Having acquired the Reds for a price tag just north of £300m back in October 2010, investment into the infrastructure of the club, from people to bricks and mortar, to the remarkable success on the pitch under the stewardship of manager Jurgen Klopp, and the not-insignificant boom in the value of media rights over the past 13 years, has allowed for FSG’s initial play to become something of a home run, to use a baseball parlance.
Earlier this month saw the first anniversary of FSG reportedly putting the club up for sale, a story that was broken by The Athletic. The Reds owners had indeed created a sales deck to present to potential investors, and there was a window of opportunity for someone to make a move to acquire the club in its entirety, but that would have had to have been an offer of monster proportions. With little in the way of previous deals for a club of Liverpool’s size (Chelsea had been acquired for £2.5bn with a further £1.5bn commitment to infrastructure development) it was unlikely that the kind of overpayment that would have been required to prise the club away from FSG would have been forthcoming.
“There have been a number of recent changes of ownership and rumours of changes in ownership at EPL clubs and inevitably we are asked regularly about Fenway Sports Group’s ownership in Liverpool,” an FSG statement read at the time.
“FSG has frequently received expressions of interest from third parties seeking to become shareholders in Liverpool. FSG has said before that under the right terms and conditions we would consider new shareholders if it was in the best interests of Liverpool as a club. “FSG remains fully committed to the success of Liverpool, both on and off the pitch.”
In the days following FSG’s intentions being made known, Manchester United’s unpopular owners, the Glazer family, put the Old Trafford side on the market, a move seen as negatively impactful for the hopes of Liverpool being sold for over and above the asking price.
For clubs such as Liverpool and Manchester United they offer real scarcity value, they are assets that do not come up very often, with ownership changes extremely rare. In the Glazers offering up United it had the potential to dilute the pool of potential investors and purchasers, and risked taking some of the shine and focus away from what FSG were seeking with Liverpool. In the weeks following the reveal that FSG were considering parting company with Liverpool, the most valuable asset in a portfolio that is worth more than £10bn and includes globally recognised sporting franchises such as the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins, Reds and FSG chairman Tom Werner, as well as Red Sox president and FSG partner Sam Kennedy, both alluded to a potential full sale of the club if the conditions were right.
But it wasn’t until early 2023 where clarity arrived from the very top. FSG principal John W. Henry revealed in an interview with the Boston Sports Journal that a full sale was not on the table, stating: “when have we sold anything in the past 20 years?”
In terms of the success of sporting investments there have been few in football to match Fenway Sports Group’s time at Liverpool.
