Explained: Bezos, Bhatia, Liverpool’s potential investors and what it means for the club

Talks are progressing between Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG) and a consortium led by Amit Bhatia over a potential significant minority investment in the club.

Bhatia, a former co-owner of Championship side Queens Park Rangers, is joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and co-founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin as part of the group interested in purchasing a stake in the English Premier League side.

The Athletic reported on July 23 that discussions had begun regarding a deal for a stake in the club.

But who are the potential investors? How wealthy are they? And what would it mean for Liverpool?

Who are Bhatia, Bezos and Saverin?

Bezos, 62, is one of the richest people in the world, best known as being the founder of the largest e-commerce company, Amazon.

Bezos launched Amazon from his own garage in 1994 after he had left his role at New York Investment Bank D.E. Shaw, where he had risen to senior vice-president. It was initially an online merchant of books before growing into the global technology company it has become today. He stepped down as the company’s chief executive officer in 2021. Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post and founder of space technology company Blue Origin.

Saverin is best known for co-founding social network site Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg, whom he met when attending Harvard. Born in Brazil, his family emigrated to the United States in 1993.

The 44-year-old moved to Singapore in 2009, renouncing his citizenship in the U.S. prior to the initial public offering of Facebook. Since then, alongside Raj Ganguly, Saverin launched venture fund B Capital in 2015 and the fund has more than $12billion (£9bn) in assets under management.

Bringing all of these resources together is British-Indian millionaire Bhatia. The 46-year-old is a former investment banker who worked for Morgan Stanley, before becoming an entrepreneur. He is chairman of British construction firm Breedon Group, managing director of AyBe Capital Advisors and a founding partner of property investment firm Summix Capital.

He married Vanisha Mittal Bhatia, the daughter of Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, in 2004. Lakshmi Mittal once ranked as high as third in Forbes’ global ranking of billionaires, but most recently sat 73rd with an estimated worth of $31.1bn.

Bhatia announced on July 21 that he was stepping down from the Queens Park Rangers board and transferring his shares in the Championship club to majority owner Ruben Gnanalingam.

Why do Liverpool appeal to already ultra-wealthy buyers?

On the face of it, spending big money on a football club, even one in England, might seem silly. Scarcely any clubs pay dividends; most lose a relative fortune, year after year. Liverpool are an outlier in the latter due in large part to FSG’s savvy financial management, but roughly breaking even hardly sets investor pulses racing.

Yet focusing on the microeconomics of individual club finances when trying to understand the thinking of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) like those now seeking to buy into Liverpool might rather miss the point.

Arjun Nagarkatti, head of private bank, U.S. and Europe international at Deutsche Bank, highlights four unique attributes that are attracting UHNWIs to sports teams.

Sport is, says Nagarkatti, “one of the few asset classes that has a moat against AI (artificial intelligence). For pretty much everything else (UHNWIs) invest in, they are going to have to think about how AI is going to completely disrupt the sector.” AI will have its place in football, particularly in data and analysis, but “in the end, you need people to get onto the field”.

Beyond that, football clubs, and particularly those playing in the high-profile competitions Liverpool compete in, appeal because live sport is one of the only remaining media offerings whereby “people will tune in at a particular time to watch a particular event”. In a world of on-demand television and film, the ability to court so many eyeballs at once is extremely valuable.

So too is a football team’s outlier status in an investment portfolio (and yes, we’re still talking about football clubs here). Nagarkatti highlights how sports teams are “uncorrelated with almost every other asset class you can think of”. If other sectors experience a nosedive, there’s no correlation to the valuation of a sports team — and so no attendant value drop.

Nagarkatti’s fourth and related appealing factor is that the only real correlation seen with sports team valuations is in global growth and wealth: “As we’ve seen wealth grow, you have seen the valuation of these assets grow.” If wider wealth keeps growing, so, says recent history, will the value of sports teams.

A final point, not so widely attributable to sports teams but certainly to a select few, is the scarcity value attached to “blue-chip” teams. As one of the highest-earning and most avidly supported clubs in football, Liverpool fall firmly into that bucket.

Put like that, it is easy to see why even the already wealthy fancy their chances of making money out of an investment like this.

Why is FSG willing to sell a third of Liverpool?

“John Henry (Liverpool’s principal owner) has been very up front about the fact that if there ever was an opportunity for investment that would help the club, then they would seriously consider it,” Liverpool’s chief executive Billy Hogan told The Athletic last month.

It remained consistent with an FSG statement in November 2022 which said “under the right terms and conditions, we would consider new shareholders, if it was in the best interests of Liverpool as a club”.

FSG has shown in recent years it will welcome outside investment either in the parent company or Liverpool. In March 2021, RedBird Capital Partners invested around $735m to acquire an 11.5 per cent stake in FSG, helping stabilise finances after the Covid pandemic.

