A consortium that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is nearing an agreement to buy a stake of about one-third in Premier League club Liverpool, according to multiple media reports Monday, in a transaction that would rank among the largest deals in the history of professional sports ownership.
The investor group also includes Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and is being led by Amit Bhatia, a businessman and former shareholder in English second-tier club Queens Park Rangers who is the son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Reuters reported.
Sky News, which first reported on the advanced state of talks, said Liverpool's controlling owner, Fenway Sports Group, could announce the deal as soon as this week.
The yet-to-be-confirmed deal would value Liverpool at roughly £4.4 billion, or about $5.9 billion, one of the highest valuations ever placed on a football club. A deal at that scale would underscore how sharply the club's value has climbed since its 2010 acquisition by Fenway Sports Group.
Neither Liverpool nor FSG has commented publicly on the reports.
Bezos, whose fortune stands at roughly $280 billion, has not previously been closely tied to professional sports ownership despite his profile as the world's third-richest person. Saverin, whose net worth Forbes puts at roughly $32 billion to $33 billion, was part of a group that made an unsuccessful bid for Chelsea during that club's 2022 sale process.
Liverpool emerged victorious in last year's Premier League but has since lost manager Arne Slot and forward Mohamed Salah. Michael Edwards, credited with building the squad that delivered Liverpool's first league title in three decades in 2020, departed his role as FSG's chief executive of football in July, Reuters reported.
JPMorgan Private Bank's 2025 Principal Discussions Report, which surveyed 111 billionaire family-office principals with a combined net worth of more than $500 billion, found that 20% now hold controlling stakes in sports teams, up from just 6% in 2022. About a third of the families surveyed have invested more broadly in sports teams or stadiums, JPMorgan said, a share that now tops their allocations to fine art and classic cars.
According to the Ross-Arctos Sports Franchise Index, a joint project of Arctos Partners and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, major North American sports franchises generated annualized returns of 13.2% over the past two decades and 16.9% over the past year alone, outpacing most other asset classes the index tracks. Citi Private Bank has responded by building out a dedicated sports advisory practice, with John Hutcheson, who leads the effort, framing teams and leagues as the connective tissue between buyers and sellers of sports assets across banking and wealth management.
Private equity has expanded further into the space after the NFL cleared institutional investors to take minority positions, and such transactions now account for close to half of global sports deals, according to an analysis from law firm Akin.
Fans of the beautiful game are not exactly rallying behind the expansion of private equity into sports. Late last month, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, found himself at the center of a firestorm after a proposal to sell stakes in future World Cup profits was met with backlash and condemnation from soccer associations across Asia, Europe, and North America.
“Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place,” Infantino said in a statement confirming that the plan would not push through.
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