The world’s fourth-richest man is part of a consortium to buy a stake in the Reds – but he must keep the club’s traditional values intact
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During Liverpool’s first encounter with American ownership, a director who went on to lead Donald Trump’s re-election campaign clashed by e-mail with one of the club’s fans.
Back in 2010, Thomas O. Hicks Jr., son of the club’s joint-owner, was exasperated by the fan’s persistence and told him, immortally: “Blow me fuck face. Go to hell. I’m sick of you.” There wasn’t a PR firefighter on earth who could save him. Hicks Jr. resigned and seven years later became co-chair of the Republican National Committee, working to return Trump to the White House.
Liverpool fans will find Jeff Bezos much harder to email. The prospective new part-owner of a club whose majority proprietor is the American Fenway Sports Group isn’t likely to engage in private exchanges about ticket prices or toilet facilities. But there is a Trump connection to maintain continuity with the turbulent ownership of Tom Hicks Sr. and George Gillett that ended in 2010.
Tom Hicks Jr with his father Tom Hicks – co-owner of Liverpool FC, 2009
Tom Hicks Jr with his father Tom Hicks – co-owner of Liverpool FC, 2009
Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest man, and worth about £200bn, is part of a consortium with the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (£23bn) and former Queens Park Rangers co-owner Amit Bhatia negotiating a deal to buy around 30% of a club once rooted in Bill Shankly’s socialism; a club still true, in the stands at least, to an egalitarian spirit no owner would mess with unless they fancied a long fight.
Like many of America’s tech bros, Bezos had liberal leanings before Trump returned to power. He supported Democrat nominees, backed same-sex marriage and donated $100m (£74m) to the Obama Foundation. Trump’s return however validated the New York Times’s description of Bezos as “a brilliant but mysterious and cold-blooded corporate Titan” who had been accused for years of under-paying his Amazon employees.
At the Washington Post, Bezos laid off a third of its newsroom staff, killed an election editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy and decreed that the paper would endorse only “personal liberties and free markets.”
Merseyside prides itself on its sense of humour. Anfield regulars therefore will like this one: in an interview with CNBC in May, Bezos argued that Trump, in his second term, was “more mature, more disciplined.”
What has this to do with whether new manager Andoni Iraola can get the best out of Florian Wirtz or Alexander Isak? Plenty, because we’ve all spent the last two weeks angry about Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell the World Cup to Trump-adjacent investors, while a Trump apologist prepares to buy into England’s most distinctive football club for reasons that won’t have much to do with emotion, culture or community.
Liverpool are a private club. International football is public property. But we ought to be honest about what the Premier League is. Abu Dhabi’s royal family owns a club. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund owns a club. And now an oligarch who went to space in his own Blue Origin rocket, and is the embodiment of unconscionable wealth, wants a chunk of the Liverpool “brand” (and one day, presumably, will want it all.)
The sequence from Hicks/Gillett to FSG/John Henry to the Amazon founder tells a story. In 2010, New England Sports Ventures (as FSG was then) saved Liverpool from financial chaos, paying £300m. It built a new training ground, increased Anfield’s capacity to 61,000 and won trophies.
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Big American sport franchises are hard and expensive to buy. This week the LA Lakers were sold to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner (the would-be Fifa investors) in a deal that reportedly valued the Lakers at $12.5bn (£10.8bn) – about £6bn more than Liverpool. American investors buy cheaper British football clubs to “add value to the asset.” They own or part-own 11 of the Premier League’s 20 teams.
If the 30% of Liverpool FSG will sell to Bezos and co is worth £1.35 billion, the club’s valuation is £4.5 billion – for an initial outlay by FSG, in 2010, of £300m. This astronomical gain will be cited by multi-billionaires and private equity managers as the ultimate endorsement of an economic culture that has turned the Premier League into a dream destination for global capital.
For further evidence, see the £1.2bn the Glazers are estimated to have taken out of Manchester United over 20 years in debt interest, repayments dividends and fees to the family (while raising commercial revenues five-fold).
When new owners arrive, supporters start fantasising about transfer targets but the combined billions belonging to Bezos, Saverin and Bhatia won’t bring Kylian Mbappé or Lamine Yamal to the independent republic of Anfield. The league’s squad cost ratio system limits spending to 85% of football-generated revenue and net profit-loss from player sales. Bezos will have examined these numbers and seen a protected bet. None of these speculators know where the ceiling is for Premier League purchase price inflation but they all seem to believe there’s more value to extract.
Liverpool’s first owner, in the 1890s, was John Houlding, a Conservative mayor, freemason and Orangeman, so it hasn’t all been Shankly-ite socialism. But this new hook-up with tech empires and Trump enablers will prompt rumination much deeper than the doomed forced marriage with Hicks and Gillett. In football, as in society, Liverpool supporters will, like the rest of us, probably adopt a policy of trying to cling to their own ideals in the face of uncontrollable, incomprehensible global forces.
But if Bezos thinks he can disregard a fan culture most other Premier League supporters regard with bafflement, but also admiration, he’s in for a shock.