In Liverpool and their wider sports empire, FSG appear almost religiously committed to one of the maxims of the great investor Charlie Munger: don’t sell anything you wouldn’t want to buy yourself.
FSG are in the business of creating value, not extracting it. In this sense, the Liverpool ownership regime’s DNA is diametrically opposed to Manchester United’s owners, the Glazer family.
While the Glazers have extracted hundreds of millions in dividends and driven United’s spending to unsustainable levels without success on the pitch, FSG have taken nothing out of Liverpool, invested very little, and made the club a force in Premier League and European football once again.
Manchester United have become commercially catatonic but Liverpool are growing financially every year. They will overtake their old rivals in the revenue race this season for only the second time in a generation.
To interpolate a phrase from Sir Alex Ferguson, FSG have knocked the Glazers right off their funding perch.
Chart showing Liverpool and Man United revenue side-by-side, with TBR Football logo
Liverpool vs Manchester United revenue Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
FSG are respected throughout football finance and the wider sports business ecosystem in a way that the Glazers are not, even if their approach at Liverpool, just as has been the case at Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox and the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins, has sometimes been perceived as unambitious.
That’s certainly a kernel of truth in that line of attack. FSG have put precisely zero money into the football side of the club, after all.
Broadly speaking, Liverpool spend what they earn and their behaviour in the transfer market is not swayed by what uber-ambitious nation state or private equity-backed clubs are doing elsewhere. They are probably the most resource-efficient elite club in the world, in that respect.
Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images
Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images
It is unquestionably healthy for Liverpool fans to be sceptical about the owners’ intentions at Anfield given what they have previously tried to pull with ticket prices, Project Big Picture and the European Super League. There are similar concerns about John Henry and Tom Werner among Red Sox fans too.
But while one can question FSG’s motives, the same can’t be said for their faculties. They came to English football with a capital appreciation plan and have executed it almost perfectly.
FSG’s end-goal is to sell Liverpool for a huge profit. If they flipped the club tomorrow, they would already be several billion pounds up on the deal, having bought Liverpool for £300m 15 years ago.
Their success is partly attributable to the network of brain power they have built behind the scenes at Anfield.
On the football side, Michael Edwards is routinely characterised as a “genius” by those in the industry, for example. But there are umpteen figures who are less visible but just as operationally important.
Among those is Gerry Cardinale, the private equity firebrand.
RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale says he wants to work with Liverpool, not buy them
Cardinale is founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital, the private equity firm that owns around 11 per cent of FSG, which is more than any other single investor besides John Henry or Mike Gordon.
A diagram showing the ownership structure of Liverpool and FSG, encompassing John Henry, Mike Gordon, Tom Werner, Dynasty Equity, Arctos, RedBird Capital and other investors, with TBR Football logo
Liverpool ownership diagram Credit: Adam Williams/TBR Football/GRV Media
RedBird’s deal to buy into FSG was worth around £533m back in 2021. Now, their stake is worth considerably more than that.
Liverpool alone are, according to new research published by Forbes, worth close to £4bn. Indeed, the decision to sell a minority stake to Dynasty Equity in 2023 tallies with that figure.
Rank Club Value Owner(s)
1 Real Madrid $6.75bn Club members
2 Manchester United $6.6bn Glazer family, Jim Ratcliffe
3 Barcelona $5.65bn Club members
4 Liverpool $5.4bn John Henry, Tom Werner
5 Manchester City $5.3bn Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan
6 Bayern Munich $5.1bn Club members
7 Paris Saint-Germain $4.6bn Qatar Sports Investments
8 Arsenal $3.4bn Stanley Kroenke
9 Tottenham Hotspur $3.3bn Joseph Lewis Family Trust, Daniel Levy
10 Chelsea $3.25bn Todd Boehly, Clearlake Capital
Forbes 2025 list of most valuable football clubs
Cardinale, who through RedBird also owns AC Milan, has sometimes been touted as the next outright owner of Liverpool.
In a new interview with CNBC, however, the American billionaire distanced himself from more investment in sports teams in the immediate future, instead suggesting he would instead like to collaborate with FSG to invest in the business ecosystem that surrounds Liverpool.
“Take Fenway Sports Group,” Cardinale said.
“That was the one time in my career where I decided to be a junior partner and not the primary partner. It was because I had such a strong conviction around the quality of that ownership and management team.
“They were the first to really diversify and create a sort of holding company platform. You see the results at Liverpool – they speak for themselves.
“If you ask anybody today what investing in sports is and they all say it’s taking minority stakes in teams. Of course, my crowd, [private equity], they jump in because they see a business opportunity. But the problem with my crowd is that KPIs, their metrics for success, is not about building businesses, it’s about raising funds, right?
“So ultimately, at the end of the day, the guys that own the IP [club owners], they’re not as well served by guys who just want to come in and raise funds as their KPI.
“Raising funds is something I need to be able to invest scalable capital. But what really gets me excited is partnership with a Liverpool or a Fenway and finding ways to build new companies with terminal value appreciation around the IP. So, for the rights holder, they don’t need to sell a stake.”
FSG want tech-inspired breakthrough to justify £300m Liverpool takeover, says Kieran Maguire
Elsewhere on planet Gerry Cardinale, RedBird Capital have just taken over The Telegraph media group in a £500m deal.
RedBird previously were co-owners of the group in a joint venture with Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund IMI. They fended off competition from Chelsea owner Todd Boehly’s Eldridge Industries to secure the deal.
If you need an example of how the Premier League, media, geopolitics and private equity intersect…
RedBird, part-owners of Liverpool via FSG, beat Chelsea's Todd Boehly to buy The Telegraph from IMI, an Abu Dhabi-owned fund run by Man City's Sheikh Mansour.
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For Liverpool, it raises an interesting point about their place in the media ecosystem. Increasingly, elite clubs see themselves as content providers and are building their own platforms to engage fans directly.
FSG, for instance, have just launched All Red, a new four-tier membership scheme combining LFCTV, ticketing opportunities and rewards in one platform.
“You need something to attract people to your product or service,” University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire told TBR Football.
“Tech organisations realise this. Elon Musk has been talking about this all-encompassing app as well where you can do pretty much everything. That seems to be the M.O. and, increasingly, we’re seeing it in football too.
Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images
Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images
“You can see the merits of such an approach for Liverpool. You need content – and recurring content at that – to keep people clicking back.
“Clubs have tried this kind of thing with dedicated TV channels. I saw the accounts for MUTV recently – it’s not working for them.
“But everybody, including Liverpool, is searching for the lost ark. If you find it, you’ve got the equivalent of the next Facebook or Amazon.”