Rich to Get Richer: Liverpool Want Own TV

[Macmoish]

Guardian/Andy Hunter

Liverpool threaten breakaway from Premier League's TV rights deal

• Current deal sees top-flight clubs share billions of pounds
• Liverpool's managing director Ian Ayre raises alternative


The deal that shares television's billions equally between Premier League clubs is facing its biggest threat to date after Liverpool announced they would lead a challenge for overseas TV rights to be sold on a club-by-club basis.

Liverpool's managing director, Ian Ayre, has insisted the break-up of the established broadcasting deal, worth £3.2bn in total to all Premier League clubs for 2010‑13, is "a debate that has to happen", with the Anfield club in favour of the Spanish model that allows Barcelona and Real Madrid to negotiate individual contracts that dwarf their domestic and European rivals.

Since the Premier League's foundation in 1992 its success has been largely based on the principle of collective selling, where each club no matter how lowly can expect a fixed share of TV deals with "merit" awards for finishing positions as an add‑on. Changing this model would risk revolt from the smaller clubs who stand to lose most, and thus threatens the league's very structure.

At present, the Premier League sells domestic and overseas broadcasting rights collectively and more than doubled international revenue in its last negotiations, from £625m for 2007‑10 to £1.4bn for 2010‑13. With the Premier League shown in 212 countries and having 98 broadcast partners around the world, it is expected the next deal will show a similar increase, with overseas rights potentially worth more than domestic for the first time.

Ayre believes the Premier League's four biggest global draws – Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal – deserve an increased share from 2013, with overseas broadcasting having a greater influence on the Anfield club's financial future than a new stadium. "Personally I think the game-changer is going out and recognising our brand globally," said the Liverpool managing director. "Maybe the path will be individual TV rights like they do in Spain. There are so many things moving in that particular area.

"What is absolutely certain is that, with the greatest of respect to our colleagues in the Premier League, but if you're a Bolton fan in Bolton, then you subscribe to Sky because you want to watch Bolton. Everyone gets that. Likewise, if you're a Liverpool fan from Liverpool, you subscribe. But if you're in Kuala Lumpur there isn't anyone subscribing to Astro, or ESPN to watch Bolton, or if they are it's a very small number. Whereas the large majority are subscribing because they want to watch Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal.

"So is it right that the international rights are shared equally between all the clubs? Some people will say: 'Well you've got to all be in it to make it happen.' But isn't it really about where the revenue is coming from, which is the broadcaster, and isn't it really about who people want to watch on that channel? We know it is us. And others. At some point we definitely feel there has to be some rebalance on that, because what we are actually doing is disadvantaging ourselves against other big European clubs."

It would require 14 of the Premier League's 20 members to vote in favour of a new commercial arrangement. Though Sir Alex Ferguson recently described the collective deal as "fair", albeit while insisting clubs deserved more from overseas rights, and La Liga's system has attracted widespread criticism, Ayre believes the status quo jeopardises the financial might of the Premier League.

"If Real Madrid or Barcelona or other big European clubs have the opportunity to truly realise their international media value potential, where does that leave Liverpool and Manchester United? We'll just share ours because we'll all be nice to each other? The whole phenomenon of the Premier League could be threatened. If they just get bigger and bigger and they generate more and more, then all the players will start drifting that way and will the Premier League bubble burst because we are sticking to this equal-sharing model? It's a real debate that has to happen."

Liverpool insist their radical proposals are limited to overseas broadcasting, although success on that front could set a precedent domestically in the long term, and the club plans to raise the issue at the next Premier League meeting. Ayre's frank admission comes almost one year on from Fenway Sports Group acquiring the club from Tom Hicks and George Gillett in the high court and, along with broadcasting revenue, another major financial decision to be resolved by the American owners remains whether to construct a new stadium or redevelop their current home, Anfield.

Liverpool's managing director insists the club are pursuing "a parallel course" on both options, with planning regulations complicating the redevelopment of Anfield and the financial benefits of a new-build uncertain, although Ayre admits the latter option is only viable with a naming rights deal. "We have been in discussions here and in other parts of the world with a small group of people that we have narrowed down that we are targeting for naming rights. That is an absolute catalyst to building a new stadium. The economics just don't stack up without it.

"When will the decision be made? It'll only be when we reach an answer with both. It's hard to put a time on it. If you put a deadline on the naming rights, then you start to marginalise the deal. We aren't desperate. We think we have an amazing proposition as one of the biggest clubs in the world. I don't recall any football club of this size with this international reach that's ever done a naming rights deal. It is quite unique in that sense. Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United haven't. Nobody in football has done this at this level. It's new ground and it will take what it takes."

Ayre, along with the former Liverpool chairman Martin Broughton, ex-chief executive Christian Purslow and Fenway Sports Group, remains the subject of a £1bn lawsuit filed by Hicks and Gillett over the events surrounding their departure last October. "It's an unwanted and unwelcome distraction. That's their prerogative but we remain extremely confident that we did the right thing," he said. The Liverpool MD offered his resignation to John W Henry following FSG's victory in the high court, and admits the five-times European champions could have entered administration had Hicks and Gillett retained control.

"Certainly the bank had the power to call in the debt and at the time there wasn't anyone ready to take on that debt. So I guess the answer to that [would Liverpool have gone into administration] is yes. It's hypothetical but based on where we were and based on the circumstances at the time that was a very real threat. That was the case in the final hours. That was one of the other routes we could have gone down."

www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/oct/11/liverpool-breakaway-tv-deal

[Macmoish]

David Conn/The Guardian


Tearing up the pooled TV deal is a recipe for the rich to get richer

Since the establishment of the Premier League clubs have divided TV revenue between them, but this is under threat

So, in relaxed, celebratory mood a year on from the court battle which ousted Tom Hicks and George Gillett from Liverpool and installed new Americans, Fenway Sports Group, as the club's owners, the managing director, Ian Ayre, mused out loud about breaking up the Premier League TV deal. That is the one element of clubs' income which they share; everything else, the tickets (prices raised to £45 this season to sit on the Kop), replica shirts at £40, advertising and sponsorship, the clubs all keep to themselves.

The Premier League, of course, was itself formed as a breakaway in 1992, by Liverpool and the other First Division clubs, from having to share the forthcoming satellite TV millions with the clubs in the other three divisions of the Football League. In its 20th season, the Premier League has managed to keep its own TV‑sharing formula intact, the one mechanism which operates to at least give the Boltons a chance of not embarrassing themselves at Old Trafford, even if all clubs outside four, at most, have no chance of expecting to challenge for the title.

The domestic TV deal – the £2.1bn from 2010‑13 which Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB and ESPN pay for the live pay-TV stranglehold, and the BBC for bite-sized highlights – is shared 50% equally, 25% according to where a club finishes in the table, and 25% to clubs every time they are on live. It favours the big clubs, but not mountainously; Manchester United were paid £42.4m last season, while Blackpool, who received the lowest, made exactly half that, £21.2m.

Overseas rights have always been shared equally, and while in 1992 they were almost nonexistent, the current deal, reflecting the game's global popularity, especially in the Middle and Far East, is worth £1.4bn over the next three years. So last season Blackpool received the same as United: £17.9m.

It was only a matter of time before the big clubs would start to challenge this last vestige of sharing, as they did in the 1980s, removing, with the threat of the breakaway they ultimately did anyway, the sharing of gate receipts which had been core to the Football League's competition since it was founded in 1888.

