Is £5bn now the entry ticket into Premier League football?
It may have taken 34 years but the Premier League has at last clawed its way into the financial big time. The reported £5.5bn valuation placed on Liverpool FC by a consortium of new investors that includes Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos – aka the world’s third richest man – has the whiff of an NFL or NBA price ticket about it.
Importantly, the sale of a 38 per cent stake in Liverpool represents a partial but hugely profitable exit for Fenway Sports Group, which remains in overall control 16 years after its initial £300m takeover of the club. As any seasoned investor will tell you, buying a business is the easy part. Exiting it profitably is the yardstick, however, by which your skill will be judged. Notoriously, football clubs are frequently a graveyard for investor reputations.
The Seattle Seahawks sold for a NFL record £7bn last month; the NBA’s LA Lakers for £9.2bn last week. The MLB record was set this week, the San Diego Padres changing hands for a mere £2.9bn.
The 2025/26 season was hardly a vintage one for Liverpool, but deals such as these take a long time to craft and then seal. This one was likely first conceived in the golden after-glow of the previous year’s title winning success and with the earlier Jurgen Klopp era still fresh in memories, providing enticing imagery to surround the dry numbers in the investment bankers’ pitch book.
It is always hard to make the maths add up when trophy sporting assets change hands. Liverpool’s annual turnover is, after all, ‘just’ £700m – the highest nevertheless in the Premier League. The Glazer family at Manchester United aside, club owners tend not to extract dividends from such investments, relying instead on the greater fool theory which assumes there will always be someone else further down the line to cash you out. Or an owner is such a fan that they are happy to bequeath their club to their family and with it the associated running costs.
Stupendously successful in business as he undoubtedly is, the ‘fool’ moniker doesn’t immediately spring to mind when contemplating Bezos. Nor does it stick to either the comparatively impoverished but still super-wealthy Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin or the Mittal family. Lakshmi Mittal’s son-in-law Amit Bhatia is becoming Liverpool’s vice-chair as leader of the investment consortium of which Bezos and Saverin are members.
These new investors are no guarantee of enhanced performances on the pitch. Liverpool’s spending on players is constrained by the financial rules of both the Premier League and Uefa. If the club can expand its revenue streams with the input of the new co-owners then its squad budget will grow accordingly. Liverpool is hardly an unknown brand amongst global football followers, though, so revenue gains from any increased marketing initiatives enabled by the consortium are likely to be incremental and hard-won rather than instantly transformative.
What then might Bhatia and his colleagues be betting on? Had I been putting together that banker pitch book, and if I could have been certain of it remaining confidential, I would have cited four possibilities: that the Fifa World Cup proves to have a transformational impact on US interest in English soccer; that Liverpool could be the cornerstone of a multi-club structure to rival City Football Group – something Fenway Sports Group attempted but failed at; that the existing Premier League broadcast model will break down and each member club enabled to sell its own individual TV rights; and that a European or global super league will eventually happen.
Any or none of these might yet come to pass. Until then, Liverpool will benefit from minority shareholders rich enough to play a long game and smart enough to bring ideas to the party. Precedents elsewhere, however, highlight the risks associated with a patchwork of club owners – especially if the new investors on a share register have only minority rights.
The Liverpool investment news dropped in the middle of the tussle for control of West Ham United. The sums involved there might be smaller, but the reputational stakes for this club’s current and wannabe owners, and the emotional ones for Hammers fans, are just as high. Think too of the failure thus far by Sir Jim Ratcliffe to successfully leverage his minority position at Manchester United to good effect on the pitch.
And then this week the story broke of Todd Boehly’s possible exit from the consortium controlling Chelsea. The apparently frayed relationship between the club’s current chair and its majority-owners Clearlake Capital has been the subject of much speculation.
If as reported a sale by Boehly to Clearlake is at an implied valuation close to Liverpool’s, then Chelsea’s headline value will have roughly doubled in the four years since the purchase from Roman Abramovich. Looks as though Clearlake could be preparing to double-down on similar strategic bets to those that might lie behind the Liverpool deal.
£5bn appears to be the entry ticket, then, for a top-end Premier League asset. In Britain, as I spouted here last week, there’s football and there is everything else.
In that vein, although at the other end of the spectrum, the National League has reported a 20 per cent year-on-year increase in total attendances on the opening day of the season across its three divisions. There’s football…
Baby, Baby, Baby!
The sting from Slade that preceded every event at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham is still bouncing around my skull. As I predicted last week, the full crowds at the Alexander Stadium in the final days will provide the competition’s abiding atmospheric images, not the empty seats at the start.
I did write that a table-topping GB performance would help. In the event, the British team was pipped by Italy, but there were more than enough home medal-winning performances – a number of them of global rather than ‘merely’ European standard – to sear into the memory.
Birmingham 2026 reminded me once again what a very special sport athletics is when everything aligns perfectly. That’s athletes in their national vests, coveted medals on offer, full crowds and kind weather. Only gymnastics can provide the concurrent “events within an event” experience of track and field that so appeals to a family audience, as evidenced by the make-up of the crowd at the weekend. Wherever in the arena you looked there was fiercely contested sport.
If only athletics could find a way to assemble these ingredients more often. Next month brings the latest attempt, the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship. It is punchy of the global governing body to bill this three day best-of-the-best competition as the “ultimate”, risking the cachet of its flagship World Championships.
World Athletics does though promise a host of presentational innovations in Budapest which might irk traditionalists, but which are the sort of initiatives that many of us have been keen to see for far too long.
Stream away
The Ultimate Champs will have the huge awareness advantage of being shown live on the BBC. Other events do exist, of course, as highlighted here last week and to the frustration of those of us eager to find more limelight for our athletes.
Brits won big in swimming and equestrian over the weekend, away from terrestrial TV. This week, our wheelchair rugby team is competing in the World Champs in Brazil. You can watch every match live on YouTube.
You can also seek out the badminton Worlds in India and men’s artistic gymnastic Euros in Croatia, while the hockey World Cups and equestrian World Championships continue.
Ed Warner is chair of Sussex Cricket and GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com