If you were to ask some of the heavy hitters in the US sports investment industry to name the best in class over the past 20 years then the likelihood is that the answer that the overwhelming majority would choose the same name.
Fenway Sports Group, owners of Liverpool, the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins and numerous other sporting and real estate businesses, have for a long time been seen as the 'smartest guys in the room' when it comes to how to own and operate sporting teams.
John W. Henry has had a fascination for the use of data, something described in Seth Mnookin's insider novel 'Feeding the Monster' as an almost 'religious belief'. That belief saw him pursue the 'Moneyball' technique that Billy Beane pioneered at the Oakland Athletics (Henry's attempts to lure Beane to Boston depicted in the 2011 Hollywood film of the same name starring Brad Pitt), as FSG went about transforming a distressed asset that had become something of a museum to baseball history, not winning a World Series since 1918.