It is a bitter pill, but not that surprising, that the club which has articulated this appetite is one of the four major clubs owned by American buyers. All of them own sports franchises in the US, where their sports operate very strict systems of sharing money, including ticket money, merchandising, TV rights, in fact all revenues. In Major League Baseball, in which Fenway owns the Boston Red Sox, gross revenues are taxed and shared quite equally – although the details are not publicly disclosed – and there is a draft system, specifically designed to ensure that the Red Sox, New York Yankees and other major teams do not relentlessly dominate and the competitions become predictable.

The American buyers for Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United in particular have been attracted into a sport which, unlike their own, now has a global following on television and the internet, from which they believe they can ultimately make a great deal of money. The Premier League also allows them to keep so much more of the money they make than US sports do, as financial dominance here does concentrate sporting success in the trophy cabinets of fewer clubs.

In 19 years only Blackburn Rovers, once, through its momentarily greater spending power, Arsenal three times, and Chelsea via an oligarch's fortune, have interrupted the dominance of United, the highest-earning club throughout, despite the debts loaded on by the Glazer takeover. A football story like Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest miracle, winning the league in their first season promoted in 1978 then the European Cup twice, is now impossible, because financial inequality buys too great a sporting inequality. Manchester City's move from ninth in the Premier League in 2008 to third last season was achieved after the spending of £600m by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi – it takes one of the world's richest men, not an inspirational football manager alone, to break into English football's elite.

Yet still, with no gate sharing, which helped level competition as the Football League grew into a storyboard of great clubs, or of other revenues, Ayre says Liverpool want more. The Premier League was born from an impulse of individual greed against the collective – unlike US sports – and that appetite has only grown, not lessened, in the 20th year of the English game's new era, with the last vestiges of sharing under renewed attack.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/oct/11/liverpool-tv-breakaway

[Macmoish]

Ian Herbert/The Independent

Liverpool: let us agree our own TV rights deal


Liverpool managing director Ian Ayre has said that his club should be allowed to pursue their own international television rights deal and that they are being placed at a disadvantage to Real Madrid and Barcelona by being forced to share media income with smaller Premier League clubs.

A year to the day since Liverpool's takeover by Fenway Sports Groups (FSG) ended the turmoil and dislocation of the Tom Hicks and George Gillett era, Liverpool are financially still way adrift of Manchester United and remain in pursuit of a naming rights partner, without which the new stadium critical to the club's commercial development cannot be built. But in a first break with the Premier League's position of collective selling of the £1.4bn overseas TV rights, Ayre suggested that Liverpool should be allowed to sell their international TV rights individually, rather than take the same share of the money as the 19 other Premier League clubs. At United, the Glazer family remain adamant that a break-up of collective selling would potentially create a La Liga-style two- or three-club monopoly and critically weaken the Premier League's appeal.

However, Ayre said: "With the greatest of respect to our colleagues in the Premier League... if you're a Bolton fan in Bolton, then you subscribe to Sky because you want to watch Bolton, and everyone gets that. Likewise, if you're a Liverpool fan from Liverpool, you subscribe. But if you're in Kuala Lumpur there isn't anyone subscribing to [rights holders] Astro or ESPN to watch Bolton – or if they are, it's a very small number – whereas the large majority are subscribing because they want to watch Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal. So is it right that the international rights are shared equally between all the clubs?

"Some people will say, 'Well you've got to all be in it to make it happen'. But isn't it really about who people want to watch on that channel? We know it is us – and others. At some point we definitely feel there has to be some rebalance on that, because what we are actually doing is disadvantaging ourselves against other big European clubs. If Real Madrid or Barcelona have the opportunity to truly realise their international media value potential, where does that leave Liverpool and Manchester United?"

The Premier League, whose chief executive, Richard Scudamore, has been aware of rumblings about Liverpool's position, will strongly resist any attempt by its bigger clubs to buck the system of collective bargaining, though some observers feel there is more scope to alter the equal redistribution of the overseas rights, in line with the way the Premier League's £18bn of domestic TV money is shared out. Only 50 per cent of the domestic pot is shared out equally, with 25 per cent distributed according to a club's final league position and 25 per cent according to the number of times a club appears on TV – up to a maximum of £26m. "The strength of the model is that you have clubs which can compete and that on any given Saturday you can actually have a Stoke [whose TV share was £46m last season] beating a Liverpool [£55m]," said a Premier League spokesman. "That is the international appeal of the league."

Though Chelsea are among a group of teams who have discussed Ayre's position, the club support collective bargaining. Chelsea and Arsenal have been advocates of the Liverpool view in the past. It would require 14 of the league's 20 members to vote for individual bargaining.

Ayre's position, which would not have been put forward without FSG's blessing, reveals the new owners' boldness in trying to shake up Liverpool's commercial fortunes. Chairman Tom Werner has refloated the 39th game idea and, with Liverpool's £184m revenues in the last financial year dwarfed by United's £286.4m, Ayre, whose side meet United at Anfield on Saturday, admitted that Old Trafford's vastly greater capacity – it secures United match-day income of £106.8m against Liverpool's £45.7m – was a problem.

"We are 30,000 seats behind our biggest competitor and that's worth a lot of money," Ayre said. Only a naming rights partner will render viable the stadium earmarked for Stanley Park, but Ayre said "a small group of people" worldwide were potentially willing to invest millions in the idea that a new commercial name for the iconic Anfield would catch on.

"It's very difficult to put a time on it," Ayre said. "Because if... you go into a room and say: 'We'd like this much money but we need the answer by the end of December', you then start to marginalise your value, because they say: 'OK, these guys are desperate to do a deal'. We're not desperate. We've got an amazing product, one of the biggest clubs in the world, and I don't recall any club of this size, with this international reach, that's ever done a naming rights deal."

A year ago today, Ayre was at the High Court, with his predecessor Christian Purslow and Martin Broughton, the former British Airways chairman hired to sell the club, winning a High Court action effectively giving them the right to sell Liverpool to FSG, even though the former American owners secured a dramatic, 11th-hour restraining order. Ayre revealed that he, Purslow and Broughton are all still being pursued individually for £1m by Hicks and Gillett, who claim that they were denied the right to repay Liverpool's debts to prevent the sale.

Ayre revealed that the most vivid moment of the extraordinary High Court scenes – which saw Anthony Grabiner QC being cheered along The Strand – came from the direction of the press gallery. "A group of Liverpool fans were up there, the judge came out and said, 'I'm sorry, you'll have to leave from there, it's a health and safety issue' and [somebody] up there said: 'Can we appeal against that?" he recalled.

Ayre, whose new owners have spent £71m since January, said Liverpool would have gone into administration had the case not been won and added that football should learn the lesson of the kind of highly leveraged buy-out which so devastated Liverpool. "There are lessons for people coming into football," he said. "They should understand not only the business effect but the effect on subculture and the fan base. As we saw, it had a very damaging effect on people."

www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool-let-us-agree-our-own-tv-rights-deal-2369072.html

[QPRAirdrie]

Their greed is staggering. Surely the Premier League is a collective. If it wasn't for the other 19 teams in the league, it wouldn't be too competitive would it? If you want to negotiate your own TV deal, go and join another league.

[mtch]

GREED GREED GREED!!!!!!!
let the top 5 piss off and start thier own competition
it wont be long before UTD CHELS ARSE CITY jump on this band waggon ,
This is only the start they are not prepaird to divvy this up equaliy any more

THEY WANT IT ALL !!!!!!!

