There may not be a 'for sale' sign outside Anfield but the ownership of Liverpool by Fenway Sports Group feels a little bit closer to the end than it did.
On Monday it was reported, first by the Athletic, that FSG were willing to listen to offers for the club and had engaged the services of major US banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to help manage that process, the two firms having been seeking outside investment opportunities for more than a year.
In a statement FSG stated that they remained committed to the future of the club but hinted at listening to offers for anyone wanting to take a slice of their shareholding, although with reports of a full sales deck being presented to would-be investors it suggests that a full takeover would be considered for the right price, the club valued at between £3.5bn and £4bn.
Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp was quizzed on the situation on Wednesday evening and his stance was that, as far as he was concerned and what he had learned from internal conversations, that the club were seeking investment first and foremost.
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But the developments of the past few days have posed question marks over the longer term plan for Liverpool under FSG at a time when the US interest from private equity funds is booming across European football, demonstrated by the immense interest in Chelsea when they were put up for sale, eventually sold for £2.5bn and a further £1.75bn commitment to infrastructure to a US consortium featuring Todd Boehly, Clearlake Capital and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss.
US private equity have viewed the market trends of English football as having plenty of runway left to travel, with some investors believing the Premier League to be heavily under monetised and some years back from where the likes of the NFL finds itself. There is a belief that valuations will continue to rise in the coming years, although given the sheer scale of the rise among the big six teams in English football's top tier over the past decade it may well be at a slower rate.
FSG acquired Liverpool in a distressed state after the near ruinous regime of Tom Hicks and George Gillett took them to the brink of administration. Bought for £300m it is an asset that has risen by 1,100 per cent in value, a remarkable return that has piqued the interest of investment funds, family offices and independent wealth from across the globe whenever a 'big six' side hits the market.
Liverpool may not be on the market per se, but their openness in accepting interest from would-be buyers is telling, and according to one industry expert makes sense.
Stefan Szymanski has for more than 20 years been a renowned voice in the world of the economics of football.
The Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan has authored many books on the subject, from the lauded 'Soccernomics', to 'Money and Football', to 'Playbooks and Checkbooks'.
FSG chief and Liverpool's principal owner John Henry was a fan of Szymanski's work, particularly 'Soccernomics', a book he co-wrote with award-winning author Simon Kuper. In fact, Henry liked it so much he provided a written recommendation of 'Money and Football' that appears on the back of the book.
Szymanski believes that the timing makes sense for Henry to think about cashing his chips.
"I think that it is important to take into account the personality of the owners, and obviously John Henry in this particular case is very significant," Szymanski told the ECHO.
"I think there are a number of reasons why it would make sense for John Henry to get out at this stage. Bear in mind that when he got into this in the first place he knew next to nothing about football, he was not an expert, he is a baseball guy.
"In retrospect he got it for £300m thanks to Tom Hicks and George Gillett screwing up, if they hadn't then it would have sold for closer to £1bn than £300m. That is a big part of all this, he got a bargain.
"The other thing to remember about this is that John Henry isn't a sports guy, he is a trader, he made his money in commodities trading, and commodities trading is all about buy cheap, sell high. He bought cheap and looking at it now he might think that it looks quite high.
"I never think that the bubble is going to burst, I think that is a crazy phrase. The bubble will burst when people decide they are no longer interested in football. I do, though, think that there is reason to think that asset prices may not continue to rise in quite the way that they have done.
"It's reasonable to think that the market price could be somewhere between £3bn and £4bn. The maths is simple, its more than a ten fold increase in a decade, and if you are a trader you might think you've gone as far with it as you can.
"I think you have to give John Henry credit for being shrewd and I think that he has run the club very well and he has brought in some sensible things. What you also might say is that he has reached the limit of what those things can do. He stabilised it, got people to make sensible decisions about buying players and made it a sensible structure. He had some good pieces of luck, think of the Philippe Coutinho transfer, getting Mo Salah, and Jurgen Klopp has been fantastic. Partly that is good decision making and partly it is luck, there are no guarantees around these things.
"Henry might think that he's done the sensible things, ridden his luck, so what happens next? He will probably get unlucky - and what more can he really do?
"Liverpool have done really well but they aren't outperforming the competition when it comes to finances. Manchester City spends more and gets more. Chelsea's performance has been comparable to Liverpool's, albeit spending a bit more, but not vastly more. The real story of the top six is Tottenham spending way less than everybody else and getting good results.
