“Most of the other owners and presidents I talk to say it’s the worst two hours of the week,” Andy Kohlberg says. And is it? “Probably, yeah.” And with that, the former professional tennis player, minority owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball franchise and president of Real Mallorca starts laughing. On Saturday, the New York born 66-year-old travels to see his football team at the Santiago Bernabéu, where they last won in 2009, since when they have been down to the third tier and back, and even if they do secure a first victory there in his decade at the club he won’t be able to celebrate.
It’s the little differences. “It’s certainly unusual for Americans: I tell them I have lunch with the Madrid president and they can’t wrap their heads around it,” Kohlberg says, sitting under the Son Moix stand, rain falling on the pitch outside. “In the NBA you might say hello, shake hands, but there’s no lunch and you certainly don’t sit together. You make sure you … do … not … sit together. It blows people away that you can’t cheer a goal. You just sit there. Amazingly, other presidents do it naturally. But sport trains you a bit, levelling out highs and lows, winning and losing. Even when I was 14, I had to do that.”
Ranked No 1 as a tennis player in college, Kohlberg set off on tour, alone in India, at 17 and retired at 30, his best grand slam finish the mixed doubles semi-final at Wimbledon in 1987. He had always been a bit different – “most players would go from the hotel to McDonald’s to the practice court; I wanted to see the cities, the people, the culture” – and he thought hard about life afterwards. “I didn’t know what to do, but did know I had to figure it out. Originally I thought of sports marketing but didn’t find it too interesting early on.”
Instead he built a senior living business. It would be more than a decade before he was involved in sport, part of Robert Sarver’s ownership group that bought the Phoenix Suns in 2004. In 2016, they bought €20.62m (£18m) of shares to take control of Mallorca, in the second division and in crisis. Kohlberg was president; the basketball player Steve Nash was on the board; so too the footballers Stuart Holden and Graeme le Saux. The chief executive was Maheta Molango, now the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association. Kohlberg bought Sarver’s shares in 2023, becoming the owner.
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth ride. Mallorca suffered relegation to the Segunda División B in 2017 – a “third” tier of 82 teams across four regionalised groups. Successive promotions brought them to the first division in 2019, only for relegation to follow immediately. But, promoted again in 2021, they finished eighth in 2023, 10th last season and reached the Copa del Rey final in 2024, losing on penalties. This summer they broke their record with 23,044 members.
“When you win, it is [worth it],” Kohlberg says, “but the best part is the overall sense of a team and club growing. Warren Buffett says turnarounds rarely turn around but I like turnarounds, not just in sport. I always say: ‘If we’re looking at a property and we can’t improve it, why are we buying it?’ I would look at a football club the same. Buying a really well-run team, I can only screw it up. Back then, you could pick almost any club and think: ‘There’s a pretty good chance we can improve this.’
“American sports are a closed system. Fans [in Europe] really care about relegation. That opens a pathway and also means that sports teams trade at a lower multiple on revenues. It’s a double-edged sword: you can buy a smaller club and get up but then there’s the risk of one bad year bringing the reverse … The horizon has to be long-term. And then Mallorca was a unique opportunity because of the island itself: the German market, British, Scandinavian. A million people live here and there are 16 million tourists. No place gets close to that ratio.”
That vision, the opportunity they saw, is seen in physical form here, Kohlberg sitting in one of the half-dozen VIP areas constructed at Son Moix. Through the window on one side is the pitch. On the other, the tunnel, players passing on matchdays, almost close enough for supporters to touch. Outside, new developments make this out-of-town stadium a busier place than it ever was on a weekday.
“It makes absolutely no sense to use a stadium 19 times a year. Why that’s an unusual concept, I don’t know. It seems logical to me,” Kohlberg says. “We want to attract those who’ve been coming for three generations, but also create something different to attract others after a great experience. One of the best compliments was from a Bayern Munich fan who said: ‘I came here and the only thing better at Bayern was the players.’ And they have, what, a $400m pay roll?”
But isn’t that what matters most? Is the risk losing sight of a club’s objective, worse still its community? No one takes an open top bus parade because the accounts look good. “Yes,” Kohlberg says, “and I’m very focused on that. In business the objective is generally pretty clear: make money. In sports you have a competing objective: to win, compete. Sometimes decisions are a dichotomy: pay a better player because you want to win and you’re going to lose more money, or don’t pay him and you’re going to lose more games. In business such a clear dichotomy is rare. But I don’t look at it as either/or.
