I am certain I am opening myself up to loads of criticism and flack, but I am one of those Liverpool fans who believes Fenway Sports Group have done us a world of good and helped Liverpool progress over the last 12 years.
Yes, they do not spend millions on transfers every window, but there is more to being owners of a football club than providing a transfer kitty every six months.
Here is why they have done well as owners of Liverpool Football Club.
(Rich Linley – CameraSport via Getty Images)
They’ve paid off club debt
During the deal to buy the team in 2010 they paid up £44.8 million (A$81.6 million) to cover the club’s debts. When they purchased the club Liverpool was in tatters. They helped get rid of the massive debt and then started to rebuild. Yes, this is the first thing any new owner would have done, but take a second and think of the state of the club that they were buying.
Two words to remind you: Paul Konchesky.
They’ve improved the club’s value
Over a period of time they have steadily increase the club’s value from £532 million (A$969 million) in 2010 to £2.8 billion (A$5.1 billion). They made smart commercial deals and made smart purchases and sales of players that helped the value of the club go up. Over these 12 years Liverpool have once again become an attractive proposition for some of the best football talent in the world.
Two words to remind you: Charlie Adam.
They’ve expanded the stadium
They loaned the club £260 million (A$473.6 million) interest-free to expand stadium capacity and make overall improvements wherever necessary. This was done in two phases, the first phase of £100 million (A$182 million) to take the capacity up by 10,000 fans and the second of £50 million (A$161 million) to help increase it by another 5000. Under this project Anfield has gone from a stadium that holds 45,276 people to one that boasts a capacity of approximately 60,000.
Klopp’s one word to remind you how good this is: impressive.
The Kirkby training ground
FSG helped us move into a new £50 million (A$161 million) training ground. Klopp is a manager who believes in training the players you have rather than jumping to buy a player to plug a gap or improve something. That is why the owners thought purchasing a new state-of-the-art training facility would be something very useful.
These might not be the amounts of money that some of the rivals have spent, but it is still a significant amount of money, just not spent in the transfer window.
Yes, Klopp is the reason that we won the Premier League, UEFA Champions League, Super League and Club World Cup as well as played in two European finals before that. But whatever people say, the fact is the owners have reinvested whatever money they’ve pulled out of the club. Yes, they have not pumped in much of their own money in the transfer window, but they have spent £200 million-plus (A$364 million) of other activities. These activities helped us expand our brand, and if the brand makes more money, they reinvest that money too.
Their aim is to help us grow, albeit a little slowly. For those who are in the digital field, their strategy is more of a slow but sure SEO marketing effort rather than a paid campaign for instant results.
I am surely not one of the fans that want #FSGOUT. Yes, they made a couple of huge mistakes, the first one being the furlough incident during the start of the pandemic, which they retracted immediately.
The second and more severe one was trying to be part of a breakaway European Super League. This was a huge mistake for which they apologised. There is a flip side to the story. These guys are money hungry businessmen. The idea of being able to generate more money appeals to them, hence the entire European Super League fiasco.
The way it was done was wrong and seemed cowardly, but the fact that they accepted it, uploaded an apology video, spoke to fans and retracted their decision while expecting to pay heavy fines is something we can’t ignore.
Should they be fined for this? Absolutely yes – they need to pay for something that they deemed worthy enough despite never speaking to the most important stakeholders of our club, the fans.
However, to sum it all up, I look at the entire situation a little differently, and I am ready to agree with those who disagree.
Vas Venkatramani
Roar Guru
lesterlike, unlike the Glazers and the Kroenkes, FSG have some credit in the bank, a lot of which they burned during the Super League fiasco. But the Liverpool fans are not as driven to get their owners out of the club, unlike Man Utd or Arsenal. Liverpool fans mainly want fan representation on the board, namely by Spirit of Shankly. Now even that is a hard sell, as few owners would want to dilute their sharehold over an asset they have grown. But that is more palatable than FSG selling their asset, which they aren't likely to do at all. But then the question is: who does FSG sell to? While they aren't benevolent, we have enough experience of what a malevolent venture capitalist looks like. Liverpool fans should be careful what they wish for if they ask for new ownership.