"John Henry hasn't found the philosopher's stone, he hasn't turned straw into gold yet, which it did a little bit at Boston with the Red Sox, they used the data analytics and did win consistently.
"You also have to factor in age. This is an energetic game and he will be thinking about legacy now. He could decide to get out now, at the peak, where asset prices are unlikely to grow as rapidly as they have and he can take his money out. When I first saw the story I felt it made complete sense, it is a completely rational time if you're John Henry to get out of this.
"Liverpool got in John Henry a pretty well structured and organised owner who brought the club back to where it should be. The next owner might be just as good, but you could also get another Hicks and Gillett farce. The risk is all on the Liverpool side."
While there has been a flood of private equity arrive in European football from America over the past year or so, Szymanski believes that the rate of growth in the valuations of teams will begin to slow and that the exit of FSG from European football would send a message to the market over the future prospects.
"Fenway getting out would be a significant signal to the market, it would signal to some that the party was over in some ways," said Szymanski.
"We have seen a lot of investment into Europe, a lot of it from the US and through private equity. It strikes me that a lot of what happened here is part of it pandemic related. The pandemic devastated European football's bottom line, according to UEFA the total lost revenues were in the region of €5bn. That created a huge hole, and if you take a huge hole out of football clubs they are basically bust. They were more or less bust going into COVID.
"That meant that there was an opportunity for the gap to be filled by capital from private equity. People have been coming in and buying assets on the cheap. On the other side of that, private equity has been sitting on a boat load of money because the people who profited from COVID were businesses that had huge handouts, and a lot of that money has gone into private equity. There is a natural marriage between the capital and where the capital is short.
"The whole premise of private equity is go in, hang around five years and get out. Restructure the business, cut costs, refocus on your core activities and then sell out. The problem with that is the economic structure of European football doesn't allow you to do that. What are you going to do to cut costs, sign crap players?
"In the 1990s there were a lot of clubs that floated on the London Stock Exchange because Manchester United had been such a success. Investors thought 'yay, football, this will be a huge success'. It wasn't, Manchester United were exceptional not typical, the typical thing is you spend it all on players. That is what happened and now nearly all those clubs are no longer on the stock exchange.
"What might happen is these private equity guys might go in and in five years time realise that there is no money in it. What that says to me is that the source of this investment will disappear when that realisation sinks in, so the likelihood that American private equity coming in will be a fairly short-lived phenomenon until they learn the lessons that generations have learned going in to football not knowing."
Szymanski believes that the failure of both the European Super League and Project Big Picture to take off in the face of significant opposition will likely be a factor in the thinking of Henry when it comes to FSG's future involvement with Liverpool.
While a contrite Henry was forced into an apology to Liverpool fans for his part in the ESL plot, something which Liverpool have been keen to distance themselves from since despite the continued efforts of Juventus, Barcelona and Real Madrid to keep the idea alive, the failure of Project Big Picture is something that Szymanski believes was taken harder by Henry, with the idea around greater funding for the EFL in exchange for a smaller Premier League, trimmed calendar to allow for more European and exhibition games and special voting rights for the top six being an idea Henry was fully behind.
"John Henry is intentional in his utterances, he knows how not to say things," said Szymanski.
"Looking at the European Super League and Project Big Picture, I think people understate how significant the latter's failure was.
"I think Henry was bitterly disappointed about the failure of that and I think that is where he realised that it was a cultural thing that he couldn't change. He gave an interview where he said he was disappointed about the other owners and their lack of ambition. I took that to be a very revealing statement from him. The fact he felt he was focused on the stars and they were looking in the gutter, that felt like it was kind of a key moment."
So, if FSG were to sell who would be the players in the market?
American investment funds and family offices would be in play in a significant way, but Szymanski doesn't believe that the prospect of sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East would be as prominent as some may think.
"Who do you have left? Bahrain, Kuwait, I don't think Dubai would ever put up for one, so you are running out of those kind of buyers," he said.
"The other option is someone in the Far East. Liverpool is such a big name in East Asia and there are billionaire Indonesians, Malaysians and Singaporeans, it would certainly sell well in that part of the world. It would be reasonable to think there would be a lot of interest."
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