[bowranger]

Think this is a really worrying precedent, particularly with how a similar system operates in La Liga with Real Madrid and Barcelona. Good critique of what Liverpool are doing here:

inbedwithmaradona.com/journal/2011/10/12/ian-ayre-i-am-very-disappointed-in-you.html

[Zamoraaaah]

Greedy bastards. 14 teams have to agree for it to happen. No doubt the top 4 will want it so it will depend how many others have delusions of grandeur.

[Lonegunmen]

And what are these greedy big four or five going to do if the TV companies say enough is enough, get F***ed!

[Macmoish]

"...The Liverpool chairman said the amount of money they are forced to share, however, is a source of resentment: "We realise we are part of a league, but we feel the burden on the top is higher than appropriate. We feel we deserve the fruits of our labour. That is the difference with the EPL. If we can generate interest in Liverpool here and around the world, we will benefit from that."


The Guardian/David Conn

Liverpool and English football were a mystery to me, says John W Henry

• Owner says club's global following has huge financial potential
• Henry sees similarities with revitalised Boston Red Sox
• American dream turns sour for Reds owners

John W Henry, the principal owner of Liverpool, has acknowledged he knew "virtually nothing" of English football or the football club before his Fenway Sports Group took over at Anfield a year ago this Saturday. Tom Werner, the chairman of Fenway and now of Liverpool, said he too had barely heard of the club, but was aware of the "EPL" – English Premier League – and its popularity, and "certainly knew about Manchester United".

During three days of exclusive access in the United States with Henry, Werner and key executives of Fenway, which also owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team, they explained the prime attraction of buying Liverpool lay in the financial potential of the club's global following.

Lifelong fans of baseball, whose support is mostly restricted to the US, they began to take an interest in Liverpool after comprehending the scale of international interest in the Premier League on television and via the internet – and the prospects of being able to make money from it.

Asked what he knew about English football, and Liverpool, before an email from a Fenway Park employee alerted him to the Merseyside club's financial difficulties last August, Henry replied: "Very little. We knew virtually nothing about Liverpool Football Club nor EPL."

Henry said as Liverpool's difficult financial predicament was outlined to him last year, he saw parallels with the Red Sox, the MLB team Fenway bought in 2002. Before the takeover, the Red Sox had not won a World Series for 84 years, and the team's stadium, Fenway Park, was showing its age. Liverpool offered Henry a new challenge, to revitalise a football club as Fenway has with the Red Sox – although a spectacular September collapse this season has plunged the team into turmoil. He saw Liverpool as an opportunity to apply a similar strategy, but in an international sport with a following that hugely outstrips that of baseball.

Following that email, Henry and Werner attended a presentation given by Philip Hall, an executive at Inner Circle Sports, the New York‑based merchant bankers which specialises in the takeovers of English football clubs. Inner Circle acted for Tom Hicks and George Gillett when they bought Liverpool in 2007, and for Ellis Short when he took over at Sunderland. Werner said before that meeting with Inner Circle, who would become Fenway's financial advisers on buying Liverpool, he knew very little of the club: "I had been in sports so I was aware of the EPL and its strength globally," said Werner, an Emmy award-winning Los Angeles‑based television producer. "But I didn't know the inner workings of it. I certainly knew about Manchester United."

The Liverpool chairman said that he did not at the time believe buying the football club held any appeal for Fenway, which owns the Nascar motor racing team Roush. Of the meeting with Inner Circle, Werner recalled: "I wasn't paying too much attention. Frankly I was on my BlackBerry, dealing with more pressing issues. I thought there was no way John was going to drag us into that one."

Henry, however, found Liverpool compelling, particularly the club's supporter base in east Asia. This week Ian Ayre, whom Fenway appointed managing director at Liverpool, said he wanted the overseas TV rights sales, which the 20 Premier League clubs currently share equally, to be broken up so that clubs could fix their own deals individually.

Werner explained that baseball teams share a proportion of income from tickets, merchandising and broadcasting, to ensure more level competition between big and small teams. The Liverpool chairman said the amount of money they are forced to share, however, is a source of resentment: "We realise we are part of a league, but we feel the burden on the top is higher than appropriate. We feel we deserve the fruits of our labour. That is the difference with the EPL. If we can generate interest in Liverpool here and around the world, we will benefit from that."

Part one of David Conn's series with the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool owners can be read here
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/oct/12/liverpool-john-henry-fenway

[Macmoish]

David Conn/The Guardian

: David Conn meets Liverpool's owners, part one

Liverpool's owners battle boom and bust after Boston Red Sox stumble

The Boston Red Sox success story came crashing down last month but John W Henry and Fenway Sports Group believe the same approach can benefit Liverpool


reddit this Comments (80)

For the owners of Liverpool Football Club – John W Henry, Tom Werner and their partners in Fenway Sports Group – the honeymoon is over. After a calamitous run of results, the group famed for shrewd-value "moneyball" player signings are accused of wastefully overspending, fans are in uproar, the manager has departed. The owners, on the defensive, are accused for the first time of having their focus diverted by the other club they own across the Atlantic.

This is not some nightmare future scenario for Liverpool, which Henry and his partners have owned, to mostly positive approval, for exactly a year this Saturday, when Liverpool face the club's modern nemesis, Manchester United, at Anfield. It is a crisis unravelling right now at the other major sports club Fenway owns and which, in reality, consumes much more of its focus: the Boston Red Sox baseball team. After the most catastrophic collapse in the final month of a season in baseball history, the Red Sox blew a nine-game lead in September to be pipped for the "wild card" – second‑place qualification for the post-season play-offs – by the much less financially resourced Tampa Bay Rays. In America, this is a huge sporting story, yet in Britain it has barely registered, despite the Liverpool connection.

Terry Francona, the manager of eight years who won World Series in 2004 and 2007, has gone, the general manager, Theo Epstein, has reportedly signed a deal this week to join the Chicago Cubs, and, with criticism of the players' physical fitness rampant, Henry has promised: "The organisation will have a self‑critical examination."

Last month, with Liverpool due to play Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane – they would be crushed 4-0 – and the Red Sox playing four successive games against the Rays, Henry granted the Guardian three days' exclusive access and interviews in Boston, with him, the Liverpool and Fenway chairman, Werner, and key senior executives at Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. Watching the games with him, and talking at length, afforded the most revealing insight yet into Henry, his and his partners' careers and approach to owning sports clubs, and their motivations for buying Liverpool in that bitter court battle against Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the previous American owners, 12 months ago.

Henry co Henry standing next to a quote from John Upd*** painted on the wall at Fenway Park. Photograph: Rick Friedman/Polaris nfessed that before he bought them he knew "virtually nothing about Liverpool Football Club nor EPL". That is the abbreviation Americans use for the English Premier League, in a country where the major sports leagues are the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. Werner said he, too, had barely heard of the club: "I had been in sports so I was aware of the EPL and its strength globally," Werner said. "But I didn't know the inner workings of it. I certainly knew about Manchester United."

It adds up to the most revealing picture of any of the US buyers, who come from a country still largely oblivious to football yet who have somehow become owners of five of the English game's most prestigious clubs: Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Aston Villa and Sunderland. Henry and his colleagues explained they were drawn to Liverpool by the challenge of restoring a great sports club to winning ways and solving its stadium conundrum, as they did for the Red Sox in Boston. But it was also clear they were attracted, centrally, by learning about the huge support the Premier League and Liverpool have on television and the internet worldwide, compared with American sports whose following remains mostly restricted to the US. The prospect of being able to make huge money from media and sponsorship with that global reach led them to buy Liverpool.

