Leicester City Up for Sale as King Power Engages Citigroup

Leicester City, the club that climbed from the Championship to the summit of English football under Thai ownership, is now formally on the market.

The King Power group, led by chairman Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha, has instructed US investment bank Citigroup to oversee the sale, according to BBC Sport. An eight-page sales brochure, pointedly titled “Project Lineup”, is already circulating among potential buyers.

It is not a modest package. The offer folds in the men’s first team, the women’s side, the 32,000-seat King Power Stadium and the Seagrave training complex, which opened in 2020 and has become one of the club’s calling cards.

Citigroup leans heavily on those physical assets. The brochure values them at more than £200 million, with Seagrave alone carrying a £121 million price tag. When it comes to the playing squads, though, the language softens. There is no firm valuation, just the description of “a rare opportunity to acquire a club with an excellent track record of winning promotions to higher divisions.”

Behind the glossy sales pitch, the numbers tell a harsher tale.

The document projects turnover of more than £97 million for the 2026 financial year. Yet Leicester have racked up financial losses of over £180 million between 2023 and 2025, a period that has seen the club lurch from instability on the pitch to turmoil off it. The 2025 accounts lay out a heavy debt load, including £103.6 million in bank loans.

All of this lands at a time when King Power’s core duty-free business in Thailand is wrestling with its own economic headwinds. The once seamless link between the company’s global rise and Leicester’s on-field success, so powerful under the late Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, has frayed as markets have shifted and results have dipped.

When the Srivaddhanaprabha family bought Leicester City from Milan Mandaric for about £35 million in 2010, they inherited a club dreaming of promotion. They leave behind an institution that became a global story: Premier League champions, FA Cup winners, regulars in Europe. But the mood has curdled.

Back-to-back relegations have dragged Leicester into League One and dragged patience to breaking point. Protests outside the stadium after their Championship relegation underlined how far the relationship between boardroom and fanbase has deteriorated. The decision to explore a sale feels like the culmination of those months of anger and anxiety.

Even so, “Project Lineup” does not dwell on the gloom.

The brochure places Leicester in elite company, stressing that the Foxes are one of only five clubs to have lifted all three major English trophies – the Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup – since 2000. It is a reminder that, structurally and historically, this is not a typical third-tier outfit.

Youth development forms a central plank of the pitch. Citigroup talks up a “strong talent pipeline backed by leading scouting infrastructure, active transfer management and highly developed academy system consistently producing top players.” The recent £10 million sale of academy graduate Jeremy Monga to Manchester City is presented as proof that the model still works and still brings in serious money.

Yet while the brochure makes its way through financial circles, reality bites in the East Midlands.

Leicester are preparing for only the second League One campaign in their history, with an opening trip to Notts County on Saturday. For any new owner, the task is stark: turn a distressed, debt-laden, third-tier club back into the kind of operation that once stunned the world.