revenue, while most other Premier League clubs sit below 4x. The average valuation multiple is 8.9x in MLS and the NHL, 12.9x in the NBA, 10.7x in the NFL and 7x in MLB. For now, Real Madrid remains the clearest outlier in European soccer: a club whose trophies slowed, but whose value did not.
