The soccer season begins. In Germany, the European Championship kicked off with a clear victory of the local team over Scotland, while at the time of going to press, the Copa America kicked off in the United States. National team championships in the two most soccer-playing regions of the planet.

But beyond the goals, behind this sport that has hundreds of millions of fans around the world, there are large investment funds with billions of dollars that seek to participate in this business with a greater aggressiveness than the best soccer players, are big investment funds with billions of dollars that seek to participate in this business with a greater aggressiveness than that of the best soccer players. And as in a good championship final, complaints and conflicts are part of the business.

Take the case of Manchester City, the English Premier League champion, owned by City Football Group, a holding company that includes an Abu Dhabi government fund, the U.S. venture capital firm Silver Lake and the firms China Media Capital and CITIC. The English club initiated legal action against the Premier League in May due to regulations limiting clubs' commercial agreements with companies related to their owners. Or the case of another British club, Everton, which saw a deal fall through with 777 Partners, a Miami-based alternative investment firm that has stakes in Genoa, Sevilla, Brazil's Vasco da Gama and Standard Liege and is being accused of fraud for using as collateral investments that do not belong to it and has part of its funds blocked by court order.

The great exception in Europe to this capitalist activism is precisely the federation that hosts the current European Championship, the Bundesliga. The German league operates a formula according to which no commercial investor can hold more than 49% of the voting shares in a soccer club. In this way, control of the clubs remains in the hands of the fans.

Somehow the formula has worked. No German soccer club has declared bankruptcy and some of them, such as Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, are regular finalists in European competitions. Last year, private equity firms Advent International, Blackstone, CVC and EQT offered more than US$1 billion for the broadcasting rights to the matches of the league's 36 clubs, but negotiations foundered due to opposition from the clubs' fans.

But the scheme may limit the development of German clubs, which have limited resources to develop infrastructure and have not been able to make their championship popular in international markets, as the English Premier League or the Spanish La Liga have. In fact, according to Bloomberg, the Bundesliga is looking for ways to strengthen itself financially, including debt issuance or hybrid instruments.

But for now, Germany is going against the global tide that has turned sports into a flashy, multibillion-dollar businessThe German government is also in the vanguard of the global sports industry, with investors vying for a share of a market that, as Bloomberg stresses, has limited stock, whether it's soccer clubs, basketball teams or ice hockey teams.