How Burnley FC's owner Alan Pace created a net worth of £190m | OneFootball

Burnley owner Alan Pace has split opinion since he took over at the club, but he has an interesting story behind how he made his millions.

Alan Pace is a name that divides opinion among Burnley fans, but the Clarets' American owner has poured his heart and soul into helping the club achieve since the takeover completed at the end of 2020.

Approaching the fourth anniversary of his takeover, Pace can reflect on his reign so far as a mixed bag, with two relegations sandwiching a promotion in 2022/23, though he'll hope to level that record out now Burnley are back in the Championship.

Pace was quick to try and win over the Burnley faithful when he gave Sean Dyche a bumper new contract in the infancy of his reign, but his decision swiftly backfired when he was forced to sack the boss of nearly ten years towards the end of the Clarets ultimately unsuccessful fight against relegation.

That certainly rubbed a lot of Burnley fans up the wroing way, but he won them round with the appointment of Vincent Kompany in June 2022, and the pair struck up a great working relationship as Burnley bounced back to the Premier League at the first time of asking.

Another relegation soon followed and another managerial departure forced Pace to dip into the managerial market once again, this time appointing Scott Parker, who is in keeping with the vision Pace has for Burnley, which is to modernise the club and see them play a certain brand of football.

Did Alan Pace's Burnley FC takeover cripple the club financially?

Much was made of the way Pace acquired the club, with a complicated buying process essentially seeing ALK Capital purchase the club using its own money and loading debt onto the club - a very complicated deal that's best left to the financial experts.

The club was debt free prior to the takeover, with years of on-field neglect from previous owner Mike Garlick leading to a healthy bank balance, but an aging playing squad which was struggling to compete at the top level.

With the financial position the club found itself in, coupled with relegation, Pace was unable to pump enough money into the playing squad to keep the Clarets up and their worst fears were realised when numerous assets were sold in the summer.

That was something TalkSport's Simon Jordan had warned would happen, and indeed, most of the players were sold to service the debts held against the club.

Fast-forward two years, and after another relegation, another fire sale happened at the club, with yet more doubts over the financial state of the club. And with very little of that money being reinvested into the playing squad, it's abundantly clear that money must have gone towards the upkeep of the squad, which Burnley would probably have struggled to do otherwise.

Pace has a reported net worth of £190m although his took over the club as part of the wider ALK Capital, so how much of that net worth is his personally remains up in the air.

He has since enlisted further investment at the club from the likes of NFL great JJ Watt and his wife Kealia who have both invested into the club and play an active role despite residing in the USA.

Pace is a self-professed "financial guru and sports technology innovator" and has a Wall Street background, which again ties into how he became such a wealthy man.

His exploits saw him appointed Managing Partner of ALK Capital in October 2019, where he interestingly tried to buy Sheffield United before eventually settling for Burnley.

The American has held several powerful roles within the financial world, including head of sales and client solutions for the Prime Finance, Futures and Securities Services division at Citi, a New York-based investment bank.

This also isn't his first role within football, as he was former president of Major League Soccer team Real Salt Lake, so his business-driven brain has been associated with football in the past.

With a keen eye for investing in the past, and that being how he made the vast majority of his net worth, it's perhaps little surprise then that Burnley have took a buying and selling approach to the transfer market, with Pace arguably treating players a bit like investments.