Project 2030? Liverpool moving in £10bn direction as insiders explain FSG's long-term plan

Why are valuations in the EPL rising for the biggest clubs, and where could it get to?

Darwin Nunez, Mohamed Salah and Dominik Szoboszlai celebrate against Brentford (GETTY IMAGES)

In terms of the success of sporting investments there have been few in football to match Fenway Sports Group’s time at Liverpool.

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.

Last week 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 an interview with myself for the Liverpool Echo back in March of this year, Henry moved to reaffirm the commitment of the group to the Reds for the long term. That reaffirmation came at a time when erroneous links relating to talks with sovereign wealth funds from Qatar and Singapore were doing the rounds on social media and gaining traction. Hundreds of hours of discourse on Twitter Spaces devoted to the sure-fire sale of the club to sovereign wealth funds, something seen as absolutely imperative among some fans when it came to competing with their rivals in an increasingly expensive transfer market rat race.

While the false rumours around sovereign wealth funds circulated, much of the leg work had already been done when it came to sourcing minority investment in the club, with FSG president Mike Gordon, the closest ally from senior leadership to Klopp and the FSG chief who has been most hands-on in the Liverpool journey through the last 13 years, seconded to spearhead the search.

The reality was that following its conclusion and having spoken to sources within US sports investment who were close to the situation, the direction in which FSG wanted to head had been agreed upon pretty early in the process, with the reason for wanting to sell a minority stake in the club also deliberate, and it wasn’t to raise capital to fund a transfer splurge that, while likely to appease some fans, would not have given any guarantees over competitive success, nor would it have sensibly addressed the financial needs that the business had, and its target of growing the value of the club in the years to come. Based on some forecasts the Bottom Line has seen for the Reds’ revenue and overall value, boy is there growth to be had!