Liverpool manager Roy Hodgson welcomed the club’s potential new American takeover as a positive move yesterday and pleaded for patience from the fans as he tries to turn around problems on the pitch.
Liverpool said on Wednesday they had accepted a ￡300 million (US$477.6 million) offer from New England Sports Ventures (NESV), who also own the Boston Red Sox baseball team, although the deal is still subject to a legal challenge as well as approval from the Premier League.
“It’s very positive and of course I’m delighted,” Hodgson told the club’s Web site. “It’s been going on a long time and I know how hard the board have worked to set things up. I know it’s not easy for them because the owners have other ideas in terms of the sale of the club and what is achievable, but I was delighted to hear the news and have it confirmed that it looks like it is going to go through.”
While the board wrestles with the financial issues, Hodgson, who replaced Rafa Benitez this season, has to address the club’s worst start for decades.
They are currently third-last in the standings with just six points from seven games having lost at home to Blackpool last weekend. They were also knocked out of the League cup by League Two Northampton Town and have made a limp start to their Europa League campaign.
“Unfortunately when you lose matches, especially games like Sunday that people don’t expect you to lose, it colors everything,” Hodgson said. “It comes on the back of a [League] Cup defeat, albeit with a second team, so that adds to the woe — but in actual fact not much has changed.”
“We know what we’ve got to do, we know we need some new players, we know we need investment and we know we are weak in certain areas of the team — these things have been the case since I arrived at the club and we haven’t had chance to put things right,” he said.
“What I ask of the fans is their patience, their trust and their belief, because we will get it right — there are no doubts about that,” he sai. “The club will be in a pretty healthy situation in general terms if the sale goes through.”
MYSTERY MAN
John W Henry prefers to fly below the radar, but the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team has an attention-grabbing track record both on and off the field to warm the hearts of concerned Liverpool soccer fans.
While the board of England’s most successful club has agreed to sell Liverpool to Henry’s New England Sports Ventures (NESV), the deal’s completion could be held up in court because of a legal challenge from its current owners.
Until then, Liverpool backers can only wonder what changes the media-shy Henry and his group might bring to improve the fortunes of the Premier League team off to their worst start to a season in more than 50 years.
While Henry, 61, could not be reached to comment, NESV promised to bring back Liverpool’s winning culture, and sports bankers, soccer executives, officials in the futures trading sector and friends said Liverpool fans should celebrate.
“What this group did with a legendary franchise, the Red Sox, which was moribund when they bought it ... from a business perspective they’ve done a superb job,” said Dave Checketts, owner of the Major League Soccer (MLS) club Real Salt Lake, as well as the NHL St Louis Blues, said at the Leaders in Football conference in London.
“From a PR perspective — -superb — and they got success on the field. They’ll repeat the model at Liverpool,” he said.
Born in Quincy, Illinois, Henry, who built his fortune as a futures trader, has loved baseball since childhood, crunching stats for his boyhood favorite St Louis Cardinals because he could not wait for the Sunday paper, said John Damgard, president of the Futures Industry Association and a guest at Henry’s wedding last summer.
NUMBER-LOVER
“His love of numbers came from his fascination with baseball,” said Damgard, who believes Henry will turn Liverpool into the toast of English soccer within three years.
He may not relish talking to the media, but Henry is not slow to interact with the fans.
“I love to listen to and interact with fans,” Henry said in a rare comment on the Red Sox media guide. “Perhaps not every fan can identify with me, but I think I can identify with most of them.”
Henry held a minority stake in the New York Yankees and owned the Florida Marlins before leading a group that purchased the Red Sox in 2002 for a then league-record US$700 million.
Two years later, the Sox won their first title in 86 years, breaking a storied curse that fans said had haunted the team since their sale of baseball great Babe Ruth to the rival the Yankees after a World Series title in 1918. Another championship was won in 2007.
That kind of success will carry across the Atlantic, Robert Reynolds, chief executive of Putnam Investments, said at an event in Boston to announce a sports sponsorship.
“The skill set you need to run a professional sports franchise, whether it’s soccer, football or baseball, is the same,” he said.
Henry came by his skills early. After a stint trying to outsmart the Las Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables, he became interested in analyzing futures markets when he inherited the family farm at age 26.
He developed his firm’s trends-following algorithms and rode them to great success.
In a profile last year, Boston Magazine described Henry as “often up until 3am, checking the Japanese markets, strategizing with Sox GM Theo Epstein or playing with his iRacing simulator, which mimics the cars of his Roush Fenway NASCAR team.”
PROFESSIONALS
It is that focus to detail that has made Henry and his partners successful, said Randy Vataha, president of sport investment bank Game Plan LLC.
“They’ve done as good a job in professional sports as anybody has ever done,” Vataha said. “They took the Red Sox, certainly a good franchise, and made it into a real business, plus more competitive and professional.”
NESV not only owns the Red Sox, but its historic home field of Fenway Park, an 80 percent stake in a successful regional sports TV network, a 50 percent stake in NASCAR’s Roush Fenway Racing team, a sales and marketing firm that serves other sports properties and more.
Forbes this year ranked the Red Sox and Roush Fenway as the second most valuable teams in their sports at US$840 million and US$238 million, respectively, while estimating the baseball team was the league’s second most profitable.
A deal earlier this year by New York Times Co to sell a 1.2 percent stake in NESV for a reported US$14 million set an enterprise value for the company at about $1.2 billion.
However, if NESV were sold in one piece it would likely draw bids of US$1.6 billion to US$1.7 billion, one sports banker said.
Red Sox fans, known affectionately as Red Sox Nation, have certainly been won over by Henry as his group has poured more than US$200 million into making ageing Fenway more fan friendly.
Not everything Henry has touched has always turned to gold, however, as a lack of clear trends in recent years has led to weaker returns at his futures trading firm John W. Henry & Co in Florida.
After estimating Henry’s net worth at US$1.1 billion early last year, Forbes did not rank him among the world’s billionaires this year.
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