Assessing 15 Years Of FSG And Liverpool FC After Owners’ Message

Wednesday marked 15 years since Fenway Sports Group bought English Premier League club Liverpool FC. As part of the anniversary, three members of FSG, Liverpool’s principal owner John W. Henry, club chairman Tom Werner, and FSG president Mike Gordon published a message on the club’s website.

It looked back on FSG’s 15 years at the club, reflected on certain achievements, looked ahead to the future, and even mentioned how they learned from some of the mistakes made since buying the club in 2010.

FSG, then known as New England Sports Ventures, bought the club from Tom Hicks and George Gillett. The club was in dire straits at the time, and reports of it being close to administration were not exaggerated.

Liverpool FC was on the brink. Following the first game after FSG bought the club—a 2-0 defeat against local rivals Everton a few months into the 2010/11 season—LFC was second from bottom in 19th place, with only goal difference keeping it off 20th.

There’s no doubt that FSG saw a business opportunity to buy a huge sporting institution at its lowest ebb, but it also recognized a sporting project that was ripe for a rebuild. Though the “Moneyball” term that originated in baseball is applied to the signing of players undervalued by others for various reasons, many of the same ideas apply to FSG’s purchase of Liverpool.

Club Culture

This was a sleeping giant whose historic Anfield stadium has not only been kept as part of FSG’s ownership, but has been invested in, redeveloped, and improved to fit the modern era. It has also developed a brand new training ground in Kirkby, while the historic Melwood training ground is now used by the Liverpool women’s team.

While many other clubs have built new stadiums on new sites (and there were threats under the previous ownership that Liverpool would need to do the same), Liverpool was able to retain this link to its past and to a stadium it has played in for its entire 133-year history.

Anfield is an FSG Liverpool success story that combines club culture and business, but there have been several occasions where these two things have clashed.

“Off the field, there have been times we’ve got things wrong,” FSG admitted in Wednesday’s message. “We know that and we have learned from it. All our decisions are made with the best, long-term interests of the club at the center of our thinking.”

These will include things like attempts to raise ticket prices, a central involvement in the proposed creation of a European Super League, moves to trademark the word Liverpool, and an unpopular decision to furlough club staff during Covid.

The Super League was perhaps the biggest misstep, and led to a very public and open apology from John W. Henry. The nature of the apology itself, not done via the media but through the club’s own channels, was an unusual move for a soccer club owner at this level of the game and indeed for an owner at this level of business in any industry.

For all the errors of judgment, FSG has tended to listen to supporters and work to either reverse their decisions or come to some kind of meeting point.

Transfers and Moneyball Ideas

The criticism from fans lucky enough to regularly attend games at Anfield has always tended to focus on these practical issues affecting supporters, or cultural issues that affect the club’s heritage.

Away from this, mostly in the online bubble of social media algorithms and echo chambers, there has also been plenty of criticism around the way FSG has run the club on the field, especially when it comes to a perceived lack of spending on players via the transfer market.

FSG has not been without its recruitment mistakes during its time as Liverpool’s owner, but many of the criticisms in this area are unfounded and, as shown this summer, FSG does spend big when needed.

Statistical output in soccer is a lot less straightforward than that of baseball and open to far more variables, but soccer is still very much a game of Moneyball, especially in the fine margins and at the top level.

Money spent on wages tends to correlate strongly with the success of a soccer club, but spending money is not in itself a guarantee of success.

Many Premier League teams have come and gone as challengers at the upper end of the Premier League table during FSG’s 15-year tenure, and some of these opponents have spent lots of money for little to no return.

It took some time for Liverpool to settle under FSG, and there were some hiccups early on, but the signs were there that the ideas were right, even if, for various reasons, they weren’t always executed properly.

The Klopp Effect

FSG finally found the perfect manager for their methods in Jürgen Klopp.

Klopp himself was identified and hired partly thanks to statistics. The German’s managerial qualities were not a secret, but some poor results and form in his final season with Borussia Dortmund had raised a few doubts.

Nevertheless, most top clubs in world soccer would have jumped at the chance to hire him, but Liverpool made sure it was the club to do so.

They were able to partly because they confirmed Klopp’s own instincts that his final season with Dortmund was actually still quite good, and he had been unlucky in certain key moments and games. Klopp liked that FSG not only understood that, but were also able to explain it, using underlying data, in a way that Klopp himself hadn’t previously been able to. They identified, using data, the key moments of bad luck Klopp had experienced in that final Dortmund season.

Klopp was still unlucky at times with Liverpool. “Of course, there have been tough times too,” FSG included in its message. “We’ve lost finals and missed out by the smallest of margins,” but the club now had the ideal blend of research and application.

Klopp’s Liverpool was also unlucky in that it came up against one of the most powerful clubs English football has seen in Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, but this Liverpool era saw the rare example in football of top man management and coaching working in tandem with recruitment and sports science.

There were some similarities with City in a sporting sense, and, hanging over from their spells at Dortmund and Bayern respectively, the approaches of Klopp and Guardiola defined the way soccer was and is played and discussed, and their methods during this competitive rivalry continue to influence the wider game.

Liverpool’s FSG-installed data analysts and researchers tended to highlight players Klopp liked. It often backed up what Klopp saw in players, and even when it didn’t, unlike many managers, he was open to being convinced.

Trophies and Ownership/Club Fit

It is almost impossible to be perfect in football recruitment, but from a sporting sense, FSG has been about as good an owner as a club like Liverpool could have in this moment, where top-level football is unavoidably a business. It made sure, for the most part, that the sport remained at the forefront, even if there have been occasional cultural missteps in the name of business.

Under FSG’s ownership, Liverpool has won two Premier League titles, the first of which in 2020 was its first in 30 years, the Champions League in 2019, the FA Cup in 2022, the League Cup in 2012, 2022, and 2024, and the Club World Cup in 2019.

FSG has notably used the word “custodians” in its 15th anniversary message, and this is what owners of these historic clubs, even those involved in the lucrative business of soccer at the top level, should be.

Ironically, Liverpool’s stuttered start to a new season in which it has spent more money than ever backs up the more cautious and measured approach to the transfer market often preferred by FSG, but it also hints that it should have begun parts of this rebuild slightly earlier.

It has tested both extremes in the balance between signing no players, as it did in its most recent Premier League title win last year under Klopp’s replacement, Arne Slot, and by potentially upsetting the first team too much by signing six potential starters this year.

It is too early to judge the new season, but the 15 years of FSG’s tenure can be judged.

The club’s return to the top of the Premier League, producing, under one of the game’s era-defining managers and arguably Liverpool’s best-ever team, all while remaining in its historic Anfield home, has to go down as a success. The big test now is sustaining that level.