The Daily Telegraph today published an article that will have pricked the ears of wary Liverpool fans everywhere.
NEW YORK TIMES TAKES MAJOR STAKE IN LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL CLUB
Gasp! Horror! What’s happening!
A short while after this brazen headline was changed to
NEW YORK TIMES EMERGES AS SECOND LARGEST LIVERPOOL FC SHAREHOLDER
And then
NEW YORK TIMES CONFIRMED AS SECOND LARGEST LIVERPOOL FC SHAREHOLDER
Oh.
Sadly even that final toned down headline was wrong.
Liverpool FC is wholly owned, 100% by Fenway Sports Group, a collection of investors and investor groups who own Fenway Sports Group – the owners of Liverpool FC, Boston Red Sox and NESN – the media channel that operates in the United States.
New York Times Co (a public listed company) owns around 16.5% of FSG, and has recently disposed of 50 of it’s 750 units in the group.
You may have heard recently about LeBron James being given a stake in LFC. This is again incorrect – he was given a stake in Fenway Sports Group.
The World’s richest man
Liverpool fans are rightly interested in the ownership of our football club, but inaccurate and sensationalist headlines do not assist in our analysis.
In fact if we want to continue the tedium of this story we can even suggest that the World’s richest man is involved with Liverpool. Carlos Slim, with a net asset worth of around $75BN is a 7% shareholder in the New York Times Company. But that doesn’t translate to him owning 1.2% of Liverpool FC. Because irrespective of what you read Fenway still directly own 100% of Liverpool FC.
So we would like to suggest a third revision to the Daily Telegraph’s headline.
NEW YORK TIMES STILL (LIKE FOR THE PAST 9 YEARS) THE SECOND LARGEST FENWAY SPORTS GROUP INVESTOR
Investors in Fenway Sports Group
The entire list of FSG stakeholders is on Wikipedia, as well as many other articles in the last 9 years.
John W. Henry – Principal Owner
The New York Times Company
Thomas C. Werner – Chairman
David Ginsberg – Vice Chairman
Phillip H. Morse – Vice Chairman
Larry Lucchino – CEO
Theodore Alfond
William Alfond
Thomas R. DiBenedetto
Michael Egan
Michael Gordon
John A. Kaneb
Seth Klarman
Henry F. McCance
Art Nicholas
Frank Resnek
Martin Trust
Jeffrey Vinik
Add Lebron James to that too.