The difficult start to the Premier League season and the perceived lack of underinvestment in the first team compared to their biggest rivals means that the ownership at Liverpool have been feeling some heat.
While social media should seldom be used as a barometer for the opinions of entire fan bases, the tough start to the campaign for Jurgen Klopp and his men, one that has been born from midfield struggles that many understandably feel should have been addressed in the summer transfer window and even before that, Fenway Sports Group 's approach has come into the cross-hairs of some Reds fans once again.
While last season saw the Reds come within a whisker of achieving football's Holy Grail of the quadruple, with Liverpool beaten in the final of the Champions League and 15 minutes away from winning the Premier League to go with their FA Cup and League Cup successes, for some it was a season achieved in spite of the owners, not because of.
READ MORE: FSG facing up to unthinkable Liverpool reality unless there is a serious re-think of strategy
READ MORE: Jurgen Klopp has already told FSG what they must do to really help Liverpool
FSG's ownership of the club has long been divisive. What was once seen as the blueprint for how ownership should approach the transfer market, where the focus on data and finding undervalued players yet to hit their ceiling as opposed to simply deficit financing the acquisition of players and inflating the market year after year, is now seen by some as an exercise in penny pinching, a model unable to keep pace with the spending power of clubs owned by countries.
The arguments against FSG's more recent past have their merits, especially as they continue, and likely will forever more, remain on thin ice after the club's part in the failed European Super League plot. The club haven't been bold enough at some points in terms of pressing home their advantage, and a lack of activity in at least two windows means that succession planning has stuttered somewhat and the transition to a new era has not been as smooth as it maybe should have been.
It is those issues where the focus should really lie, and where it is fair to lay some blame at the door of ownership for their inaction in those moments. But when it comes to the financial health of the club, in a landscape of a sport where teams tend to haemorrhage money, the football club is in an undeniably better position that what it was when it was acquired back on 2010, sitting on the precipice of administration following the near ruinous regime of Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
The club was purchased for £300m and has now grown in value to some £3.5bn. That value growth is seen by some as being enough for ownership to sell up and ship out, with the recent defeats to Nottingham Forest and Leeds seeing the #FSGOut hashtag trend on Twitter, not for the first time.
This is a testing time for the club at the moment. Achieving a top four spot this season will be a battle, and throwing into that the need to invest considerably in either January or the summer, with the backdrop of no guaranteed Champions League, means that recruitment will provide some challenges. With Manchester United resurgent and Newcastle United flexing their muscles, and having the backing to do far more in order to disrupt the established order of things, the next 12 months or so will be crucial to how the medium to long term pans out.
Football may seem to be scrambling to those with unlimited wealth continue financing the continually astronomical transfer fees and wages, but there is little appetite for those in charge of the biggest six clubs in the most watched sporting league on the planet to part company with their assets.
Roman Abramovich was forced into selling Chelsea, the Glazers don't want to part with Manchester United despite numerous offers, and neither did Stan Kroenke when presented with an offer from Daniel Ek, the founder of streaming giant Spotify. FSG also have no intention of parting company with Liverpool.
Liverpool is FSG's most valuable sports team, while the 2002 acquisition of the Boston Red Sox may have been something of a beach head, the purchase of the Reds has become core to their business, one that has now grown into a $10bn empire that also includes the Pittsburgh Penguins NHL team and is likely to see an NBA expansion franchise added in Las Vegas in the next couple of years.
While FSG are helmed by John Henry and Tom Werner, two men in their 70s, the play at FSG is for the very long term across their assets. There is a reason why US investors are flooding the Premier League and European football with capital in recent times, it is because they realise the value proposition of a market that, while in the UK we may see as being at the limit of what it could achieve, is actually seen as being two decades behind American sports' biggest league, and with a far greater slice of the global audience.
Speaking at the Sportico Invest in Sports conference in New York last week, where the ECHO were in attendance, Chelsea co-owner Behdad Eghbali said: "Fenway with Liverpool and the Abu Dhabi group with Manchester City have done it well but for the most part these opportunities have not been optimised.
" European football is probably 20 years behind US sports in terms of sophistication on the commercial side and sophistication on the data side.
"Cumulative market cap uses the Forbes value of NFL teams, and that is probably $150bn-$155bn.
"The Premier League, France, La Liga, Serie A, it's about $30bn-$35bn with fan bases of maybe four billion globally compared to maybe 200m, and that's being generous, for the NFL - talk about a league and a sport that is optimised. Clearly a four billion fan base on a cumulative market cap of maybe $30bn and cumulative media revenues of $5bn-$6bn against 20 for the NFL on a 200m fan base. There is a tremendous upside."
Premier League teams have real scarcity value. Promotion and relegation doesn't exist in American sport, meaning that there is greater cost certainty for owners, something that drives the valuations of teams, which are valued on multiple of revenues of around seven or eight times in the US compared to two, three or four in the Premier League. Teams that are deemed relegation proof, of which the 'big six' most certainly are, carry an even greater scarcity value for would-be owners.