Over two years later, Dynasty Equity acquired a roughly three per cent stake in the club, based on how much of the money flowed directly into Liverpool’s coffers, for just under $150m. The investment was used to cover costs of the Anfield Road Stand redevelopment and the repurchasing of Melwood training ground, which became the home of the club’s women’s team, as well as repaying a tranche of bank debt.

Even if the potential percentage stake is significantly higher and close to the 30 per cent that has been reported, it would still leave FSG in control, but it would now have more people to potentially carry the burden of continuing to grow the business.

There is the point, too, that every investment has its own lifespan.

Deutsche Bank’s Nagarkatti, while not speaking about the specifics of this deal or on what FSG’s overriding motive in selling a stake might be, highlights that any investor has to choose when is “a good time to monetise their asset”. It is a consideration which spans all asset classes including, given its continually increasing wealth, football.

In this case, FSG has been at Anfield for a decade and a half, overseen significant on-field success and huge value appreciation off it. Selling a large minority stake now will generate a huge return for the group.

Would this bolster them financially going forward?

Since purchasing Liverpool in October 2010, FSG has used a self-sustaining model to run the club. All of the money generated is reinvested. While it has been a point of frustration at times when supporters have felt the owners have failed to capitalise on Liverpool being in a position of strength, it is a model that has worked, with the club returning to the top of the domestic game and competing for the biggest trophies.

Having a consortium full of very wealthy people investing in the club should, in theory, strengthen Liverpool’s financial position further.

It could open up new sponsorship avenues which would further enhance the significant revenues the club is generating season upon season. Last summer they showed a willingness to invest heavily in the playing squad, and under the new squad cost ratio rules that are replacing profit and sustainability rules, it could enhance their power in the transfer market.

As outlined above, the investment by Dynasty conferred direct funding from Liverpool’s shareholders for the first time in almost a decade, with £146.5m of cash flowing in across the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons.

Much of that was used to pay for infrastructure works, and it is extremely unlikely that whatever sum a large minority stake brings would be ploughed directly into the club, not least because football’s financial rules have reduced the efficacy of owners pouring big sums in. But the arrival of a well-backed minority partner may see a shift in owner funding for a business model that has, for the most part, been self-sustaining under FSG.

Does it mean a majority sale to this consortium makes sense in the future?

It is understandable that this development raises questions about the long-term future of FSG as Liverpool’s owners.

The club are in a strong financial position, announcing record revenues of over £700m and ranking fifth in the Deloitte Football Money League — the highest-placed Premier League team — so new investment is not a necessity.

It would be slightly odd, though, if this consortium would invest so heavily and in such a large minority stake that they would not want to have some say in how the club is being run.

Liverpool are at something of a crossroads, too. Nobody would have envisaged that would be the case when Arne Slot led them to their 20th league title in 2025, before the club spent close to £450m in the following summer transfer window, their biggest single-season investment in players.

Since then, the club have regressed on the pitch. A new head coach, Andoni Iraola, is in the dugout and some of the key senior figures at the club have or are departing. It was announced in July that Michael Edwards had stepped away from his role as FSG’s CEO of football, while Liverpool’s sporting director Richard Hughes is set to join Saudi club Al Hilal following the end of this transfer window.

Just how wealthy are Bhatia, Bezos and Saverin?

According to Forbes’ ‘Real Time Net Worth’, Bezos sits third behind Elon Musk and one of the co-founders of Google, Larry Page. It says the 62-year-old has a net worth of $280.6bn.

At 65th on the list is Bhatia’s father-in-law Lakshmi Mittal — the head of the Mittal family — with a net worth of $33.6bn, while two places below him is Saverin with a net worth of $33bn.

Have any of them been involved in sport before?

Bhatia is leading the consortium and has been the most involved in sport of any of the three, having only ended his near 19-year tenure with Queens Park Rangers last month. Bhatia’s association with the London club began in 2007 as the representative of his father-in-law, after he bought a shareholding alongside co-owners Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore. He served as vice-chairman until 2018, before becoming chairman, a role he held until 2023.

Bhatia’s brother-in-law Aditya Mittal is now the CEO of the family steel business. He recently invested $1bn in private-equity firm boss Bill Chisholm’s takeover of basketball’s Boston Celtics. Earlier this year the family also ventured into the cricket scene when they purchased 75 per cent of Indian Premier League side Rajasthan Royals for $1.65bn.

For Saverin, this would not be his first attempt to venture into football ownership, as he was part of the consortium that backed former Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca’s bid to buy Chelsea in 2022 from Roman Abramovich. The Russian billionaire sold the club after being put under pressure to do so from the UK government following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Bezos has yet to step into the sports investment world either, but he has looked at the possibility of buying NFL franchises, having explored making an offer for the Washington Commanders and the Seattle Seahawks.

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