Having been the target of boos among some of the Boston Red Sox fans who had gathered at Fenway Park to watch the NHL Winter Classic between the Boston Bruins and the Pittsburgh Penguins earlier this week, the ire directed at John W. Henry and his Fenway Sports Group organisation was palpable.
FSG, owners of Liverpool, the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Penguins, among other business interests, have been feeling the heat on both sides of the Atlantic for what has been a perceived lack of investment at key times that had now led to poor performance.
Liverpool's need for midfield reinforcements to aid their vital assault on the top four and success in the Champions League had seen the calls grown for FSG to either spend or leave, while the same calls were being heard in Boston where the loss of cornerstone franchise players Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts over the past two years, and inactivity during free agency this winter, had seen Red Sox fans demand that action be taken.
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On Wednesday it was announced, officially, that Rafael Devers, one of the Red Sox's stars who had been rumoured to be on his way as his contract ran down and headed towards free agency, had inked a new one-year deal with the team at a value of around $17.5m. The reason for that was to avoid arbitration and allow for the Red Sox to have more time to negotiate with the 26-year-old Dominican third baseman, a two-time All Star.
But just hours after that announcement, which was not well received on social media, news broke via multiple outlets in the US that Devers and the Red Sox had come to a longer term arrangement, the biggest in the team's history.
According to reports in the US from various outlets, FSG have sanctioned an 11-year deal for Devers worth a whopping $331m (£275.2m) to keep him in Boston for the best years of his career. The deal has not yet been officially confirmed but when confirmation is forthcoming it would be the sixth largest deal in Major League Baseball history and the biggest ever struck by the Red Sox.
There have been similarities with what has been happening for FSG in European football and baseball, where the self-sustaining model that had been so lauded during the height of Liverpool's dominance of European football from late 2018 through to mid 2020 had now been met with huge financial challenges when it came to replacing the players who had delivered such value for money. The transfer market has become the Wild West, the fees ever more exorbitant and the demand from fans of all teams to continually spend growing year after year. While there is still a desire to seek value in their recruitment there is the almost inescapable fact that Liverpool will have to become part of the rat race if they are to maintain their competitiveness.
The same can be said for what is happening in baseball. The Devers deal is Boston's only appearance in the top 10 of the biggest deals struck, and for a team that is one of the most storied and financially successful in baseball, that does not sit well.
Of the 10 most expensive deals struck in MLB history, all but one was post 2019, with five of them agreed in the past 12 months. It is a market that hasn't seen slowed growth in the rise of payroll post pandemic, but in a sport that is facing a struggle to maintain the eyeballs of the next generation, the extra cost for paying for the biggest and best players creates an added burden on team owners and reduces the margins for profit.
A move to keep Devers won't mend relations between FSG and Red Sox fans, but it will at least show a commitment to the team's future and one of the key things fans wanted to see, a career Red Sox player locked down for the duration, come to pass.
FSG, while open to listening to major offers above and beyond $4bn for Liverpool, are leaning towards a partial sale of the club to provide some scalable capital to invest into the team and into other areas of growth opportunity and infrastructure. The stewardship of FSG at Anfield looks set to continue for a little while yet, and if that is to be the case then Liverpool fans will be expecting that the same approach that has just been taken in Boston is taken in Liverpool, and that money is found to make the kind of long-term investment into the playing squad that the Reds require.
To put it into perspective, the Red Sox delivered $479m (£398.2m) in revenue in 2022, while Liverpool are set to post revenues in excess of £600m, according to predictions by analysts at football business website Off The Pitch. A deal at that level for Devers would cost around £25m per year for the Red Sox. For arguments sake, a move for a £100m player for Liverpool, with wages of £250,000 per week over six years, with the transfer fee amortised for accounting purposes, would come out at around £32m for Liverpool.
FSG have made a commitment to making the Red Sox competitive in handing Devers such a big deal. The same commitment will now be expected at Liverpool, whether it be this window or in the summer, although the need for it being the former grows greater with each passing week if the desire to make the top four and continue to tap into the £100m-plus bounty that the Champions League can offer annually.
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