Top 7 EFL Championship owners you'd most trust to run your club | OneFootball

The owners of your club will ultimately be responsible for its health, so here are the seven that you'd most trust to run yours.

Players and managers may hog the headlines, but owners can have a far greater effect on the wellbeing of a football club, so here's the seven that you'd be able to trust running yours.

It is a reflection on the all-important role that money plays in modern football that the owners of clubs are under the spotlight to a greater extent than at any point in the history of the game.

With the success (or otherwise) of teams on the pitch increasingly determined by the size of a club's wage bill, the individual in charge of the annual budgets can have at least as great an influence on where a team might end up as any player or manager. Owners are kind of a big deal, these days.

And they are a diverse bunch. In amongst the owners of the 24 clubs in the EFL Championship, you'll find local businessmen made good, American investment groups and even a pair of Hollywood celebrities. Until a couple of years ago, the division even had its own celebrity chef.

The owner's job is a tough one. In the second tier, everybody is desperate to get into the Premier League, and this has caused a wages arms race amongst Championship clubs over the last couple of decades which has forced wages up to a level that even modern television contracts and match-day revenues can't cover on their own.

So club owners need to be trustworthy, and they need to be sensible. Many clubs have found themselves in deep trouble because of the over-ambition of those at the top, and the after-effects of mismanagement can last for years. With all of this in mind, Football League World have ranked the seven that you could entrust with the running of your football club.

7 ? ? Mark Attanasio

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The Milwaukee Brewers MLB owner Mark Attanasio has only been in control at Norwich City for two years, and the Canaries haven't made many great waves since then, but what did stand out was how he handled the one crisis the club has faced.

The decision to bring in Liam Manning made perfect sense at the time. Manning is a reasonably successful manager at this level of the game, and he also started his career with the club.

But when it became apparent things weren't working out, he acted quickly and decisively, and the club's choice of replacement, Philippe Clement, was both imaginative and inventive.

Clement got Norwich City all the way up to 9th in the Championship last season, and although they lost their opening home match of this season to West Bromwich Albion, Carrow Road continues to be a reasonably optimistic place, and the Norwich fans themselves seem broadly pretty pleased with him.

6 ? ? Steve Lansdown

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Success doesn't always have to be flashy. There have been few fireworks for Bristol City under the long-time ownership of Steve Lansdown, but what he has offered them has been stability, longevity and a transformation into the modern age.

Steve Lansdown has seen substantial investment into infrastructure at Ashton Gate. The stadium has been brought up to date, and the club are in a reasonably comfortable financial position. There are elements of support who grumble about a lack of ambition on the part of the club, but Landsown's Bristol City have lived within their means and are in a reasonable financial position, considering the division they're in.

This is their 12th consecutive season in the Championship, but while there are obvious reasons for the frustration felt as other clubs head to the Premier League, even if only one or two seasons, this is also a solid run for a club who've spent plenty of time in the third and fourth tiers throughout their history.

5 ? ? Michael Eisner & Family

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Given Portsmouth's history of dismal ownership - which hit a low with Ali Al-faraj, a man about whom so little was known that Pompey supporters started calling him "Al Mirage", whoever took the club on from the supporters trust which saved them in conjunction with a group of local businessmen was going to have to treat the club with the respect its heritage deserves.

And Eisner has come good. When he took ownership of the club in 2017, they'd just won promotion from League Two. This is now their third successive season in the Championship, having won the League One title in 2024, so it's fair to say that they've made progress under his ownership.

Pompey are now jointly-owned by his family, too. His three sons, Breck, Eric and Anders, have had 24.5% shareholdings in the club since March 2026, while Eisner retains 26.5% plus full voting rights. Michael Eisner is now 84-years-old, but this transfer of shares has helped to secure the future of the club.

4 ? ? David Clowes

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David Clowes would be higher on this list were it not for the fact that he has recently been engaged in talks to sell Derby County, although recent conversations with the Saudi boxing magnate Turki Alalshikhhave reportedly come to nothing.

But Derby fans have a lot to thank Clowes for. He bought the club out of administration in 2022, an act that certainly wasn't for the fearless, given the state in which the Rams found themselves as a result of some serious over-spending by the club's previous owner, Mel Morris.

Under his ownership, they've been promoted from League One, stabilised in the Championship, and last season came close to snatching a play-off place. Should he sell the club, Derby fans will have a lot to be grateful to him for. They are unrecognisable in comparison with the financially incontinent mess that they were prior to his arrival, and they're all the better for it.

3 ? ? Tom Wagner & Knighthead

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There can't be any more ambitious ownerships in the entire EFL at the moment than those at Birmingham City, and they're aiming high. Plans are moving forward for the construction of a 62,000-capacity stadium as the centrepiece of a sports village which would completely redefine the club.

Things haven't been completely plain sailing. Birmingham were relegated at the end of their first season in charge. But the reaction to that relegation couldn't have been more positive, with 2024-25 setting a new EFL record points tally at 111, and this was followed by a respectable 10th-placed finish in the Championship.

Of course, the health issues suffered by Tom Wagner earlier this year were a terrible thing on a personal level, but the club itself didn't suffer a huge amount of disruption. Indeed, the way in which Knighthead dealt with his sudden indisposal after suffering a stroke in February only hinted at their professionalism, and the reaction of Birmingham fans spoke volumes for how popular he's become at St Andrew's.

2 ? ? Ryan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney

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When they come to reflect upon their carers, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney may consider the £2 million that they invested into Wrexham in 2021 to have been the wisest money they ever spent.

Not only has the value of the club itself absolutely skyrocketed, but they've also been on a scarcely believable adventure, with their club having won promotion from the National League to the Championship in successive seasons, and then not finishing that far short of a place in the play-offs at the end of the 2025-26 season.

They have connected with the town, put it on the map, and made the football club globally famous, and they give every impression of having fallen in love with the town, the club and the game. And the feeling, when it comes to fans of the club, seems to be mutual. The ground is being redeveloped, and a town and football club which have both experienced tough times have both been given a lift.

The fairytale narrative is wearing a little thin, but it can't be denied that the sort of journey that Wrexham fans have been on over the last five years has been one that any football fan would want to go on.

1 ? ? Steve Gibson

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The original and best. It often feels as though Steve Gibson doesn't get enough credit because he's been around so long. Gibson was part of the consortium which rescued Middlesbrough from extinction in 1986, when financial issues which had been building over the previous three or four years finally reached boiling point. He assumed the chairmanship of the club in 1994.

Over the forty years since Gibson first became involved at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough have had 16 years of top-flight football. They've reached their first (and to date only) FA Cup and UEFA Cup finals. They've won their only major trophy, the 2004 League Cup, and they've also been the runners-up in that competition twice. They even moved into a new stadium.