Henry, though, is clearly keenly worried about a backlash from fans at both clubs, who may accuse the owners of concentrating too much on the other – a reaction that erupted in Boston last week with vitriolic press criticism of Fenway's "dysfunctional" organisation and Henry's involvement with Liverpool. He suggests he and his partners, contrary to their image of frugal, statistics-based player signings, in fact sanctioned major spending partly to allay that concern. The Red Sox spent $300m (£190m) on "payroll" – wage commitments – before this season on two left-arm hitters: Carl Crawford, signed for $140m wages over seven years, and Adrian Gonzalez, $154m. Kenny Dalglish, since being appointed Liverpool manager in January, has paid £110.5m in transfer fees alone for Andy Carroll (£35m), Luis Suárez (£22m), Jordan Henderson (£20m), Stewart Downing (£20m), Charlie Adam (£7.5m) and José Enrique (£6m).

"There was a lot of criticism in Boston that we weren't going to spend money on the Red Sox after we did the Liverpool transaction," Henry said. "Then there was the fear we wouldn't spend in Liverpool. Hopefully the fans of both clubs will eventually see what we see clearly – that there is nothing to fear from the existence of the other club."

In the proud, cultured city of Boston, this is Fenway's first crisis in a story of previously shining success since Henry, Werner and partners bought the Red Sox in 2002, and hired Epstein, a protege of the chief executive, Larry Lucchino, to overhaul player recruitment. They inherited expensive plans for a new stadium but ripped them up, opting instead to refurbish Fenway Park, the grand, original, 1912 inner-city ballpark. (They do not use the word stadium, Lucchino firmly explained, just as they have trained themselves with admirable discipline not to refer to Liverpool as a franchise or football as soccer.)

Henry said from the beginning they always wanted to stay at the renowned old place: "Why would you leave a beautiful, historic ballpark unless you absolutely had to? The previous ownership believed the best way to compete with the New York Yankees was to build a brand-new ballpark, which would have generated tremendous revenue. We chose to refurbish Fenway Park because after a great deal of study we were able to determine it was, in fact, doable."

The group has asked that same question at Liverpool, where it inherited designs for a prohibitively expensive new stadium on Stanley Park, but it has found the legal planning obstacles to redeveloping Anfield, still its preferred option, so far intractable. At Fenway Park, with more of the expansiveness of a cricket ground than a football stadium, it was able to develop gradually, make good money from relatively cheap improvements, and invest the income back into another upgrade, until the group completed a splendid refurbishment, costing $285m since 2002, all with reinvested income.

The renovation has generated a great deal more income, partly from increased ticket prices. The first move, Henry recalled, was to introduce two new front rows of seats, for which fans pay a high premium. They later added extra tiers, the Coca-Cola Corner and Budweiser Deck, where a party of 20 can sit at tables for $22,000. Corporate boxes, overhauled, sell for $250,000 a season. Some fans can still stand in one row at the back of stands for $25 or $30; the seats in front of them cost $90. The 274 seats installed in the Green Monster, the famous wall above the scoreboard, are favourites, costing $165.

At these Fans milling about outside Fenway Park. Photograph: Rick Friedman/Polaris prices, the crowd at games appears comfortably middle class and is overwhelmingly white, largely missing the age group also substantially priced out of Premier League matches: young people in their late teens and early 20s. It is, though, striking how many girls and women there are, and baseball is clearly a date, young couples snuggling closer as night draws in. David Ginsberg, a former hedge fund financier, now the Fenway partner who spends most time in Liverpool – "Around a week a month," he said – smiled, watching families on the Budweiser Deck guzzle beer, Coke, hotdogs, popcorn, peanuts, ice cream, chips. "I wondered why there were so few women at Anfield. But it's more social here, isn't it?"

For the English visitor abroad in Boston and innocent of the weighty expectations riding on the games, baseball at Fenway Park is a lovely sporting experience, a privilege. The early autumn sun setting golden over the ballpark, the game's attractive geometry, the well-catered-for crowd hugging the action … Fenway Park weaves a seductive appeal. If you are watching sport at a level on which the very rules must be explained, you can enjoy the spectacle detached from emotional investment in the result. With The Star Spangled Banner sung before the game by the pure young voices of Scouts or glee clubs, the baseball frames an idealised vision of how much of middle America would like to see their country. To the English eye, the Red Sox fans, agreeable enough even in defeat, seem a world away from a sporting passion that anybody could possibly describe as more important than life and death.

Henry watches from his owner's box above the hitter's plate, present, with his wife, Linda, at almost all the games at Fenway. The volume of matches, 162 a season, and the work required in the "offseason" mean, Henry said, he can be at Liverpool matches only rarely. "There is a rhythm of nightly baseball games. I couldn't give that up," he said. "And I love that. I'm rarely at Liverpool matches. If I had two lives I would spend one in Europe, but I don't."

In the agonies of defeats to the fitter and more united-looking Rays, Henry was an optimist to the last, a foil to Werner's nervy exasperation. With two men out in the ninth inning and the Red Sox 8‑5 down, Henry still saw possible salvation from the last man standing: "OK, we need a home run." Yet watching hitters striking out or fielders fumbling, at times he swept his fingers through his hair, whispering to himself: "That is unbelievable."

Werner, a celebrated Los Angeles TV producer of series including Roseanne and The Cosby Show, is more a pacer and shouter: "Come on!" he yelled in frustration. They came together with Lucchino and 16 other partners to pay $700m for the Red Sox, and the baseball franchise's truly lucrative arm, the pay-TV station New England Sports Network, which has the rights to show the games regionally.


Baseball has always had owners; the teams were commercial ventures from the beginning, not formed as member associations, like most football clubs here, where for 100 years shareholders were prohibited from taking money out. The teams are literally franchises, licensed by Major League Baseball, which tries to ensure a level playing field between high-earning big city teams and smaller ones. All clubs' income is taxed, then shared out, a system Lucchino described, drily and without obvious enthusiasm, as "very socialistic". Werner was quite open that, as a richer franchise, Fenway resents how much money it is taxed, which is not publicly disclosed. "It is a balance," he acknowledged. "We realise we are part of a league, but we feel the burden on the top is higher than appropriate. We feel we deserve the fruits of our labour."

It became quickly clear, talking to them, that a prime attraction to the Americans of buying English football clubs is that in the Premier League the clubs keep all the money they make, from everything except television rights. So it was no surprise that the managing director they appointed, Ian Ayre, talked this week about beginning the break-up of even that, the collective TV deal. "That is the difference with the EPL," Werner said. "If we can generate interest in Liverpool here and around the world, we will benefit from that."

Henry st Fans at Fenway during the final home game of the regular season between the Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles. Photograph: Rick Friedman/Polaris ill talks about baseball as a passion rather than a financial investment, but it is clear the 19 Fenway partners expect to make money out of it. Ed Weiss, Fenway's general counsel – in-house lawyer – explained the approach of the partners, who have never so far taken a cash profit out: "If you were interested in pure financial return, sport would not be your path, because it is not liquid. That said, everybody would want to make some return for their investment." The one partner whose financial figures are public, because it is listed on the stock exchange, is the New York Times Company. It paid $75m to become 17.75% owners in the original 2002 takeover. Last year it sold a small stake for a reported $14m. Three months ago it sold around 10%, for $117m – that makes $131m realised, a $41m profit, and still the company retains a 7% stake.

