This week, Liverpool’s success on the pitch translated into a huge return for Henry’s Fenway Sports Group. The club, which carries little debt, has been valued at more than $7bn in a stake sale to a group of investors led by Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of steel tycoon and billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin are backers. Will McDonough, founder of merchant bank Corestone Capital, made the introductions that led to the deal. Talks accelerated during the World Cup. A key moment came when Henry and Bhatia met at Zero Bond, a private club in New York, and built their rapport, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The powerful consortium has bought around a third of the club and could increase its stake over time. The valuation sets a new record for a football club, surpassing the $6.3bn enterprise value ascribed to Manchester United when Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a 25 per cent stake in 2024. There is a growin...
US financiers Todd Boehly and Mark Walter are in talks to sell their stakes in Chelsea Football Club to majority owner Clearlake Capital, according to the Financial Times. Any deal would potentially help to resolve long-running tensions among the Premier League club’s ownership group, which acquired it for £2.5bn in 2022 when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was forced to sell in the wake of sanctions imposed on him following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since buying Chelsea, Boehly and Walter’s side of the consortium has clashed with Clearlake over strategy. While Clearlake owns more than 60 per cent of Chelsea, it shares joint control and equal governance of Chelsea FC with Boehly, who chairs the club. The talks come after years of on-and-off negotiations between the two sides, but it was not yet certain that a deal would be struck, the people said. The revived negotiations also come as Walter has sought to sell other high-profile assets as his business empire f...