Liverpool owners close to £1.35bn sale of 30% stake to consortium including Jeff Bezos

£1.35bn for a 30% stake

The transaction being negotiated implies a total enterprise value of roughly £4.5bn for Liverpool, based on the £1.35bn price tag for nearly a third of the club. That valuation places the Merseyside outfit in the upper tier of football's most expensive clubs, behind only a handful of privately negotiated comparables. The consortium structure spreads the capital commitment across multiple billionaires, reducing any single party's exposure while ensuring enough financial firepower to push the deal across the line. According to the Guardian, Deloitte has advised on the transaction, signalling the kind of institutional rigour expected of a deal at this scale.

The buyer consortium is led by Amit Bhatia, whose family ties to Lakshmi Mittal make him one of the more prominent Indian-origin dealmakers in European football; he was previously a shareholder at Queens Park Rangers. Eduardo Saverin, who built his fortune as a co-founder of Facebook, brings both Silicon Valley capital and a long-standing interest in sport. Bezos's entry, however, is the headline act: the Amazon founder has a personal fortune of around $257bn according to Forbes, making the football stake a rounding error on his balance sheet but a strategically meaningful one given Amazon's sports ambitions.

Fenway Sports Group's era since 2010

FSG acquired Liverpool in 2010, taking over a club that had been drifting both on and off the pitch. The 16-year tenure has included two Premier League titles and the steady rebuilding of the squad's commercial operations. This is not the first time FSG has opened the door to outside capital: in 2023, the US private equity firm Dynasty Equity bought 3% of the club, setting a template for minority stake sales. Selling a much larger slice now is consistent with that pattern but at a meaningfully different scale.

The summer of 2026 has been one of upheaval regardless of the equity story. Andoni Iraola replaced Arne Slot as head coach, Mohamed Salah departed on a free transfer and joined Trabzonspor, and chief executive officer Michael Edwards left his role at FSG. A fresh injection of capital could, in theory, fund squad rebuilding and infrastructure investment at a moment when both appear to be needed. FSG declined to comment when approached.

Bezos's pivot into European football

Bezos has no prior football investments but has previously looked into bidding for NFL franchises. According to Forbes, his wealth ranks him the fourth-richest person in the world. The personal investment in Liverpool sits alongside Amazon's corporate sports strategy: the retailer held live UK rights to 20 Premier League matches each season for six seasons until the end of last year, and continues to broadcast the Champions League in several European countries as well as the NFL in the US.

The arrangement gives Bezos equity in a club whose games Amazon already broadcasts in some territories, creating a potential alignment between personal and corporate interests. Whether the two are formally coordinated or simply convergent is unclear from the article. What is clear is that European football's largest clubs continue to attract capital from figures whose primary businesses sit outside the sport, and that the line between sports ownership and sports broadcasting is becoming increasingly porous.