The Fenway partners made their money in diverse fields before they invested in baseball. Henry grew up on an isolated Arkansas farm, his father seriously ill for much of John's childhood, and baseball was an escape that became a lifelong passion. Listening to the St Louis Cardinals on radio commentary, he said, "filled my room with players and magic". Gentle in manner behind thick glasses he has needed all his life, and famously softly spoken, Henry played in rock bands and, in his early 20s, was a professional gambler in Las Vegas, using a mathematical approach for the casino game of 21. Inheriting his father's farms, he moved into grain trading, where he developed an analytical system based on identifying long-term trends, which led him to the fortunes he ultimately made trading for major financial firms.

His first baseball stake was in the New York Yankees, baseball's giant whose rivalry with the Red Sox parallels Manchester United's with Liverpool. He described buying into baseball as "a great stress reduction", not primarily an investment. American sports owners move around; they are not tied by support to a particular club. In 1998 Henry bought the Florida Marlins, stayed for three years, then left after he was unable to get a new stadium approved and paid for with public money by the Florida senate. Werner was a partner in the San Diego Padres, where Lucchino was chief executive. In dizzying multiple trades, Werner sold the Padres, Henry sold the Marlins to the owners of the Montreal Expos, that group sold the Expos to MLB, which scrapped the Canadian franchise and turned it into the Washington Nationals, and Henry's partnership, freed up, bought the Red Sox.

The Boston team is, to use that evocative American word, "storied", meaning the Red Sox have heritage, stories. The most renowned, of course, was that the team had not won a World Series, the equivalent of the Premier League championship, since 1918, when the legendary hitter Babe Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees. Lore has it that the sale, and subsequent long-time "curse of the Bambino", was due to the financial motivations of the owner, Harry Frazee, who sold Ruth because he wanted to take money out to invest in a Broadway play.

Henry and his partners, of course, wrote a new story, staying triumphantly at Fenway Park and winning the World Series, in 2004, breaking the 86‑year curse, and 2007. Famously too, they became associated with the sabermetrics, statistical approach, as used by the arguably overachieving small team Oakland Athletics and chronicled in the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, now romanticised into a film starring Brad Pitt as the As' manager, Billy Beane.

The Moneyball concept has become both simplified and overblown in discussion, and even Henry says its significance is exaggerated. The Oakland As did not become successful because they suddenly started using statistics to assess players to sign. Baseball has always been bedecked in statistics; the game manufactures numbers. Moneyball told the story of a hobby statistician, Bill James, who concluded that some data, such as the number of times a hitter makes it, workaday, to first base, were in fact more important to a match than crowd-pleasing, eye-catching but rare feats such as hitting glorious home runs. Sceptics, however, argue that the Oakland As did so well because they had three outstanding, star pitchers, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Tim Hudson, in a sport where the pitcher is key – hitting a ball thrown at 80-95mph with a thin bat is extremely difficult, even for players on $154m wages.

Henry, keen to accrue any potential advantage and being, with his ostensible gentleness, a consummate networker, made contact with James and Beane. He offered Beane the job of general manager then, when Beane declined for family reasons, hired Epstein instead. The World Series victories were ascribed to sabermetrics, but Henry explained it was down to all-round rigour. "We'll look at stats no one else will look at, employ scouting in a way that has a compelling organisational context, question everything and everyone and ensure we have the best player development curriculum and protocols. In short, we are determined to outwork everyone else and hopefully be smarter every year." That was before the September collapse that plunged the Red Sox organisation into, as Henry put it, "critical self‑examination".

They came to buy Liverpool a year ago when, despite missing the play-offs, their record was still glowing, Fenway's income was around $1bn, and Henry was considering expanding into some other American sporting venture. His interest was sparked by an employee in corporate sales at Fenway Park, Joe Januszewski, who was, somehow, a Liverpool fan. With Liverpool staggering under the debts Hicks and Gillett had loaded on to the club, he emailed Henry: "Please save my club." Henry admits he had reached the age of 60, a lifelong American sports fan, knowing "virtually nothing" of football, or the Anfield club that have won 18 League championships and five European Cups. But he was intrigued, and fixed a meeting with Inner Circle Sports, New York bankers who became Fenway's financial advisers on the deal.

Werner, recalling that meeting, at which Inner Circle's Philip Hall presented Liverpool's prospects, smiled. "I wasn't paying too much attention," the current Liverpool chairman said. "Frankly I was on my BlackBerry, dealing with more pressing issues. I thought there was no way John was going to drag us into that one."

Part Two of David Conn's series with the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool owners will be on guardian.co.uk on Thursday

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/oct/12/liverpool-boston-red-sox-henry

[Macmoish]

Paul Wilson/The Guardian

Premier League needs more than just its top teams to be a global hitLiverpool's plan to sell foreign TV rights individually would dilute the competitive character of the Premier League


Anyone involved in English football these past 20 years or so knows two things. One is that you cannot stand in the way of progress, the other is that progress is actually spelled G-R-E-E-D. So if the big clubs want more of the overseas television money that has climbed from nothing to colossal proportions on the back of their fame and success over the past couple of decades, one imagines that eventually they will find a way to get it, even if it is difficult at the moment to envisage 14 Premier League clubs voting for a change that would disadvantage most of them.

Liverpool's managing director, Ian Ayre, makes a valid point when he suggests that the huge growth in television subscriptions in Asia and the Middle East has not been fuelled by people wanting to watch Bolton or Fulham every week, but by support for teams such as Manchester United or his own. Fair enough, though there is another way of looking at those figures. If the Premier League is comfortably the most watched league in the world, with an estimated 70% of the global TV market for football, then part of that success must be due to its success as a league. Clubs such as Chelsea, Liverpool and United may be driving the global interest, but since they cannot play each other every week people must be tuning in no matter who happens to be providing the opposition.

In other words, clubs such as Wigan and QPR, and even Blackpool or Hull City in recent seasons, still have a part to play. What appears to be unique about English football is that while the result in a game between United and Wigan or Chelsea v Fulham may not be all that hard to predict, the game itself may not be all that predictable and the entertainment factor can still be quite high. That's not to mention games in recent seasons between Blackpool and Liverpool, say, or Hull and Arsenal, where the results were not predictable at all.

This weekend brings the north-west derby between Liverpool and Manchester United, always one of the most eagerly awaited fixtures in the Premier League calendar if rarely in recent years as high-powered and relevant an event as the increasingly gripping showdowns between Barcelona and Real Madrid. But because of the way television money is distributed in Spain – the model that Ayre and Liverpool would like the Premier League to copy – interest falls away sharply once the leading lights are pitted against those who are in La Liga merely to make up the numbers.

This is not intended as an attack on the quality or depth of the Spanish league, but it is possible to surmise merely from the television viewing figures that even Barcelona are not must-watch material if they are only playing Getafe or Levante. Whereas the more equitable distribution of funds between English clubs means that most have not only decent players but footballing personalities who are recognised around the world – think of Tim Cahill, Joey Barton, Shay Given, Peter Crouch, Danny Murphy and many more – and an English Premier League game will generally be well-contested and exciting until the end.

There are exceptions, of course, and Blackburn's collapse at Old Trafford last season comes readily to mind, but it is quite easy to show the competitive strength of the Premier League in statistics. Manchester United won the title last year despite winning only five games (of 19) away from home. That may have caused Sir Alex Ferguson some discomfort, yet that there were 14 opponents who either held or beat the champions on their own ground speaks volumes for the close-knit nature of the English league. For purposes of comparison, Barcelona won 14 away league games last season. Real Madrid, runners-up in La Liga, won 13. Milan won Serie A by winning 11 times on the road, as did Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga. In Portugal, André Villas-Boas won the title with Porto after securing 13 away wins, quite an amazing stat given that Portuguese teams play only 15 away fixtures, though not one that necessarily has viewers in east Asia setting their alarms for appointment television.

