Liverpool are looking irresistible again.
The disappointment of last season's failure to mount any kind of serious title defence and have to pull their season from the fire in the final months before nailing down Champions League football seems a long way away now.
The weekend couldn't have been any sweeter for the Reds. A second-half rally to claim three massive points with a 3-1 win having trailed at home to Norwich City was followed by late drama at the Etihad Stadium as Tottenham Hotspur stunned Premier League leaders Manchester City deep in stoppage time to claim a 3-2 win over Pep Guardiola's side.
For Jurgen Klopp and his men it put them right back into the title race. Six points behind, a game in hand and all the parts working in perfect harmony, allied to the superb start made by Luis Diaz to his Liverpool career, Harvey Elliott returning to the fold sooner than expected and Thiago Alcantara looking like the finest midfielder in Europe at present have made for a remarkable few weeks for the Reds.
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Liverpool and City's duel for the title will be what consumes the watching world in the coming months. The power of the Premier League's global appeal, and why its next cycle of media rights will be worth more than £10bn, is predicated on the league being the biggest and the best. In Klopp vs Guardiola they have the battle that the audiences crave; in Liverpool and Manchester City they have the two best teams in world football vying for the crown.
This, and the fact that Liverpool are going great guns in the Champions League and still have the FA Cup and Carabao Cup - the final on Sunday - in their sights means that the Reds are at the peak of their powers, something that has been even more impressive given the month that they had to do without the services of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Naby Keita due to their involvement in the African Cup of Nations.
The Reds were active players in the January transfer window with the addition of the exciting Diaz, with the only issue that remains outstanding in terms of providing Reds fans with utopia is Salah's contract situation getting sorted out in a timely fashion.
From a competitive standpoint, all is well. And from a commercial standpoint, the success that is being enjoyed now will provide a major boon to the club's ability to drive forward revenues, not to mention the prize money that comes with success in the Premier League and Champions League.
Manchester City last month revealed their financial accounts for the 2020/21 financial year, their £569.8m in revenues outstripping their rivals Manchester United for the first time and being some £37m higher than Liverpool's best-ever revenue result that arrived on the back of the Champions League victory in 2019.
The Citizens' ability to drive revenues forward has been aided in no small part by their successful commercial operation that has benefited from a simpatico relationship between the club's owners and big business in the United Arab Emirates. Finding a way to try and keep up with that growth is the challenge that Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group face.
The ownership models of the two clubs are very different, that is well known. Liverpool are a club who use success to leverage their position when it comes to growing revenues, operating more within the confines of traditional business, while City's owners have been content to absorb losses in a bid to create a global football club and ownership group in City Football Group.
Prior to the release of the 2020/21 City accounts, which Liverpool have yet to publish, Liverpool had made an economic profit of £21.5m over the past five years, one of only two Premier League clubs to do so, the other being Burnley.
For Man City their economic loss stood at £403.2m, according to Vysyble.
Economic profit and loss is the method used by financial analysts Vysyble when measuring the financial performance of a business and is different to the commonly used metric of EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation).
The formula for working out economic profit and loss is taking the net operating profit figure and subtracting all of the capital invested into the business. Until a business turns a profit greater than the cost of its capital then it is a business that runs at a loss.
But City's heavy investment has finally reached the point where revenue generation is starting to be able to sustain the major spend. And it is their ability to spend more than their rivals that has been a bug bear of their Premier League rivals, who have had to find different ways to try and keep pace.
City Football Group and FSG will always have a different approach as to how they invest into first team affairs in their respective football clubs. But for FSG, having ridden the impact of the pandemic better than European clubs due to their more reserved strategy, raising revenues will go hand in hand with spending more money on investing into the first team, something that will be a focus over the next 12 to 18 months as the Reds seek to make changes to an ageing side without upsetting the harmony and knocking them out of their stride.
The resurgence this season after the disappointment of last has come at the right time for the Reds.
The world is recovering from the impact of the pandemic and football has welcomed back fans and the appetite for it is as great as it ever was. The fact that media rights rose to the dizzying levels of more than £10bn following the biggest healthcare crisis in a century where the sport was facing an existential crisis is an example of that.
Liverpool's deal with Nike officially started during the middle of a pandemic, where retail outlets globally were shuttered for months on end and the physical experience of football was a memory for a good while as games were played out in empty stadiums.
Big businesses were facing issues of their own and commercial revenues for clubs were threatened.
But as football comes out of the pandemic there are plentiful opportunities, particularly for the likes of Liverpool. The Reds are only matched by Manchester United when it comes to global appeal for English clubs, and with United, as well as Real Madrid and Barcelona not holding the lustre they once did there is a real opportunity to make further gains.
The Nike deal, worth £30m guaranteed annually but with 20 per cent of the sales of Nike/Liverpool merchandise heading back to the Reds means that the ceiling is pretty limitless. The more appealing the club, the bigger the success they are on the pitch correlates with more money made from merchandising, and with Nike now looking at selling products virtually through the 'metaverse', Liverpool have a lot more possibilities.
Then comes their ability to drive up existing deals.
Standard Chartered have been the club's main front of shirt sponsor for the past 12 years but the current £40m per year deal is set to finish at the end of the 2022/23 season.
That will put plenty of big businesses on alert. There are few more valuable marketing spaces than the front of shirt of one of the world's most recognisable football clubs, and if that global appeal that already exists is being matched with success on the pitch it makes them a hugely appealing property, meaning that they will undoubtedly smash their current £40m per year deal then when it ends. Whether Standard Chartered remain or a new party comes on board remains to be seen.
Success is vital to Liverpool's business model, and in order to achieve success there has to be investment in the product that delivers it. The Reds have returned themselves to among the very elite of world football and with the strength of the media rights deal and the turmoil that giants like Barcelona face for some seasons to come means that selling their assets to fund heavy investment can't be relied on as it once was, and that is where other revenue streams will need to pick up to help meet those ambitions and expectations.
FSG are now the third biggest sporting empire in the world, worth more than $9bn, according to Forbes magazine's 2022 list.
While their Boston roots might make the Boston Red Sox the club with which they are most synonymous, it is Liverpool who have become the crown jewel and most valuable asset. The success that the Reds are enjoying make them an even more appealing partner for firms than they were before. For the Reds and FSG, the timing of their resurgence couldn't really be any better.
