For a club that has won more La Liga and Champions League titles than any other team on the planet, the past two seasons have been disappointments for Real Madrid, which finished behind archrival Barcelona in the Spanish league standings in back-to-back years and crashed out of European competition in the quarterfinals each time. Yet for all of the hand-wringing among the team’s exacting fans, business has never been better for Los Blancos.

During the 2024-25 season, Real Madrid posted $1.27 billion in revenue, up 12% from its mark the year prior, already a record for a soccer club. In fact, the new figure just edges the Dallas Cowboys’ $1.23 billion from the 2024 NFL season for the highest revenue total for a sports team ever measured by Forbes (without adjusting for inflation).

So even with Real Madrid sitting out Saturday’s Champions League final—where Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain will battle for an extra $29 million in prize money—Los Blancos are the world’s most valuable soccer team for the fifth year in a row, and the tenth time in the past 13 editions of Forbes’ annual ranking. Real Madrid is now valued at $9.5 billion—a $2 billion lead on No. 2 Barça, which last season became the only other soccer club ever to have surpassed $1 billion in revenue (excluding player trading).

Despite the Spanish dominance at the top, La Liga has only one additional club represented among the 30 most valuable soccer teams, leaving it behind England’s Premier League (11), the United States’ Major League Soccer (seven) and Italy’s Serie A (four) in its representation in the valuation ranking. Germany’s Bundesliga also has three clubs among the top 30, and France’s Ligue 1 and Portugal’s Primeira Liga each have one to fill out the list.

On average, the 30 teams are worth $2.9 billion, a 21% increase from 2025’s record $2.4 billion.

One notable omission from the ranking is Serie A club Napoli, which recently fielded an unsolicited offer of around $2.3 billion from sports-focused private equity firm Underdog Global Partners, according to a report from the Athletic citing unnamed sources. (In an email to investors reviewed by Forbes, Underdog did not explicitly deny making the bid but said, “Anything you read in the press should be taken for what it is at this stage—pure speculation.”)

Such a price—at roughly 11.7 times Napoli’s $197 million in 2024-25 revenue, excluding player trading—would be an extreme outlier in European soccer. For instance, the sale of La Liga’s Atlético de Madrid to Apollo Sports Capital, which closed in March and was priced at roughly $2.95 billion at the current exchange rate, including debt, came at about six times the team’s revenue the previous season. In the Premier League, meanwhile, Forbes values five top teams between 6.0 and 8.3 times trailing-year revenue and most other clubs below 4x. At a multiple between 3x and 4x, in line with marquee Italian clubs like Inter Milan and AS Roma, Napoli would be........

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