This is what the Premier League has without realising it, and what some of its members are now discussing throwing away. One might have thought that the teams at the top of the Premier League pile already have more than enough money and have no real need of further compromising their domestic competition by claiming more, though it needs to be remembered that Liverpool are not quite in the same financial clover as their immediate rivals. While not as skint as Everton – who is? – they have not enlarged their stadium like Arsenal and Manchester United, and have not the private backing that Chelsea and Manchester City can rely on.

It is easy to understand why they would like to cash in on their name and their fame, because they were unlucky enough to do all their conquering of Europe in the 70s and 80s, when name and fame was mostly all success brought. They have been somewhat unfairly accused of neglecting to build their brand during the good years, in the way that Manchester United did so impressively in the 90s and Arsenal and Chelsea have been doing since, but Liverpool never had the moneymaking machinery and guaranteed global exposure of the Premier League behind them when they were beating off the likes of Ipswich, Watford and Southampton to win their host of titles. (And United, Arsenal and Everton, of course, I don't mean to belittle Liverpool's achievements, but few things illustrate how times have changed better than Watford finishing runners-up.)

As a matter of record, in the 16 seasons since Blackburn's one-off title in 1995, not only has the title been shared between a mere three different teams – United, Chelsea and Arsenal – but only two more teams have managed to finish second – Liverpool and Newcastle. Manchester City's third place last season represented the first new face in the top three since Leeds surprised Liverpool in 2000. So it is not quite true to say changes to the distribution of foreign TV revenues would concentrate power in the hands of just a few clubs and create an unalterable elite at the top of the league. That much has already happened. Yet, despite everything, what goes on in the 15 positions below the top five is still pretty entertaining, impressively competitive and greatly enjoyed by the majority of fans, even though most are resigned to the fact that it is almost impossible to win anything of note any more. That is quite a delicate balancing act, and for all the many things that are wrong with the greed business, the Premier League is still rated around the world and massively popular throughout all the levels of football in this country.

The main problem with the Liverpool proposal is that it implies that 14 or 15 clubs in the league are relatively unimportant. They are not. It is perhaps just as well that 14 or 15 clubs will have to agree before anything can change.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/oct/12/premier-league-foreign-tv-rights

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The Guardian

Premier League broadcasting revenue: how is it distributed?Liverpool are calling for overseas broadcasting deals to be changed. How much is each club receiving and what is the ratio between top to bottom earning clubs?
• Get the data
www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/12/football-broadcasting-deal-liverpool

Liverpool are the latest Premier League club calling for changes in overseas broadcasting rights. Photograph: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
The debate over the Premier League broadcasting deal was heightened last night after Liverpool called for overseas rights to be sold on a club-by-club basis.

Liverpool follow clubs such as Manchester United in arguing against the traditional English clubs' broadcasting deal. Andy Hunter writes:

Liverpool's managing director, Ian Ayre, has insisted the break-up of the established broadcasting deal, worth £3.2bn in total to all Premier League clubs for 2010-13, is "a debate that has to happen" with the Anfield club in favour of the Spanish model that allows Barcelona and Real Madrid to negotiate individual contracts that dwarf their domestic and European rivals.

The English broadcast income for clubs is generated in three parts: 50% shared between the 20 clubs equally, 25% in facility fees and 25% in merit payments which depend upon where a club finish in the league table. Facility fees are paid to each club every time their matches are shown on UK television, with each club being guaranteed a minimum of ten fees.



The overseas broadcasting income is shared in equal measures by all the Premier League clubs. A belief that the bigger clubs will earn more by arranging their own overseas deals has driven some of the Premier League clubs to push for the collective deal to be abandoned when it ends in 2013.

The ratio of top top to bottom-earning clubs has also dropped since last season - from 1.66:1 to 1.54:1. This shows how the Premier League distributes broadcasting income in a far more equitable way than other top European leagues. In comparison the ratio is 12.5:1 for La Liga and 10:1 for Serie A. The graphic above shows how large the gap in the ratio is between the Premier League and other European leagues.

The table below shows the total broadcasting payments for the Premier League during the 2010/11 season. The domestic payments consist of the equal share, facility fees and merit payment. The overseas payment and overall total are also shown.

What can you do with this data?

Data summary
Total broadcasting payments, Premier League season 2010-11 (£'s)
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Club Equal Share Facility Fees Merit Payment Overseas Total
Source: Premier League 2010/11 Season Review

Man Utd 13,819,031 13,548,306 15,135,120 17,926,595 60,429,052
Chelsea 13,819,031 11,616,544 14,378,364 17,926,595 57,740,444
Arsenal 13,819,031 11,616,544 12,864,852 17,926,595 56,226,932
Man City 13,819,031 10,167,565 13,621,608 17,926,595 55,534,799
Liverpool 13,819,031 12,099,417 11,351,340 17,926,595 55,196,383
Tottenham 13,819,031 9,201,639 12,108,096 17,926,595 53,055,361
Everton 13,819,031 7,269,787 10,594,584 17,926,595 49,609,997
Aston Villa 13,819,031 8,235,713 9,081,072 17,926,595 49,062,411
Fulham 13,819,031 5,820,898 9,837,828 17,926,595 47,404,352
Newcastle 13,819,031 8,718,676 6,810,804 17,926,595 47,275,106
Sunderland 13,819,031 6,303,861 8,324,316 17,926,595 47,373,803
West Brom 13,819,031 5,820,898 7,567,560 17,926,595 45,134,084
Stoke 13,819,031 5,820,898 6,054,048 17,926,595 43,620,572
Bolton 13,819,031 5,820,898 5,297,292 17,926,595 42,863,816
Blackburn 13,819,031 5,820,898 4,540,536 17,926,595 42,107,060
Wigan 13,819,031 5,820,898 3,783,780 17,926,595 41,350,304
Wolves 13,819,031 5,820,898 3,027,024 17,926,595 40,593,548
West Ham 13,819,031 7,752,750 756,756 17,926,595 40,255,132
Birmingham 13,819,031 5,820,898 2,270,268 17,926,595 39,836,792
Blackpool 13,819,031 5,820,898 4,540,536 17,926,595 39,080,036
TOTALS 276,380,620 158,918,704 158,918,704 358,531,892 952,749,977



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• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

[Macmoish]

Guardian/David Conn - Part II

John W Henry turns from Red Sox to red shirts for the global gains

In the second of our exclusive series, the US owners of Liverpool talk about their investment motives, the merits of Kenny Dalglish and the players he signed – and that thorny stadium issue

In his apartment on the 11th floor of Boston's five-star Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Liverpool's principal owner, John W Henry, and chairman, Tom Werner, watched on Fox Soccer Network what could be Liverpool's most significant match of the season, last month's 4-0 demolition by Tottenham Hotspur. For Henry, Werner and their 17 partners in the Boston-based Fenway Sports Group, their takeover of Liverpool, a year ago this Saturday when the team face Manchester United at Anfield, has been marked mostly by progress and feel-good optimism.

The club's £200m bank debt was paid off as Fenway's price of buying the club, Damien Comolli was appointed director of football, the Kop's king, Kenny Dalglish, made manager, £110.5m has been spent on new players. Above all, Henry and Werner are basking in their overwhelming quality, of not being Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

Henry, naturally optimistic as a spectator – constantly believing his Boston Red Sox baseball team would turn games round throughout their record-breaking September collapse – anticipated a win, to launch Liverpool towards the cherished, lucrative, Premier League fourth place. What happened, however, was not in the prospectus: Liverpool froze, Luka Modric scored after five minutes, Charlie Adam was sent off for two bookings, Martin Skrtel followed him, Spurs were comprehensively superior.

