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FSG will be ‘secretly delighted’ as Liverpool using Barcelona as ‘Trojan horse’ in £266m masterplan

Adam Williams

Wed 19 February 2025 17:15, UK

15 years into their reign at Anfield, Fenway Sports Group have turned Liverpool into a monster. The club’s growth as a business has been stratospheric and is showing no sign of slowing.

In 2010 when FSG paid £300m to take over Liverpool, the club was groaning under the weight of debt amassed by the previous owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

The first thing Fenway did was clear the decks, removing the debt burden and promising cultural reforms in both the sporting department and Liverpool’s commercial strategy.

It was a sign of things to come. Under their remote ownership from Boston, Liverpool have always prioritised FSG’s long-term vision over the dopamine hit that expensive, big-name signings deliver.

This is the reason – or at least, one of the reasons – that FSG have been less trigger-happy than many fans would have liked with Mohamed Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk’s contracts.

They are club legends, true, but legendary status isn’t measured on a balance sheet.

FSG’s masterplan is cold, hard capital appreciation, and that means showing restraint in the wage market in order to demonstrate the viability of the business plan.

Cost control has been exemplary, with the wages-to-turnover ratio having been steady at around 65 per cent for years while three-quarters of the Premier League have lost their heads in a recruitment arms race.

Liverpool’s net spend in the FSG era is often held up as an example of a perceived lack of ambition, but their outlay on player wages and fees has risen in line with revenue.

They have more headroom in terms of Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) than virtually every other team in Europe meanwhile and, when market opportunities arise, the owners will strike.

FSG are the most deliberate owners in football and run Liverpool with surgical precision, which has led to a boom in the enterprise value of the club.

By most estimations, the club is now worth north of £4bn. That’s a compound annual growth rate of around 20 per cent – and they have spent next to nothing to achieve it.

FSG have invested around £500m of their own money in the club, although a chunk of that is in the form of low-interest loans that they will one day recoup.

The sale of a minority equity stake – believed to be around five per cent – to Dynasty Equity in 2023 saw FSG recoup in the region of £175m.

However, when it came to the biggest opportunity for overnight capital appreciation, FSG misfired – and badly.

The European Super League, if properly executed, would have transformed Liverpool as a business, turning the club into a US sport-style franchise in a close league where profits were guaranteed.

But the breakaway project, which FSG had been plotting since 2016, was a totally botched and destroyed by the collective will of supporters in L4 and beyond.

It was gratifying to see that, as thick-skinned and dispassionate as billionaire investment groups like FSG can be, they can still be made to yield to pressure from bedrock fans.

But the central aims of Super League are alive and well – and recent news suggests FSG are a step closer to achieving one of their key aims with the project: explosive commercial growth in the United States.

• READ MORE: Sam Allardyce shares what he’s heard about why Liverpool didn’t hire Ruben Amorim

Liverpool and FSG covertly creeping towards matches in the US

In 2023-24, Liverpool’s media income – that’s revenue primarily from the Premier League and UEFA’s TV deals – totalled around £206m.

That is some way off their peak of £266m in 2020-21, although some of the media income that season was deferred from the previous campaign due to Covid.

But they would smash their record if they were to take matches to the United States, as Liverpool chairman Tom Werner has openly said is his aim.

Now, in a move widely seen in the industry as a precursor to moving Champions League matches to THE US, UEFA are set to sell their global commercial rights to the Relevant agency after 30 years with TEAM.

“I suspect the decision the likes of Tom Werner will be secretly delighted with the TEAM decision,” said Liverpool University football finance lecturer Kiernan Maguire, speaking exclusively to TBR Football.

“Managing expectations and the message is going to be the difficult element of this.

“However, I think they will frame this as not wanting to be the first mover but if they can use, say, La Liga as a Trojan horse and say ‘we don’t want to play in the United States but La Liga are doing it and we also don’t want to be left behind.’

“The Premier League are a global brand and they will argue that the fans in the United States deserve to watch Liverpool play there as well.

“The financial benefits are that you can charge the prices that American fans are used to paying.

“You have got to give Liverpool a huge amount of credit for freezing ticket prices for 2025-26 and that decision will not be from FSG side of things – there are many Liverpudlians working at the club who are advocates for the local fanbase.

“Liverpool probably make £4-5m from a home fixture at Anfield. If you’re going to a 60,000-capacity stadium in America, you’re probably talking £10m.

“If it’s just a couple of times per year, you can go into overdrive with merchandise and so on too.”

La Liga have been flirting with the idea of moving some matches to the US for years.

After almost staging Barcelona’s meeting with Atletico Madrid in Miami in December 2024, are set to revisit the idea next term.

• READ MORE: £37m player has told Liverpool he wants to sign a new contract at Anfield urgently

The technology that could eventually spark Liverpool takeover

Most brand experts will tell you that cultivating a club’s global commercial pull is an art, not a science.

That said, the benefits to Liverpool’s global brand of playing in the United States are obvious, even if it would come at the expense of alienating true fans.

However, the owners accept that they cannot simply relocate the club, and the imminent independent football regulator would make that nigh on impossible anyway.

So FSG are looking to tap into new technologies that allow them to tap into their international fanbase remotely, such as immersive reality experiences.

There is a genuine, almost evangelical belief within the sports industry that this is the next revenue plateau for clubs like Liverpool and, in turn, could see their enterprise value soar.

Given that FSG’s long-term ambition is to sell Liverpool for a gargantuan profit, technology could – if you subscribe to the sports business boffins’ view – be the factor that sees them hit ‘exit value’.