One in five professional clubs is owned by a foreign shareholder, according to the newspaper Le Figaro.

The French soccer, whose championship resumes this weekend, has increased its attractiveness for the foreign investor after his sounded success in the last World Cup celebrated in Russia.

However, attracting Chinese, American, Qatari or Russian funds also creates suspicion. The distancing of the new foreign owners with the host cities of the clubs is one of them, but it also generates others: do the investors do it as an image-washing operation? Mere business? Where do the capitals of the purchase come from? The acquisition of the historic Girondins de Bordeaux by the American investment fund General American Capital Partners (GACP) for 100 million euros was the last operation.

The Zidane team. The old team of Zinedine Zidane was sold to foreign hands after two decades linked to the French television network M6. "The sports environment has become increasingly competitive in France with the arrival of foreign investors in Paris, Marseille, Lyon or Monaco, so that the Bordeaux would be more, it had to give supplementary means," said the administrative and financial director of M6, Grégory Le Fouler, to justify the sale of the club in southwestern France.

Before the Girondins, trained by the Uruguayan Gustavo Poyet, there were more cases, such as Olympique de Marseille, owned by Frank McCourt, a millionaire US real estate developer who bought the entity for 50 million euros, in 2016, or the best known , that of Paris Saint-Germain, acquired in 2011 by Qatari funds.

Because of its large investments, the PSG is under investigation by UEFA after its owners spent 400 million euros on signings in 2017 - in Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, essentially - which could have contravened the financial fair play rules .