One of Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group's major investors says there is no conflict between his company's stake in FSG and its holding in the global talent agency Wasserman Media Group.
RedBird Capital Partners took an 11% stake in FSG - and, ergo, a stake in Liverpool - back in April of last year.
The $750m deal saw the company become the third largest shareholders in the Reds' owners.
A month before the deal with FSG was clinched, RedBird acquired a '30 to 40%' minority stake in Wasserman, one of the world's biggest talent agencies that looks after musicians such as Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, and a multitude of sports stars, including footballers such as Liverpool duo Curtis Jones and Joe Gomez, Manchester City's Aymeric Laporte, Borussia Dortmund's Giovanni Reyna and Real Madrid's Federico Valverde, among many others.
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But Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird, has insisted that there is no conflict of interest between the two and that it would not be used to provide any influence on what happens in FSG's teams, which includes the Boston Red Sox baseball team and Pittsburgh Penguins NHL team, as well as Liverpool.
Speaking in an interview with the Boston Globe, Cardinale, asked specifically about the link with the Red Sox, said: "There’s adjacency issues that you need to sort of work through, which we did, but the reality is, there’s no issue there – if I need to recuse myself in something, it’s fine, it’s not a big deal.
"Anybody with common sense would tell you that I’m not involved at all in trades, I’m not interested in being an agent.
"I’m not going to sit here and tell Chaim Bloom (Red Sox general manager) who to trade for or anything else."
RedBird and FSG have been in partnership for almost a year.
The first year saw the capital injection aid investment into infrastructure and acquisition, with FSG finalising a deal to purchase the Penguins, the NHL team with a valuation of around $900m.
It was a deal that pushed FSG's value as a sporting empire to close on $10bn, making it the third largest sporting empire in world sport, according to Forbes magazine, behind only Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke's Kroenke Group, which also owns the LA Rams NFL franchise and Denver Nuggets NBA team, and Formula One owners Liberty Media.
RedBird were erroneously linked with a move to buy Chelsea over the weekend, something that sources told the ECHO was categorically not on the agenda.
Instead, the New York-based firm is focused on a long-term strategy with FSG that includes looking at acquiring an NBA team as well as more football teams, and potentially an NFL franchise in the future.
