Messi buys Eldense and Cristiano already owns 25% of Almería: Spanish Second Division has gone mad (and Sunday brings action to El Molinón)

What's up, lads? I sit down to write a chilled preview for matchday 5 and then this drops: Leo Messi has reached a preliminary agreement to buy 100% of CD Eldense. Yep, Eldense. The bottom club in LaLiga Hypermotion. The team coming to El Molinón this Sunday.

Journalist Rubén Uría broke it Monday afternoon, September 8, and within minutes El Desmarque, Relevo, the Elda press and half the planet had it everywhere. So let's break this down: what's confirmed, what isn't, and what's got to do with Sunday's match. Because it's actually quite a lot.

⚽ The match: Sporting - Eldense, Sunday 13th at 14:00

Let's start with what matters to us. This is the match info, and the scoreboard below updates itself automatically on Sunday while the match is on — no need to refresh.

And here's how both sides arrive, with the table in hand. Also live: as soon as the matchday finishes, these two rows update themselves.

📌 What's confirmed (and what isn't)

Negotiations have been cooking for months between Messi's legal representatives and the TH group. Current president Carolina Holguín had already told Elda's mayor, Rubén Alfaro, back in early September that she had an offer on the table.

What still isn't done:

• The due diligence. Before signing you've got to audit the entire club: accounts, contracts, debts, licenses. It's the procedure that can drag on —or kill— any deal like this.
• CSD approval. The Spanish Sports Authority has to sign off on a change of ownership in a Sports Public Limited Company. It's the last filter, and it's not just paperwork.
• The price. Not a single official figure. Everything you read today about how much Messi's paying is speculation.
• The date. Thursday, September 10 is being pointed to as a possible day to make it official, but that's a working date, not an announcement.

Elda's mayor summed it up best: «we were confirmed tonight that there's already a preliminary agreement, but we must show the caution these situations require and wait to see if the deal actually goes through». Exactly.

🏟️ Why Eldense? The Elda numbers

A lot of people found the choice surprising. Not me so much, and these figures explain why:

• Elda has just over 55,000 inhabitants and the club has about 3,500 season-ticket holders. Do the maths: it's an insane proportion for a city that size.
• The Nuevo Pepico Amat holds 4,036 seats. In other words: the stadium is practically full of season-ticket holders before selling a single ticket. It's by far the smallest ground in the category.
• The club is over a century old (1921) and was out of professional football for 60 years straight until promotion in 2023.
• It dropped to Primera RFEF, lasted just one season there and bounced back up in June 2026. It's in its second recent spell in the second tier.
• The town council has spent twelve years shoring up the club's structure (including ground access and facilities), and that's exactly what makes it a buyable project: a healthy entity, second division football, a city behind it and room to grow.

Translation: you don't buy Eldense for the fan base it has today, you buy it for what it costs and what it could become. A Spanish second-division club is a cheap platform to an expensive First Division.

🔵 Not his first club: the Cornellà precedent

This didn't come out of nowhere either. On April 16, 2026 Messi already bought UE Cornellà, currently in Tercera RFEF. That was a small operation, almost experimental. This is another league —literally—: it would be the first time Leo Messi owns a professional club in Spain.

And it fits with where he's at in life: Messi already said goodbye to Argentina after the World Cup, he's still at Inter Miami, and what he's building around himself is an ownership structure, not a playing career. If you want that side of things, I covered it all here: Messi retires from Argentina.

🐐 And now the big one: Cristiano already owns 25% of Almería

Because the Portuguese got there first. On February 26, 2026, Cristiano bought 25% of UD Almería through CR7 Sports Investments, a subsidiary specifically created within his CR7 S.A. company. The club announced it officially and framed it within the ownership consortium led by SMC Group, chaired by Mohamed Al Khereiji, who took over Almería in summer 2025 from Turki Al-Sheikh. The figure wasn't released either. Cristiano said back then that he'd wanted to contribute to football beyond the pitch for a while, and that Almería had solid foundations and room to grow.

The differences, and they're massive

And this is where it gets interesting, because from «both have a club in the second tier» to what's actually going on is a whole different ball game:

	Leo Messi	Cristiano Ronaldo
Club	CD Eldense	UD Almería
Stake	100% — sole owner	25% — minority partner
Status	Preliminary agreement, awaiting CSD approval	Closed and official
From	September 2026, if signed	February 26, 2026
Vehicle	Personal investment, solo	CR7 Sports Investments (CR7 S.A.)
Does he run the club?	Yes, completely	No: SMC Group has control
Stadium	Nuevo Pepico Amat · 4,036	Juegos Mediterráneos · around 22,000
Other club in Spain	UE Cornellà (Tercera RFEF)	—

Translation: Cristiano put money in, Messi puts money in and signs. One's joining a Saudi consortium that already runs things; the other's taking the whole club home. If I had to pick which of these two moves is more ambitious, I wouldn't need to think about it long.

📅 The Messi-Cristiano matchup that's already on the calendar

And now hang on tight, because this is literal and it's in LaLiga's official calendar: Eldense and Almería face each other this very season.

