Espanyol is pushing for European qualification in La Liga only two years after promotion.
Twelve months ago, Espanyol were fighting for their La Liga lives. They survived the 2024-25 season by two points, scraping safety on the final day. This season they sit 11th with 37 points and nine games to play, comfortably clear of trouble and level on points with Osasuna in tenth. It is not a title race. But for a club that came up through the Segunda play-offs in 2024 and then spent much of last season near the bottom, it is a meaningful shift. Fans tracking Resultados Futbol Hoy can see this steady climb in the La Liga standings.
Velocity Sports Partners, which completed its takeover of RCD Espanyol in 2025, is making the case that the shift is not accidental. “Our goal is to return Espanyol to the status of a self-sufficient and stable club,” explains Brad Spiby, Chief Operations Officer, “and return the club to the upper echelons of Spanish soccer”.
The sports investment arm of ALK Capital led by American businessman Alan Pace, completed its majority acquisition of RCD Espanyol in October 2025 in a deal reported to be worth up to €200 million ($230.6 million). The move ended Chinese conglomerate Rastar Group’s nine-year ownership of the club, after a prolonged period of looking to sell the club, and added Espanyol to a portfolio that already includes Burnley, where Pace has served as chairman since 2020.
Pace was careful to frame the takeover as an expansion of a model rather than an imposition of one. “Football has always belonged to its people,” he said at the time. “Our role is not to replace legacy, but to build upon it.”
Both clubs are run independently under the arrangement, with separate leadership structures and decision-making, though the data and commercial frameworks developed at Burnley are being applied in Cornellà de Llobregat. They run from transfer recruitment through to commercial strategy and fan engagement. The results on the pitch are starting to show. The work off it is just beginning.
Data analytics driving Espanyol’s rise up La Liga table
Data as One Input, Not an Absolute Truth
Unai Ezkurra, Espanyol’s Director of Sporting Processes and Big Data, is careful about how he frames what data actually does. “Data is not a decision maker,” he says. “It’s like having parents, sometimes mom is right, sometimes dad is right, you have to have a bit of both. We have senior scouts who know our club culture and supporters, what our manager likes, all this intangible context that we put together with data to find opportunities. When everything ties in, that means we are close to reducing the uncertainty of the decision we’re making.”
That framing matters. The clubs that have stumbled with analytics-driven recruitment have often treated data as a replacement for judgment rather than a check on it. At Espanyol, the model keeps human context in the loop, which is partly why a signing like that of English winger Tyrhys Dolan made sense.
Dolan joined from Blackburn Rovers in the summer, a move that required him to trade the Championship for La Liga and relocate to Barcelona. “Espanyol came up late in the window for me, it was nerve-wracking,” he admits. “There were quite a few clubs coming to the table. I had options to play in England and abroad, but when Espanyol came, I looked into the club and it just felt right.”
The winger has settled quickly. “There’s so much that goes into the way we play and approach games,” he explained. “Going into games we know exactly what we’re heading into and the coaches show us how the data backs up the way we are playing, a lot more than what I’d experienced in the past. The more information you get, the better you can become as a player.”
Tyrhys Dolan has made 30 appearances since joining from Blackburn Rovers in summer of 2025.
Sustainable Growth Fuelled by Homegrown Talent
If recruitment is one application of the data model, the academy is where Espanyol’s longer-term thinking is most concentrated. “We are constantly developing our use of data in the academy,” Ezkurra reveals. “We really believe in the academy here at Espanyol and have a strategic plan to demonstrate a clear path from the academy into the first team. We are using stronger tools to scout internally, rather than focusing on outside competitions, and we are very lucky because we have much more data about our own players.”
The project is two years in. “We’re now moving into the next phase of identifying who the next Javi Puado, Jofre Carreras, or so on is from our academy,” he adds. “I would say it’s our biggest project we are working on.”
For a club that cannot outspend Barcelona, Real Madrid, or even the mid-table sides backed by sovereign wealth funds, developing and retaining talent from within is both a commercial and a sporting necessity. Players produced by the academy carry no transfer fee on the balance sheet, and La Liga’s financial control system, which Spiby describes as “forward-looking” and different from the model he knows from England, makes that kind of cost discipline particularly valuable.
“The LALIGA system makes for a much more sustainable model moving forward and reduces uncertainty for us as owners,” Spiby elaborates. “We like it. It’s a challenge but one we are enjoying.”
Competing in Barcelona’s Shadow
Espanyol’s location on the outskirts of Barcelona is both an asset and a constraint. The city draws tourists, raises the club’s international profile, and makes it easier to attract players who want to live in a major European city. It also means competing for attention, sponsorship, and supporters against one of the most recognised clubs in the world.
Velocity’s response has been the same as at Burnley, where the club operates in close proximity to Liverpool, Manchester United, and Manchester City. “For us, it’s about catering to our own fans first and foremost — those who are with us today and who have been with us through more difficult times — making them endorsers for a wider audience,” Spiby explains.
Dolan noticed that dynamic immediately after signing. “As a player coming in, there was a survivors’ mentality, and one thing I noticed was that the supporters were really behind us with everything we were doing,” he said. “Barcelona is so big in the city, so everyone who is rocking with Espanyol is so loyal to us. As a player, you know that the supporters have your backs.”
That loyalty is an asset the club is now trying to convert into commercial value. Espanyol’s stadium occupancy rate has been among the lowest in La Liga in recent seasons, and sponsorship positioning still reflects years of mid-table or lower-division soccer rather than where the club now stands. “The club hasn’t been a mid-table club in the last five years, but our sponsorship position is,” Spiby acknowledged at a La Liga roundtable. “Our starting point is a good one.”
Alan Pace was named President of Espanyol after Velocity Sports Partners acquired the club in 2025.
Building Commercial Infrastructure
The off-field ambition runs in parallel with the sporting one. Spiby is focused on closing the gap between what Espanyol can offer commercially and what the market currently values them at.
“What we need to start doing is providing tailor-made assets and utilising our tech stack to help sponsors to activate, which other teams in this kind of position aren’t always able to do,” he said. On revenue more broadly, Spiby was direct about the approach. “Soccer has existed at this club for 125 years when we came in, we aren’t going to pretend to be the geniuses to invent new revenue streams. We can do a better job in maximising the fixed assets we have.”
The longer-term investment is in data infrastructure. “Our industry needs to move in a direction of owning our fan data and providing better experiences — and monetising that, particularly where it’s owned by third parties like on the media side,” Spiby said. “So we’re investing in our tech stack. That will allow us to create new revenue streams as and when they become available.”
The pieces are taking shape. A second consecutive season in La Liga, a stable mid-table position, an academy data project two years into construction, and a commercial base that Spiby believes is undervalued relative to where the club actually sits. None of it is dramatic. That, for Espanyol under Velocity Sports, appears to be the point. For the latest Resultados Futbol Hoy and La Liga updates, check out Resultados Futbol Hoy.