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Liverpool put up for sale by FSG.

The owners of Liverpool, Fenway Sports Group (FSG) have put the club up for sale.

A completed sales presentation has been produced and is available to interested parties.

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FSG have owned Liverpool since 2010, when they bought the club from Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr., and have overseen an era of success since Jurgen Klopp was appointed manager in 2015.

They won the Champions League, clinched their first Premier League title in 30 years, and have also captured the FA Cup, League Cup, and the Club World Cup title.

Furthermore, they have made significant investments in their Anfield Stadium, which will eventually have a capacity of 61,000.

Although FSG have largely been good owners for the club, there is a growing feeling that they have now taken things as far as they can, and that they cannot compete with the level of backing that teams like Manchester City, PSG and, more recently, Newcastle United enjoy, who are funded by nation states and their Petrodollars.

Liverpool have effectively operated a self-sustaining business model under their stewardship, famously, for example, using the money raised from the sale of Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona to fund the purchase of Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker, two players credited with transforming them into a title winning team.

But without a similar asset available to sell this summer, they did not provide Jurgen Klopp with the backing that he might have wanted in the transfer market, much to his frustration and some of the club’s supporters.

That is one of the reasons why they are having an indifferent Premier League season – by their own very high standards.

At the same time, FSG were never in it for the long haul, and they always had an exit strategy in mind. Given the prices paid for some clubs recently, now might be as good a time to cash in as any.

Recently, the club has been valued at £3.6 billion by Forbes, more than ten times what they paid for it in the first place, making it an outstanding investment.

In the interim, they have said that they are looking for minority investors, although they are not naïve enough to believe that anybody would pay significant amounts of money for something that does not give them meaningful control.

At this early stage, there appear three early candidates to buy the club.

The first is RedBird Capital Partners, an investment vehicle that already owns a 10% minority stake in the club. Their owner Gerry Cardinale has already indicated they would be interested in buying the rest of the club if it ever became available.

And then there is Sir Martin Broughton, who was briefly Liverpool chairman back in 2010 and was part of a consortium that tried to buy Chelsea earlier this year. He might well be interested in putting together a similar group of investors to buy his old club.

Another buyer from the Middle East cannot be discounted either. Current oil prices mean that there are more than a few sheikhs with money to burn at the moment.

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