A consortium including the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is close to completing a deal for a 30% stake in Liverpool after months of talks with Fenway Sports Group. The investors are led by Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of the Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and for eighteen years a director and co-owner of Queens Park Rangers, and the group also includes the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The price is understood to be in the region of £1.35bn, and the deal is understood to be effectively agreed while still taking up to a month to complete.
That figure values Liverpool at somewhere between about £4.4bn and £4.5bn, depending on which account of the talks you read. Fenway Sports Group, then trading as New England Sports Ventures, paid £300m for the club in October 2010, at the end of a tumultuous period under Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Everything since has been won: two Premier League titles under the group's ownership, and every major trophy available to the club.
What the money is actually buying
The distinction that matters to supporters is a dull one, and it is the whole story. The consortium's offer was made to buy a stake from Fenway Sports Group, which makes the £1.35bn a payment to the existing owner for shares it already holds, not a sum arriving in the club's accounts. The comparison is the group's last piece of business of this kind: when Dynasty Equity took 3% of the club in 2023, the agreement was valued at between £82m and £164m, and the money was set against debt accrued on the Main Stand, the Anfield Road End and the training ground at Kirkby.