Playing an active role in growing these teams as leagues to bring them closer to where the US sporting eco-system lies is something that offers a tremendous opportunity for investors, and with FSG viewed stateside as one of the leaders in the sports ownership field globally, the bigger picture will not be lost on them.
In March of 2021 FSG sold 11 per cent of the firm to Gerry Cardinale's RedBird Capital Partners in a $750m deal.
New York-based RedBird, who took over a AC Milan in September, have a track record of being business builders and partnering with rights holders, having stakes in the likes of the YES Network that broadcasts New York Yankees games regionally in the US, Skydance Media, the Wasserman media agency and having helped build successful, scalable businesses such as On Location and Legends, the latter a a food, beverage, merchandise, retail, hospitality and stadium operations firm that has taken off on a global scale.
Tapping into the expertise of RedBird is something that FSG wanted to do to help them grow the value of the business as a whole an their individuals assets. It is a plan for the long term and one where Liverpool remain core.
Speaking at the Sportico summit, Cardinale said: "Each of these markets in Europe are their own eco-systems and guys like us can do our job in those eco-systems specific to the parameters of those eco-systems.
"One of the things I am increasingly interested in is this growing divergence between the English Premier League and the rest of the leagues on the continent. In the old days everyone in the US talked about media and how media was the silver bullet to drive value for all these teams, and the business of sports over here is the pace card for the rest of the world and goes way beyond that facile notion that media is going to be the silver bullet to buy down your over payment on one of these teams.
"Over there it is still really media. They haven't figured out how to monetise the live event, a lot of the infrastructure needs to be redeveloped. All of the stuff we take for granted over here gives you a pathway to work your way into the money on and over or by a full value payment in becoming a rights holder. As someone who just put a lot of money into Serie A with AC Milan is that disparity that is really driven by media. There is a three-to-one disparity between Serie A and the English Premier League. Why is that? There is a huge opportunity there.
"As a relatively new entrant into European football I can't for the life of me understand how you can have the world's most popular sport and not have the world's biggest economy in that sport, in the global system.
"When you start looking a major structural changes that guys like us could be positive catalysts for as responsible participants, that is really interesting to me. At some point you run out of things to do, so maybe one of the things we can set our eyes on is each one of us doing our job in a specific asset.
"What is really interesting is while we are doing our job in a specific asset can we be catalysts for structural change at that level, which is very Darwinian and is what needs to happen."
The scarcity value that exists among the big six was seen with the clamour to get hold of Chelsea, when Abramovich's sanctions by the UK government in reaction to his historical ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin forced him to relinquish control and the government stepping in to conduct the sale process.
Eghbali, co-founder of Clearlake Capital, his business partner Jose Feliciano, US entrepreneur Todd Boehly and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss eventually won out, paying £2.5bn initially and committing to another £1.75m to be invested into infrastructure.
The interest that was seen in Chelsea would be amplified further if Liverpool became available for sale, but the reason for that interest is also one of the reasons why there is no desire for FSG to part company with the club, and why major teams in the Premier League seldom come up for sale of an owners' own volition.
Speaking at the Financial Times' US Business of Sport Summit in New York on Wednesday, Colin Neville of the Raine Group, the US firm that was tasked with finding a buyer for Chelsea, said: "When we sold Chelsea earlier this year we had people from six out of the seven continents, all the continents besides Antarctica, looking to buy the club.
"We had some of the richest people in the world and in countries that would surprise a lot of people.
"In respect to assets like Chelsea there is a world of have and have not in the Premier League. There are six power clubs that really don't come up for sale, and several of them are owned by countries at this point. That deal was partially situation specific because it was Chelsea, in London, hadn't been sold for 20 years had this history of incredible success on the pitch.
"The broader situation due to the Ukraine situation created an intensity like I have never seen in my career, and hope to never see again. Once these one of a kind, once in a lifetime kind of assets come up there will be a tremendous amount of interest.
"These are global businesses.
"These are still under-monetised leagues. The Premier League is still the biggest league and the biggest sport in the world and it is significantly under-monetised relative to what it should be."
Liverpool have not reached their ceiling yet, and the Premier League, while some may have predicted the bubble to burst long ago, still has a lot of runway to travel down yet.
READ NEXT:
-
Liverpool have run out of excuses and it is very obvious who is to blame for current plight
-
'Really poor' - Jason McAteer launches staunch defence of FSG after fresh Liverpool blow
-
Fabinho fumes with Jurgen Klopp as Liverpool team-mate involved in touchline altercation
-
Jurgen Klopp addresses 'major overhaul' question after Liverpool suffer shock Leeds loss
-
Jamie Carragher labels Liverpool man a 'ghost' and slams 'absolutely stupid' decision