Henry watched the Red Sox's 8-5 defeat to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays later that day with quiet but vocal despair and Werner would struggle to contain his angst. But theygreeted the football hammering mostly in affronted silence. When Skrtel crashed into Gareth Bale for his second yellow card, with Bale on the halfway line facing his own goal posing no threat, there was no eruption of fury from Liverpool's owners at so needless a dismissal. Henry, joking, said: "Well, we played a little better for a while with 10 men, maybe we'll play better with nine." Watching Liverpool crumple and the new, expensively-bought midfield of Adam, Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing outplayed, Henry and his party, all fans of baseball, a game charted by numbers, seemed to need some statistical handle on it. "How many yellow cards we got?" somebody asked. (Answer: at least four too many.) At the Red Sox games, I had been similar; appreciating the skill and speed, recognising great athleticism and obvious bungles, but still grappling with the rules, so a lifetime short of understanding the sport's pattern and rhythm.

With Liverpool 3-0 down, Henry mused admiringly: "Boy, did you see how far [Andy Carroll] headed that ball?" He seemed to have a touch of Dalglish's propensity to query refereeing decisions, struggling to see why Adam's downward lunge on Scott Parker merited a second yellow. I began to offer an appreciation of the officials' skill, pointing out how an assistant referee was exactly in line with the last defender, to judge the Spurs forward's position precisely when the ball was played – then I suddenly thought: I am watching a match with the owners of Liverpool Football Club, and I am coming perilously close to explaining the offside rule.

Told relentlessly about the Premier League's huge following internationally, and that soccer is breaking through in America, you can believe it – until you actually go there. In Boston, football barely breaks into consciousness. Widely played by schoolchildren, as a spectacle it is drowned out by the giants of American sport: baseball, American football and basketball. Henry believes Americans want regular decisive action, so struggle with a game that can deliver 0-0 draws. Manchester United's 3-1 defeat of Chelsea later that day was the most watched Premier League match ever in the US – 886,000 people tuned in live, 0.3% among a population of 307m.

Henry acknowledged that, a lifelong American sports fan aged 60, he knew "virtually nothing" of Liverpool or the Premier League before buying the club. That drilled home how extraordinary it is that American businessmen, from the singular huge country with its own sports, still largely oblivious to football, have bought five of English football's greatest clubs, Manchester United, Liverpool (twice), Arsenal, Aston Villa and Sunderland. These owners' collective contribution at the big three has not been positive: £473m drained out of United in interest, fees and bank charges by the Glazers' leveraged United takeover; Hicks and Gillett almost costing Liverpool its solvency; Stan Kroenke paying more than £300m to Arsenal's English shareholders but promising, as an article of faith, no investment in the club.

His interest sparked by an email from a Liverpool-supporting Fenway employee last August, Henry fixed a meeting to hear about the club with Philip Hall, of Inner Circle Sports, New York-based merchant bankers. Inner Circle previously acted for Hicks and Gillett when they bought Liverpool and became Fenway's financial advisers on their Liverpool acquisition. During that meeting, Werner did not pay too much attention, believing he and his quintessential American partners would not venture into English football.

But Henry, as he listened to the club's prospects, found it revelatory. "A number of parallels emerged with the situation that existed in Boston when we arrived," he explained. The Red Sox and Liverpool were both historically successful clubs which had lost their dominance, and both had beloved old grounds not up to modern money-making standards. Henry began to feel Fenway could apply the same strategies at Anfield as they had to winning effect in Boston, and also make an ambitious move into international sport.

There was more to it than just wanting to win. Central to Henry's and Fenway's fascination was English football's, and Liverpool's, huge worldwide support, compared to the US-restricted following for American sports. Several Fenway executives recounted, with awe, that the Super Bowl, American sport's most prestigious event, is watched by around 20m viewers outside the US, whereas Liverpool's 3-1 defeat of Manchester United last season attracted an estimated 500m global audience.

Hall outlined how United, under the Glazers, have made money via international sponsorships, explaining that Liverpool have room similarly to profit. They found it very attractive that, as Hall explained, in the Premier League, individual clubs keep the money they make from such worldwide sponsorship. In baseball, the teams are franchises, their income is taxed by MLB and shared, to maintain reasonable competition between big city teams such as the Red Sox, and smaller teams. Thus the underdog Rays were well-equipped enough this season to dramatically deny the Red Sox a place in the play-offs. Werner told the Guardian he resents the amount of money the Red Sox have to share with smaller teams.

Understanding how compelling Fenway found these individual financial arrangements, it is no surprise that Ian Ayre, whom Fenway appointed Liverpool's managing director, said this week they want to break out of the collective overseas TV deal, the only income football shares. Henry, asked if the American owners will ultimately want their clubs to do their own TV deals, as Real Madrid and Barcelona do, replied: "These people [the American owners] understand media and the long-term global implications. They're going to want to reach their fans in the new media landscape. The Premier League was created in response to changing media. Audiences will drive leagues rather than the other way round."

Hall's presentation included a comparison demonstrating that Liverpool, a big "EPL" club with a worldwide following, could be bought for better value than US sports teams, with their "limited global potential". Ed Weiss, Fenway's general counsel (in-house lawyer) who would help mastermind the bloody legal fight that Liverpool's three-man board won, selling the club to Fenway against Hicks' furious opposition, explained Liverpool's appeal: "So much internet clutter competes for mindshare now. Big sports clubs are one of the few things which can cut through and capture mindshare. We have one of the great baseball teams, but its ability is geographically limited. The Liverpool numbers blew us away. We believe there is a significant amount of monetisation we can do, on a worldwide basis, which is not occurring now."

Henry was extremely taken. Just six weeks later, after rapid due diligence and that bitter court battle, he emerged blinking in the media's spotlights outside his London lawyers' offices, having bought Liverpool. Fenway had been forced to increase their price to £200m, due to the higher bid from the Singapore businessman Peter Lim. Weiss said before that they had been planning to leave some debt in. The takeover undoubtedly put Liverpool immediately in a dramatically better position – undoing the previous US takeover's damage, so putting the club almost back to where it had been in February 2007, before any takeover at all.

Fenway, like the Glazers and Kroenke, do not intend to spend their own money freely on Liverpool. Henry is firmly attached to Uefa's financial fair play rules, which require clubs to move towards breaking even, rather than make huge losses bankrolled by indulgent owners such as Chelsea's Roman Abramovich or Manchester City's Sheikh Mansour. "We wouldn't have moved forward on Liverpool except for the passage of FFP," he said. He is worried Uefa will not enforce the rules strictly, so that clubs with investing owners will remain wealthier. Henry and David Ginsberg, the enthusiastic Fenway partner who spends most time in Liverpool – a week a month – say they have put some partnership money into Liverpool, "to help with cash flow", although they would not say how much. Certainly, they clarified, it had not come from the 19 Fenway partners putting more money in, but from the group's existing reserves.


Fenway's significant first move was to appoint Comolli, the former director of football at Tottenham, into a similar position at Anfield, working with Roy Hodgson, the manager, who Fenway would replace with Dalglish in January. Henry confirmed there had been no wider recruitment process for this most plum of jobs; Comolli was appointed following the recommendation of Billy Beane, the former general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, with whom Comolli had struck up a friendship. "Billy became passionate about the Premier League and he became my initial adviser about the football side of Liverpool," Henry recalled. "Billy was adamant – 'There is one person who you have to hire – Damien Comolli. He has the same philosophy Theo [Epstein, the Red Sox general manager], you and I share.'"

