Liverpool had only been up for sale for less than a week when the first serious interest in the club arrived in the form of Mukesh Ambani.
Fenway Sports Group announced their intention to look for outside investors on Monday and by Saturday Mirror Football was breaking the news of Ambani’s interest. FSG are understood to want in the region of £4billion to sell the club they purchased for £300m back in October 2010.
Ambani may be the first, but he is very unlikely to be the last person to contact FSG to express an interest in buying the Premier League club. Investors from the Middle East and USA are understood to be considering FSG’s proposal, which in part was prompted by the sale of Chelsea to Todd Boehly’s consortium in May.
Here is everything you need to know about Mukesh Ambani.
Who is Mukesh Ambani?
Ambani is a 65-year-old Indian businessman who lives in Mumbai. He is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, a Fortune 500 company, which has a diverse portfolio of interests.
He studied chemical engineering in Mumbai before dropping out of an MBA course at Stanford University in the United States. He left the USA to help his father develop the family business, which is now booming.
Ambani has a wife and three children and his family live in a private 27-storey building in Mumbai which was one of the most expensive residences in the world when it was built. It requires 600 staff to function and includes three helipads, a 160-car garage, private cinema and swimming pool.
In August Bloomberg reported that Ambani had bought a $80m (£67m) beach-side villa on the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai.
How he made his money
Ambani is extremely rich. Not as wealthy as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Co, but still among the elite of the elite. Ambani has a net worth of around £90billion and is the eighth richest person in the world.
Ambani owes his fortune to Reliance Industries, the family business which was started by his father, Dhirubhai Ambani, back in 1966. What started out as a small textile manufacturer is now a diversified mega-business which spans petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom and retail.
Phone and broadband service Jio is one of the more recent focuses, while Ambani’s company is moving away from fossil fuels and into green energy. In 2019, the company also bought toy retailer Hamleys.
Whatever he is doing, it is working: Ambani has more than doubled his wealth in the past two years, jumping from an estimated $36.8bn (£31bn) in 2020 to his current worth of £90bn.
Cricket is his passion
Ambani is a huge sports fan and cricket – India’s national obsession – is the main outlet for that interest. Reliance Industries own Indian Premier League franchise Mumbai Indians, who have won the IPL a record five times since the league’s inception in 2008.
Ambani is regularly spotted attending matches at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium. The franchise is known as the flashiest of all the IPL teams, with national treasure Sachin Tendulkar on board as a mentor and superstars like Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya in the side.
Previous with Liverpool
This is not the first time Ambani has been linked with Liverpool. Back in 2010, before FSG bought Liverpool from Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Ambani was also interested in buying the club.
Teaming up with fellow Indian billionaire Subrata Roy, Ambani was reportedly willing to pay off Liverpool’s £237m debt in return for a 51 per cent stake in the club. That approach never came to anything, but Ambani is involved in football, and launched the Indian Super League in 2014.
The way the ISL has been criticised in the Indian media, with some feeling the most hasn’t been made of what ex-FIFA president Sepp Blatter's described as the “sleeping giant” of Indian football.
Ambani’s younger brother, Anil Ambani, has twice flirted with buying Newcastle – first in 2008 and again in 2011. A £260m bid in 2008 never materialised, with negotiations with Mike Ashley fizzling out, while another in March 2011 never got going.
That is not where the links with Newcastle end, either. In June, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chief of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – Newcastle’s new owners – joined Ambani’s company as an independent director.
