Colorado Native Ben Harburg Vying for Football Ownership Success

Colorado Springs, CO – At 41 years old, Ben Harburg has lived in just about every single region in the world, but it was in Colorado Springs, Colorado where his journey began. 

The son of a U.S. Air Force pilot, Harburg spent his childhood bouncing around from various locations like Michigan, Egypt, and Switzerland Harburg eventually moved to Spain, where he fell in love with football during his stay in El Puerto de Santa María after attending a Cádiz match in 1997. Harburg received a Fulbright scholarship to attend the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, where he pursued Islamic studies and oriental philology, and also became a Neubauer Scholar at Tufts University, before returning to Berlin to work for Boston Consulting Group, followed by a stay in Dubai. Harburg moved around from China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa and diligently crafted his reputation in the world of business. After co-founding one of the largest commodity trading companies in Asia, Harburg decided to sell out of commodities in 2010 and put everything into venture capital and technology investments. 

“I’ve spent a decade as a venture capitalist at a growth equity firm in technology companies, and prior to that, I was a commodities trader and a consultant,” stated Harburg in an exclusive Burgundy Wave interview. “In 2015, I put $200 million into Palantir. At the time, people thought it was a company that was kind of on the downslope. People were kind of describing it as the Accenture of technology…Accenture plus a little bit of computers. They thought that Palantir was pretending to be a tech company, but they were really just a human-centric business.”

“Not long after I invested, people were actually selling shares in the company on the private market for half the price at which we invested, they were really down on the stock. And even post-IPO, it went as low as $6 a share, and now it’s around $400 a share. So it’s just been an astronomic rise, benefiting from great relationships in Washington D.C. and government contracts. Obviously, thanks to this huge shift to artificial intelligence and domestic next-generation industrial technology and defense industrial base, it’s paid off many times over. But it was a good example of something where the wisdom of the crowd wasn’t probably accurate at the time of investment.”

Having overseen strategic investments into global giants like Palantir, Uber, and Airbnb, Harburg has enjoyed widespread success as a Managing Partner at MSA Capital, a global investment firm with over $2 billion in assets under management. He also works on the National Committee Board of Directors on U.S.-China Relations and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University and the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. But after watching the Netflix docuseries Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Harburg decided that it was time to start a new adventure in football ownership. He wanted to own a club in Spain, where he first became acquainted with soccer, so he plotted all 80 of the teams in Spain’s top three divisions into an Excel spreadsheet, analyzed key metrics from GDP per capita, size of the stadium, size of the fanbase, and more. Eventually, he found that Cádiz was the best value-for-dollar investment, and in October 2021, he purchased a 6.5% stake in the Spanish club.

“Money is kind of a funny thing where it expands and contracts, depending on how much of it you have, or how much of it you need. II think one of the happiest times of my life was when I essentially had nothing, so I don’t think there’s any correlation between happiness and wealth, or happiness and monetary success. For me, if we can make these football clubs financially sustainable and enable ourselves to return on profit…I’ve done everything with my own money, but in the future, maybe we take on some third-party capital. If we can return our investors something that enables this investment to be sustainable and on-par with other asset classes that they might be exploring, or even better, that’s obviously critical.”

“It’s a lot less about finances and more about building sustainable clubs that don’t lose money, that are great community assets which make our fans really happy, and that ensure that kids in our communities can come and play in our academies and develop. If we can build really robust fan bases that support our clubs, that’s great for me. And then if I can do all that sustainably so that we can bring in more clubs to the group, and that the group can spit off cash that would enable us to further develop those infrastructures, or buy new clubs, then we’ve done our job.”

Four years after becoming a minority shareholder and advisor to the Cádiz board, Harburg decided to purchase 100% of Al-Kholdood in July 2025. In doing so, he became the first foreign owner in the history of Saudi football. Founded in 1970, Al-Kholdood spent their first half-century oscillating from the second division to the third division before earning promotion in 2024.

Despite losing four of their first six matches in their first-ever top-flight season, Al-Kholdood would stabilize their form and finish ninth in the table. Under the ownership of Harburg, Al-Kholdood would kick off the 2025/26 season with back-to-back losses at Al-Ettifaq and Al-Nassr, before bouncing back with league wins vs. Damac and Al-Shabab and a King’s Cup win vs. Al-Bukiryah – surpassing last year’s cup finish in the process. They sit 11th in the Saudi Pro League table, and they’ll be looking to make it four wins in a row on Friday as they host Al-Najma SC.

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