Amit Bhatia confirms investment stake in Liverpool Football Club

Amit Bhatia has confirmed that his consortium has secured an investment stake in Liverpool Football Club, completing one of the largest minority stake acquisitions in football history. The deal values the Merseyside club at approximately £4.5 billion, or roughly $6 billion, a figure that would have seemed absurd when Fenway Sports Group picked up Liverpool for about £300 million back in 2010.

That’s a 15x return on paper in 16 years. Not bad for a club that hadn’t won the Premier League when FSG bought it.

The consortium and its backers

Bhatia, who transferred his stake in Queens Park Rangers on the same day he publicly declared interest in Liverpool, is not exactly arriving alone. The consortium includes backing from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and the Mittal family, one of the wealthiest industrial dynasties on the planet.

The group is targeting roughly 30% equity in Liverpool for an estimated £1.35 billion, approximately $1.7 billion. That price tag puts this transaction in the upper echelon of football club stake sales globally.

Bhatia expressed pride in investing alongside FSG, the Boston-based ownership group led by John Henry that has overseen Liverpool’s transformation from perennial underachievers to Premier League and Champions League winners. FSG retains majority control of the club, a pattern they’ve established through incremental stake sales rather than outright divestiture.

This isn’t FSG’s first move to bring in outside capital. In 2023, the group sold a 3% minority stake to Dynasty Equity for under £150 million.

Bhatia’s track record and what comes next

Bhatia is no stranger to English football ownership. His tenure at Queens Park Rangers gave him direct experience navigating the financial and regulatory complexities of running a club, albeit at a different scale than Liverpool.

The jump from QPR to Liverpool is enormous in sporting terms, but Bhatia’s connections to the Mittal family, through his marriage into the steel dynasty, have long positioned him as someone capable of operating at this financial altitude. Lakshmi Mittal, chairman of ArcelorMittal and one of the richest people in the world, has been a background figure in Bhatia’s business ventures for years.

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