Football financier Staveley joins board of tokenisation start-up Ctrl Alt

Amanda Staveley, the Mayfair financier best-known for her roles in takeovers of Premier League football clubs Manchester City and Newcastle United, is joining the board of Ctrl Alt, a financial infrastructure start-up.

Sky News has learnt that Ms Staveley, who has recently been trying to orchestrate the purchase of a stake in West Ham United FC, the Championship club, has agreed to become a director of, and senior advisor to, Ctrl Alt, which specialises in tokenisation of alternative assets.

Ms Staveley's appointment comes as Ctrl Alt raises additional funding round to help it expand internationally.

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The company's founder and chief executive, Matt Ong, is understood to have recruited Ms Staveley partly as a result of her extensive network of business relationships in the Middle East.

Her private equity and advisory firm, PCP Capital Partners, was instrumental in the multibillion pound recapitalisation of Barclays by Gulf funds during the 2008 financial crisis - a deal which later sparked a protracted legal battle between the financier and the British bank.

She was part of the Saudi state investment fund-led deal which took control of Newcastle United in 2021, selling her stake for a substantial profit three years later.

In recent months, she has been attempting to put together deals to buy either Tottenham Hotspur, the Premier League's basement club, or West Ham.

Ms Staveley made an offer for a large minority stake in the Hammers during the summer but appears to have been trumped for the time being by the club's largest shareholder, the Czech tycoon Daniel Kretinsky.

Ctrl Alt is understood to be the first external board appointment the prominent financier has taken on.

The start-up operates in a complex, fast-growing area of digital financial markets, operating regulated entities in the UK, Europe and the Gulf.

To date, it has tokenised more than $1.8bn in alternative assets such as real estate, private credit and commodities, underlining growing demand for tokenisation as digital assets become increasingly embraced in global financial markets.

The company's regulators include Britain's Financial Conduct Authority.

"I've spent my career closing deals where access to capital was the binding constraint," Ms Staveley said on Tuesday in a statement issued to Sky News.

"Tokenisation is the first real structural fix to that problem, and Ctrl Alt has done the hard part first - building the regulated infrastructure that institutions and governments actually need before scaling the market around it.

"I've watched this team turn a genuinely difficult, multi-jurisdictional regulatory challenge into a working product, in the UK, UAE and beyond."

Ctrl Alt was founded in 2022, and works with a number of regulated financial institutions and governments.

"From our first conversations with Amanda, it was clear we shared the same conviction about how this technology can fundamentally change the way we transact in alternative assets," Mr Ong said.

"The opportunity is enormous, but access to these assets still runs on infrastructure built for a different era, and our mission is to change that.

"Few people know the UK and Middle Eastern markets as deeply as Amanda does, from how capital moves in each to what it takes to close complex transactions."

BCG, the consulting firm, forecast in a report in April that the global market for tokenised assets would reach $14 trillion by 2030.

(c) Sky News 2026: Football financier Staveley joins board of tokenisation start-up Ctrl Alt