This was not, as some have simplified it, Comolli's use of player performance statistics, although Henry says Comolli is famous for that; all clubs use such data now, mostly the Prozone analysis. "What Billy meant is we are all dedicated to finding and using every advantage no matter how small," Henry said. "We don't rest. We'll look at stats no one else will look at, employ scouting in a way that has a compelling organisational context, question everything and everyone and ensure we have the best player development curriculum and protocols."

Dalglish, as Ayre enthused this week, was the key appointment that instantly lifted the Anfield mood, embodying for Liverpool fans the "spirit of Shankly" they felt Hicks's and Gillett's misrule drained out. "I wasn't convinced when we arrived that Kenny should be back managing," Henry reflected. "Kenny and Damien were calculated gambles. They both have the advantage of being passionate about their work and are both very clever. We didn't feel we had a lot of time to wait, and we hope things turned around."

They did, dramatically, even before the January transfer window in which Liverpool sold Fernando Torres to Chelsea for £50m, signed Luis Suárez for £22m – a high-quality arrival for which Dalglish has credited Comolli – then Carroll, for that £35m Dalglish still finds himself defending, quite impatiently, after every match. In the summer Liverpool spent again, £20m each for Downing and Henderson, £7.5m to Blackpool for Adam, £6m for left-back José Enrique, which many believe to be the best deal. Because of Comolli's presence, many have inferred there must be some statistical shrewdness to these signings, but Henry said it is not so simple. "Everyone is fixated on Moneyball or sabermetrics [an approach to using baseball statistics, which the book documents]. But football is too dynamic to focus on that. Ultimately you have to rely on your scouting."


Many in football remain staggered that Liverpool, with new owners famed in the US for analytical rigour, paid Newcastle so much for Carroll who had at the time played 18 Premier League matches. Some believe that huge fee sent a signal that Liverpool were now flush, and raised the prices for Henderson and Downing, while Adam, a fine playmaker in Blackpool's energetic 4-3-3 last season, faces a challenge adapting in Liverpool's four-man midfield. Asked if Liverpool did overpay for Carroll and the other players, Henry suggested the new owners did, to reassure fans: "There was a lot of criticism in Boston that we weren't going to spend money on the Red Sox after we did the Liverpool transaction," Henry explained. "Then there was the fear we wouldn't spend in Liverpool. Hopefully the fans of both clubs will eventually see what we see clearly – that there is nothing to fear from the existence of the other club."

Asked about Carl Crawford, the expensive Red Sox signing who attracted most criticism for poor performances this season, Henry said Crawford had only "had a bad year". But he then acknowledged: "Choosing players in any sport is an imperfect science. We certainly have been guilty of overspending on some players and that can be tied to an analytical approach that hasn't worked well enough."

At White Hart Lane, the new signings were outclassed principally by Parker, who cost Spurs £5.5m. Liverpool recovered with a 2-1 victory over Wolves in which the central midfield again did not dominate, against Karl Henry and Jamie O'Hara. Then against 10-man Everton in the Merseyside derby – Jack Rodwell, who was effectively cancelling out Adam, having been incorrectly sent off – it was still only after Adam and Downing went off , andwere replaced by Steven Gerrard and Craig Bellamy that Liverpool finally made their breakthrough, Carroll scoring his first goal of the season. A thorough assessment of the players signed, Dalglish's return to management and his partnership with Comolli, which Henry said works "remarkably well," has a long way to go.

The same can be said of solving the Anfield stadium conundrum, the reason why the former majority shareholder, David Moores, and then chief executive, Rick Parry, said they needed to sell Liverpool in the first place. They disastrously opted for Hicks and Gillett, who made no progress, but whose £174m purchase made Moores £90m personally for his shares. A year on since their takeover, Fenway are not a great deal closer than any Liverpool hierarchy has been in the near 15 years since Moores and Parry decided a new stadium on Stanley Park was the only option. They were terrified of United, slapping extra tiers up at Old Trafford, whose 76,000 capacity Ayre referred to this week.

Fenway arrived, though, saying they wanted to stay at Anfield, believing they could do at Liverpool's home what they did with Fenway Park, a stunningly high quality and shrewdly lucrative refurbishment. Henry is clear that building a new stadium, for perhaps 15,000 more seats than Anfield, at a price currently estimated at £300m, is an expense to be avoided if possible: "If you build a 70,000-seat stadium it will cost much more than double to build than a 35,000-seater. The higher the seat the more expensive it is to construct."

They have, though, been confounded, as their Anfield predecessors were, by the neighbourhood facts: Anfield is hemmed in by houses. Weiss, and Ginsberg, have now understood that expanding would mean Anfield requiring a larger footprint, which would mean acquiring dozens of houses and knocking them down. Not all residents, defiantly maintaining family life in a desperately run-down neighbourhood pockmarked by boarded-up terraces – some, historically, bought by Liverpool and left empty – will want to sell. There is also "right to light", preventing a bigger stadium shutting out its neighbours' light.

Fenway and Liverpool have spent a year "mapping" both alternatives, and are finding the uncertainties, of potentially being stalled at Anfield, great. They seem somehow surprised that English planning laws protect neighbouring residents so firmly; in America, Weiss believes "eminent domain" laws would be more favourable to a top-level sports team, which local authorities are usually desperate to satisfy. "Approvals are needed, and it is much more complicated," said Weiss. "If all the problems of redeveloping Anfield could be made to go away, we could have a different discussion. But we started out thinking we could refurbish, now we think maybe it will have to be done the other way. But at the moment we don't have a path to Stanley Park."

Fenway's multimillionaire partners do not intend to spend their own money building a stadium; they will borrow cash and ticket prices will inevitably rise to pay for it. Hence the search, so far unfulfilled, for a naming rights partner, whose sponsorship they hope would pay a substantial chunk of the building costs. "I'd like to tell you how it will play out," said Weiss, "but I can't."

It was, therefore, baffling that Werner last week stated publicly they would not consider a shared stadium, an obvious potential solution, because, he said, fans would not stand for it. With Everton, a mile across the park, also wanting a new ground, the income from two clubs' matches and events, and any contribution Everton might make to the construction, could make the difference. Fenway have conducted no poll of fans, nor boldly set out any arguments for a shared stadium, but based this dismissal mostly on already-fixed opinions on fans websites.

The new American owners, who saved a great club from the last American owners, have unquestionably lifted Liverpool's mood, spent partnership money to ballast the club, appointed Dalglish and sanctioned huge spending on players. But a year on it remains difficult to see quite how Liverpool are better off than in February 2007, before any takeover. Then the club had little debt and was heading to another final of the Champions League, which it won in 2005, but faced the same conundrum: how to finance a stadium.

Henry, a disarming money man, softly-spoken, viewing the world through thick spectacles and a lifelong love of baseball, still "rarely" visits Liverpool, given his commitment to the Red Sox. Fenway bridge the Atlantic, he said, by delegating, to Ayre, Dalglish and Comolli, the running of Liverpool, and Fenway do not "override football decisions". Henry knew "virtually nothing" about the world's most popular game before buying one of its greatest names, and he always said it would be a learning curve. He and his partners, dealing with the wreckage of a calamitous September collapse for the Red Sox, must hope buying Liverpool does not turn out to be a curveball. Read part one of David Conn's exclusive interview with John W Henry online


www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/oct/13/john-w-henry-liverpool-boston