• First leg — matchday 1, 16 August 2026: Almería 3-0 Eldense. This was played before Messi showed up, so it was all Cristiano flying solo. Bonini in the 15th and Dzodic and Melamed in stoppage time of the first half: game over before the break.
• Return leg — matchday 37, 2 May 2027, at Nuevo Pepico Amat: that would be the first. The first Messi versus Cristiano in history with both as owners, on a four-thousand-capacity pitch in Elda, a Sunday in May of Segunda División. Tell someone this fifteen years ago, when they were handing out Ballon d'Ors like confetti, and they'd laugh you out of the room.

🎮 What if they signed themselves? (this is pure fantasy, fair warning)

You've asked me twenty times this afternoon, so let's play — being crystal clear that there's absolutely nothing to this. Zero. It's a bar-stool "what if?"

The real starting figures: Messi is 39 with a contract at Inter Miami; Cristiano is 41 and just renewed with Al-Nassr through 2027. Both of them, besides, earn figures that no Spanish Segunda club could pay even if they pooled every peseta in the region. So it's not a regulatory problem: it's that the maths simply don't work.

But imagine it for a second. The Pepico Amat, 4,036 seats, with Messi as owner and player. Season tickets would sell out in an afternoon and there'd be a waiting list stretching to Alicante. Resale prices for Eldense-Almería would cost more than a Clásico. And El Molinón, with 29,000 capacity, would be one of the few Segunda grounds able to handle that kind of visitor influx without the city grinding to a halt.

It's not going to happen. But that in September 2026 we're talking about this before a Sporting match already says quite a lot about how weird and wonderful football has become.

🚨 Meanwhile, on the pitch: Eldense are bottom

Here's the beautiful contrast. While half the world's talking about Messi, Eldense sit twentieth, in the relegation zone: four matchdays, zero wins, two draws and two losses, 2 points, 2 goals for and 6 against. Only Albacete and Ceuta, both still at zero, are below them.

And last Sunday the club made a brutal call: sacking Claudio Barragán, the manager who'd got them promoted to Segunda, after just four matchdays. He was the first managerial casualty of the season across the entire division. He left after the 0-0 at home against Mallorca.

The dugout is now occupied, on an interim basis, by Josep Ferrando, who was the assistant. His first game in charge: El Molinón. If the club hasn't announced anyone before Sunday, the interim manager's debut with the team that Messi's about to buy will be in Gijón, at two o'clock, in front of our fans.

🔴⚪ How does this affect Sporting?

On the pitch, not much: Sunday it's eleven versus eleven and Messi's not going to pop up at centre-back. But there are three things that do hit close to home:

• A team in turmoil is unpredictable. Change of manager and change of ownership in the same week can go two ways: a disoriented side or a side absolutely buzzing from the high. And Sporting arrive after losing 0-2 to Girona, so complacency is off the menu.
• Media spotlight. A Sporting-Eldense matchday 5 would be invisible outside Asturias and Alicante. A Sporting-«Messi's team» gets watched by half the world. If it's signed Thursday, Sunday El Molinón is on screens in Argentina, the US and everywhere else.
• Points are points. Sporting sit on 7 points from 4 games, in no man's land but a whisker off the play-offs, because there's only two points between 2nd and 11th. Beating the bottom side at home is not optional. It's mandatory. Everything else is noise.

And a warning we've learned the hard way: in Segunda, the team that's just sacked their manager wins the next game more often than logic should allow. The so-called "bounce effect" is a cliché, but it's a cliché that exists because it actually happens.

💰 The fashion for player-owners

Messi isn't a rare case, he's the tip of a trend. In recent years we've got used to seeing ex-players and active players buying modest clubs: it's an asset that appreciates with promotion, gives creative control over a brand, and works as a natural exit when the playing career ends. What changes here is the scale of the name. This isn't «some ex-footballer». It's Messi. And the effect on shirt sales, sponsorships and the image rights value of a Segunda club has no comparison whatsoever.

For Eldense, if it goes through, the interesting question isn't how much money comes in. It's what project comes with it: whether it's a club that'll be a platform for young South American talent heading to Europe, or whether it's a genuine sporting push to get promoted to the top flight. That's something nobody's said yet.

🧐 Five facts for the bar

• If it closes, Messi will have two clubs in Spain: Cornellà (Tercera RFEF) and Eldense (Segunda).
• Nuevo Pepico Amat, with 4,036 seats, fits inside El Molinón seven times over.
• Eldense is the only Hypermotion club to have changed manager before matchday 5… and could change owners in the same week.
• Barragán was the first manager sacked across the entire Segunda División this season.
• The club's worn the crest in blue and garnet since its foundation in 1921. Yes: Barça colours. Someone will crack the joke, so I'm getting in first.

🔮 What to expect this week

Keep your eye on Thursday the 10th: that's the date everyone's working with for the official announcement, assuming due diligence and the CSD play ball. If it's confirmed, Sunday the 13th at El Molinón could be, without a shadow of exaggeration, Messi's first match as owner in Spanish professional football.

And if it's not confirmed, well, we'll have had a laugh and we'll have a normal Sporting-Eldense in which we need to win anyway. PUXA SPORTING. 🔴⚪

📺 Sunday 13 · 14:00 · El Molinón

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