The money behind Ipswich Town: How the club's owners built their fortune | OneFootball

You have to be rich to own a club and that's as true of the Championship as the Premier League. Here's how Ipswich's owners made their fortunes.

You have to be seriously wealthy to own a football club these days, and that's as true in the Championship as it is in the Premier League. Here's how the owners of Ipswich Town made their fortunes.

Ipswich should be in fairly good financial health at the moment. The club may have only spent one year in the Premier League before getting relegated straight back to the Championship, but that one season alone was worth over £100 million to the club.

They will also receive a minimum of three years' worth of parachute payments - should they not get promoted back in that time - and they received £68.5 million this summer from the sales of Liam Delap to Chelsea and Omari Hutchinson to Nottingham Forest alone.

The rollercoaster of the last three years hasn't always been Ipswich's default position. The club was sold by their unpopular previous owner Marcus Evans to the American consortium ORG in April 2021. They set up a new company called Gamechanger 20 Ltd (GC20) which remains the vehicle which owns the club. But under Evans, Ipswich had 15 years' unbroken service in the Championship before relegation into League One in 2020.

Ipswich Town's owners are an American investment fund

The ownership structure of Ipswich Town is slightly complicated. Gamechanger 20 Ltd is 90% owned by ORG Portfolio Management, with the other 10% owned by the other shareholders in the club, which originally included Marcus Evans, who retained a 5% shareholding himself before selling it in May 2025. The four seasons since the sale have seen the club get two successive promotions, from League One to the Premier League, followed by relegation back to the Championship at the end of last season.

One thing that we can say for certain is that this fund is fabulously wealthy. Ipswich were £100 million in debt at the time of the takeover, but were almost immediately rendered debt-free by the takeover. Asked by a fan at the time it was completed whether the financial resources were there to support the club, the response was: "Our fund is $13 billion and we’re holding $700m in cash."

How Ipswich's owners made their wealth - it's complicated

Because of the nature of what they do, the way in which Ipswich's owners accumulated their wealth can appear somewhat opaque at times. ORG manage funds on behalf of a large US pension pot - the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System - and their representative on the Ipswich board of directors is Edward Schwartz, who came from a real estate background to co-found ORG in 1999.

But he certainly wasn't the only person involved. Shareholder Brett Johnson started out in investment banking, and in 2005 founded Benevolent Capital, a private equity fund with investments in real estate, manufacturing and consumer brands, alongside the Turkish businessman Berke Bakay. Another significant shareholder is Mark Detmer, the managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated (JLL), a global commercial real estate services company. Johnson, Bakay and Detmer, jointly owned the other 5% of GC20, alongside Marcus Evans. Together, these three became known as the "Three Lions."

And on top of this, GC20 haven't stood still in bringing further investment into the club. The private equity firm Bright Path Sports Partners acquired a 40% stake from them in March 2024 for £105 million. The club posted a pre-tax loss of £39.3 million for the 2023-24 season, when they won promotion into the Premier League. This is the last year for which annual accounts are available, and the combination of that first year of Premier League television money and player sale money this summer will likely have obliterated those losses.

Ipswich Town have had a difficult start to their return to the Championship, failing to win any of their first four matches of the season. But promotion to the Premier League alone, if only for one season, has already justified that investment. A club which had grown stagnant under the ownership under Marcus Evans has found itself has been anything but, since this consortium bought the club.