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One of the great curiosities regarding the state of Premier League ownership will come into focus when Liverpool visit Manchester City on Sunday.
Despite a rivalry that has defined the past decade and has led to both sides’ team coaches being attacked, a £1m legal settlement being paid by Liverpool after City claimed their scouting database had been hacked, and accusations from City officials that Jürgen Klopp had made borderline xenophobic comments about state-backed owners, which the German rejected, the two clubs have more in common than some of their feuding fans may wish to acknowledge.
In 2023 City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, sanctioned a $750m investment in the company that is the third-biggest shareholder in Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group.
RedBird Capital Partners has since 2021 owned 11% of FSG, in which Liverpool’s principal owner, John Henry, is the biggest shareholder with 40%. Mansour’s International Media Investments (IMI) ploughed $750m into RedBird two years later as part of a fundraising drive that delivered $2.5bn to be spent on sport and media assets, with the investment deemed so significant that the fund was renamed RedBird IMI.
The fund was created to specialise in sport and media mergers, and RedBird IMI has spent the past two years in a complex position related to its involvement in the Telegraph Media Group.
The question of why Mansour’s IMI bought into RedBird has yet to be answered in public, as is often the case with Abu Dhabi’s investments. RedBird Capital, founded by the New York-based financier Gerry Cardinale in 2014, has made a series of sports investments in the past five years, snapping up Toulouse in 2020 and buying Milan for $1.2bn from the hedge fund Elliott Management in 2022.
Its $735m investment in FSG was concluded in the spring of 2021 at a time when Liverpool’s owner was looking to stem losses caused by almost 12 months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some of the money is understood to have been used to help fund the £80m redevelopment of the Anfield Road Stand at Liverpool. Later in the year FSG paid $950m to acquire the Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey franchise, adding to a sports portfolio that also includes the Boston Red Sox and various investments in Nascar and golf.
RedBird Capital’s 11% stake gives it little say within the FSG sporting empire, to the extent that it was not involved in a sale process at Liverpool led by the US banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs three years ago, which resulted in FSG selling a small stake to the boutique investment firm Dynasty Equity for £164m.
With IMI owning less than a third of RedBird Capital’s subsidiary funds, sources at Liverpool and City insist Mansour has no influence at Anfield. One source likened the situation to the ownership position at Chelsea, whose majority shareholder, Clearlake Capital, receives a significant part of its funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the owner of Newcastle.
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With private equity firms viewing sports teams as investable assets, such associations between ownership groups are likely to increase, with Liverpool also tangentially linked to two other major European clubs. Another of FSG’s shareholders, the American investment group Arctos Sports Partners, owns minority stakes in Paris Saint-Germain and the Serie A side Atalanta.
Online conspiracy theories notwithstanding, there are no serious suggestions that PIF calls the shots at Stamford Bridge, or that FSG runs PSG. And no one should expect Sheikh Mansour to be wearing a half-and-half City-Liverpool scarf if he tunes in on Sunday.