“Even in business, you can’t alienate the local people. They’re the core. We’ve made it about the club belonging to the island. Supporters still come with their grandparents. Before we bought the club, the one thing everyone said was that the previous owners had been promising to move the running track for 25 years, and we did that. Fans are invested in the team, its future, they feel it’s theirs; that has a negative side in that defeats can be taken personally. But they are loyal, appreciative, and don’t expect perfection.”
There’s a pause, a smile. “Well, a few do. But they appreciate it if you have a clear, long-term plan.
“Sports teams don’t generate cashflow: you’re not in it for the annual cash distribution, but over 20 years you can grow,” Kohlberg continues. “If you’re looking at it from a pure, 100% business perspective, better to buy a top-six Premier League team or a top-four, five La Liga team. But it’s not as pleasurable. We had an idea of what we would spend, and I didn’t come looking to flip the team. We saw the financial controls [in Spain] as a positive because if there are rules that are somewhat fairly applied, then management becomes the key differentiator. Big clubs have a huge advantage but there’s an opportunity for well-run clubs to get close. Well, closis. We saw the possibility of the gap between the big clubs and the rest to narrow.”
And has it? “Not as much as I thought. The big clubs have more political power than in the NBA. That’s kind of expected but maybe a little more entrenched than I thought. The aim is to be top 10 consistently, competing for Europe, and we’re there now but staying there is even harder.”
More than half of the Premier League teams have US owners; in Spain, investment is increasing: Betis, Sevilla and Atlético Madrid have significant US interest. Why? “Probably because US values have got so crazy, so fast,” Kohlberg says. “Even the women’s franchises have crazy valuations. The women’s team in LA sold to Bob Iger for $250m. Five years ago, that would have been probably be $2m. People saw that and said: ‘Why would I do that?’ They come to Europe and think: ‘It seems a lot more reasonable.’”
Acquisition is just the start and while Kohlberg talks about some of the American knowhow being applied to European sport, there is another dimension, something a little more human, a sporting empathy rooted in experience. Over an hour he cites lessons from Rafael Nadal, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and more, and Mallorca’s players know he’s not just a president, some clueless politician or construction magnate. That’s the theory at least. Kohlberg laughs. “They probably are [thinking]: ‘Here comes a pain in the arse who used to play tennis.’”
He says: “A lot of athletes come and talk. We had Hakuho Sho, the sumo wrestler, here yesterday. [Steve] Kerr has come, Nash has come. Hopefully the players enjoy that. I figured those guys are better spokesmen than me. Generally, I’m more hands-off, I let them decide, although I enjoy the interaction with players. Having been an athlete, I understand the pressure, not wanting to chit-chat before and after games. You get some owners going into the locker room, but having been an athlete … Ufff.”
That’s the coach’s domain. Mallorca’s manager, Jagoba Mondragónis a teacher who took leave to pursue a football career and there’s something in that, Kohlberg thinks – in the emotional intelligence, the guidance and above all the adaptability. “One of the central commonalities is the coach. A good football coach has almost the exact attributes a good basketball coach has: being able to connect, communicate. You have to be far smarter than people realise. A really good coach [in football, basketball]even in tennis, has the same skill set: intelligence, communication, understanding, awareness to know that it’s always different.”
In that intuitiveness, that shifting context, lies part of the reason Kohlberg doesn’t entirely buy into the statistical revolution. “You have to use it,” he says. “But it’s less important here than at other clubs; in the Premier League some are very data-driven, but it’s easy to become reliant on them. I see this as an athlete, not a business owner. I know from experience that when you’re competing you can only think about one or two things max. [Roger] Federer said: ‘For a while I got involved in data. I go on to the court, it’s break point, I start thinking he serves 40% here, 30% there, and I couldn’t play!’
“What’s natural is to feel this match: that’s what I want to be thinking about, not previous stats. I talked to our guys at the Suns and they said: ‘The players can’t understand them and if they did, it would screw them up.’ Great athletes are great because they have an innate sense of flow, an intelligence. They know what’s needed now, which may not be what the stats show happened 80% of the time in a prior year. Stats helps in recruiting but in terms of helping players improve performance, only two or three do. I asked a [basketball] player: ‘Do you hit more shots from the right of the key or the left?’ He said: ‘About the same.’ In fact, it was 80-20 right side, so that’s helpful to know. But oftentimes analysis becomes paralysis. Historical stats hinder, rather than help.”
They also don’t define. So, despite having never sat at the Bernabéu and watched Mallorca win, you’re saying there’s a chance? Yes, just don’t expect Kohlberg to shout in celebration if this time it comes off.