Chris Lewis
Roar Guru
That ticket price is very high. TBH, only the community and govt would care about the social issues. Investors will indeed seek to maximise profits, although they will at some time provide some benefit.
Zubin Daver
Roar Pro
Hi Lesterlike, I understand your point of view and agree, that a local analysis is missing. But that does not take away from my feeling that if they undo those mistakes over a period of time and as mentioned by Vas above, improve their relationship with the fans by helping improve the standard of living, they are still better owners to have as compared to many of our rivals.
Zubin Daver
Roar Pro
Hi Vas, I understand your point of view. And do consider each one of them. Yes, a local flavour would have added a lot more depth to my analysis as well. Something that I hope to experience soon in my life which then by interacting with the local fans might change my point of view. Appreciate you taking out time and putting your point across like that. I really hope their next step is to help uplift the standard of living because, somewhere I believe that this entire debacle of the ESL might open their eyes up a little wider.
lesterlike
Roar Rookie
See only an overseas fan and not a local match-going resident would say this. FSG increased ticket prices to £77 well out of reach of working class fans, they put their lowest paid employees on furlough, they continued the policy of buying up houses around Anfield and letting them sit empty to drive down prices and THEN they threatened to blow up over a hundred years of football culture and tradition that fans cherish. A fancy training ground and a few extra seats that only tourists can afford doesn't mean diddly squat to people who feel like they are losing their communities connection to their club. How many times now have they stepped over the line and had to get John W Henry grovel on camera saying how sorry they are and how important the fans are blah blah blah..... Spare me. They, like the rest of the owners that have come over from American sports, have been absoloutely awful and need to be driven out of the game.
Vas Venkatramani
Roar Guru
Zubin, I won’t criticise you as you allude to, as you make some fair points of how FSG has improved the club, especially from the place they found them in. But I think your analysis is half-baked, not least because that you neglect where FSG have gone wrong (73GBP tickets, attempting to trademark Liverpool, furloughing staff). Then you have the Super League debacle, which sought to undermine the very essence of what competitive sport is all about. Sport without jeopardy is merely performance art. But more than any of those, I think you, I, and many foreign fans miss what is truly essential about the marriage between FSG and the community they are working in. Having lived in London, I made enough trips north to Merseyside to at least empathise with what the people protesting against FSG are complaining about. In all of the points you made, none of them brought substantial benefit to the community. Yes, they have improved the club, but these clubs are so embedded with their working class origins, you cannot delineate between the two. FSG are venture capitalists, and good ones at that. They saw an undervalued asset in 2010, invested in it sufficiently to help it grow, brought supporters onside with some of the decisions you listed above (plus things like hiring Klopp, buying VVD and Alisson, and winning the two big trophies on offer). The club is now worth near enough 2 billion pounds – which is a substantial ROI. As far as venture capitalists go, FSG are some of the better ones, especially compared to the Glazers and the Kroenkes. But none of FSG’s work has improved the community in Liverpool. If you don’t think that’s important, consider the work Man City’s owners have done to gentrify the eastern side of Manchester – this part of town was seen as dangerous and a place where no family would feel safe: it is now an impressive area where quality of living now surpasses the western part of Manchester where Man Utd are. When we look at owners, we have to consider their impact on the community as a whole: FSG have done little of that. And in a working-class area like Liverpool, where Tory politicians are seen as the devil incarnate, this matters. So if FSG want to get back in Liverpool fans’ good books, their next moves have to centre around projects that improve standard of living in their community. Otherwise, they are merely soft-spoken venture capitalists making substantial profits based on their own interests, and not much more.
Alvin
Guest
As a kop for 16 years I can't agree more, absolutely spot on! Now let us get to the top 4
Chris Lewis
Roar Guru
That would be some atmosphere at Anfield with 60,000 spectators.