Liverpool-owned Fenway Sports Group is set to meet with minority partner RedBird Capital Partners. John Henry and Jerry Cardinal are generally allies on board.
The business partners will go from friends to foes in a matter of hours when Liverpool take on Toulouse in the Europa League on Thursday night. Fenway Sports Group (FSG) will compete with Redbird Capital Partners for the first time after working together for the past two and a half years. In April 2021, FSG decided to sell approximately 11 units. A stake in the company was acquired by RedBird for £535 million. As a result, the company founded by Cardinale, a former Goldman Sachs partner, became an indirect investor not only in Liverpool, but also in Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox. Under FSG, Liverpool have returned to the elite of European football. Since Jurgen Klopp took charge in October 2015, United have won six major trophies, including a sixth Champions League title in 2019 and a first Premier League title the following year.
In addition, major investment of around £200m has been made to increase Anfield’s capacity to 61,000 following the completion of work on the Anfield Road stand, and £50m has been spent on a state-of-the-art AXA training center . RedBird bought 85% of Toulouse shares before buying FSG shares and focusing on football. At the time, Les Violettes were preparing for life in the French second tier after relegation and RedBird reportedly paid €20 million for the club. RedBird, like FSG, took a data-driven approach in Toulouse. They hired former Liverpool director of football strategy Damien Comolli as chairman and Toulouse were promoted to Ligue 1 for the 2021–22 season.
After finishing well in 13th place last season, they won the French Cup, the equivalent of the FA Cup, for the first time in their history. As a result, they qualified for the Europa League. In fact, the cardinal admitted that while working at Goldman Sachs, he offered to buy Liverpool for $350 million in 2008 from the investment bank, but the deal fell through. According to Forbes, the Reds are currently valued at $5.3 billion.“It’s great,” Cardinal said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2023. “Advice to my 20-year-old self? I started DA with George Steinbrenner when I was 33 years old.
So my advice to a 33-year-old would be to speculate on buying Liverpool for $350m over a few years. Goldman (Sachs) blocked my comment on this. It would be great if we did this sooner. But if Toulouse pull off an unexpected upset, John Henry could face some criticism from the cardinal. And next time we will sit around the business table with the rest of the FSG.
