Football's Richest Club Owners: #1 ...QPR's Lakshmi Mittal

-
SKY -Football rich lists: Find out the wealthiest players and owners

Sky/Simon Ward- Football's Richest Club Owners
..1: Lakshmi Mittal (Queens Park Rangers)
No-one really expected the title of wealthiest club in Britain to shift a few miles across west London – certainly not to Loftus Road, anyway. Yet that’s what happened when Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Renault team boss Flavio Briatore took over at struggling QPR. F1 and the associated TV rights and spin-offs have made Ecclestone worth around £2.4bn. As if there wasn’t enough cash in the boardroom, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and his family – with a fortune estimated around the £27.7bn mark – have also come on board as shareholders. While they haven’t splashed the cash yet, they certainly have it if they want to." Sky

Richest owners
10 Sir David Murray (Rangers)
9 The Walker family (Blackburn)
8 Michael Spencer (Ipswich)
7 Mike Ashley (Newcastle)
6 Dermot Desmond (Celtic)
5 Malcolm Glazer (Manchester United)
4 Joe Lewis (Tottenham)
3 Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal)
2 Roman Abramovich (Chelsea)

1 Lakshmi Mittal (Queens Park Rangers)
Frank Lampard has hit the headlines this week with the announcement that he has signed a lucrative new contract at Chelsea.
However, the Blues midfielder only places joint fourth in a list of the richest footballers in Britain published by the Sky Money website.
Lampard is worth around £19million, the same amount as England colleague Steven Gerrard.
Many of the usual suspects make up the ten, including Cristiano Ronaldo, John Terry, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney, who is second on £35million.
There are one or two less obvious names, with Harry Kewell and Damien Duff worth approximately £13million and £14million respectively despite recent injury problems.
Michael Owen is top of the list and is understood to be worth £41million, with a £100,000-a-week wage packet supplemented by several sponsorship deals.
Owen's £41million seems a paltry figure when stacked up against the sort of money made by club owners.
Guessing the wealthiest owner would seem straightforward but Roman Abramovich is no longer number one.
The Chelsea boss has an estimated fortune of £11.2billion but he has lost out to steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, a shareholder at Queens Park Rangers.
Mittal is worth around £27.7billion and with that type of money in the boardroom at Loftus Road it might be safe to assume that QPR have a bright future.
Alisher Usmanov of Arsenal and Manchester United's Malcolm Glazer both feature in the list, which starts at ten with Rangers owner Sir David Murray, who has a fortune of roughly £720million. Sky Sports

Sky/Simon Ward- Football's Richest Club Owners
The English football league is the richest in the world – and unlike most industries, shows no signs of slumping into recession. But which clubs have the biggest backing – and how will their ownership structures boost their performance on the pitch? We take a look
While many of us are tightening our belts because of the dreaded credit crunch, there’s no sign that football’s going to hit hard times – yet. However, the need to compete and pay ever higher wages and transfer fees mean that a lot of clubs are in the red.
TV is one of the biggest earners for the clubs at the top table. Sky pays a whopping £1.3bn a season for 92 English Premier League games, plus Champions League and other top games. Meanwhile, relatively new kid on the block Setanta has stumped up £392m a season for 46 live English Premier League games, £150m to a joint deal with ITV for FA Cup and England international matches and £125m for four years of Scottish Premier League games.
Then there’s the income from matchday ticket sales (with prices averaging around the £40 a ticket mark for the English Premier League), merchandise, matchday catering, sponsorship deals, image rights – the list goes on.
The new breed
Finally, there are the people at the top – the club owners. Some of the wealthiest men in the world now own English and Scottish clubs.
Long gone are the days of the patriarchal chairman presiding over his local club. Now steel magnates and oil billionaires hold the purse strings. Even if the man in charge is local, they’re likely to be based overseas.
Let’s take a look at the men dominating football’s boardrooms and how much they’re worth. Next: Number ten on our survey >> Sky - Football's Most Powerful Owners

Football's Most Powerful OwnersList


The UK’s Richest Football Stars
Richest players
9 = Harry Kewell
9 = Didier Drogba
8 Damien Duff
7 Cristiano Ronaldo
6 John Terry
4 = Steven Gerrard
4 = Frank Lampard
3 Rio Ferdinand
2 Wayne Rooney
1 Michael Owen

Frank Lampard has joined the ranks of world sport’s biggest earners with an incredible five-year, £39.2m contract with Premiership giants Chelsea. And he’s not the only young football star building a multi-million pound fortune. We profile Britain’s 10 richest young footballers

The top level of football is awash with money. Billionaire benefactors, lucrative TV deals and huge sponsorship deals are all pouring unprecedented riches into the game. And it means that the top players are wealthier than ever - and it seems that their earning potential hasn’t been damaged by the credit crunch.

Just this week Chelsea renewed midfield talisman Frank Lampard’s contract for a further five years, in a deal worth a cool £150,000-a-week. It’s a long, long way from the maximum wage of £20-a-week set back in the 1950s.

Unlimited earning potential
There’s also a whole raft of other earning opportunities to those with big names and good agents. Sponsorship and endorsement deals, TV adverts, book deals, you name it, players have done it.

And British football’s global popularity means that the top players can add to their millions all over the world.

Let’s have a look at the top highest-paid footballers in Britain and how they made their fortune. (All data sourced from the Sunday Times Rich List)
Next: Number 10 on our survey >> Sky