It's a little over year since Fenway Sports Group and RedBall Acquisitions stepped back from plans that would have seen FSG taken public on the stock market.
Liverpool owners FSG had been seeking additional investment into the business to provide them with the capital to pursue business growth despite the financial pressures that had been placed upon them and the rest of the football world by the impact of the pandemic.
When special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) formed by US financier Gerry Cardinale and baseball analytics guru Billy Beane in the summer of 2020, it was done so with the intention of investing in sports.
RedBall and FSG had been in talks for some months over a potential 20 to 25 per cent purchase of a part of the Fenway empire by Cardinale and Beane's SPAC, something that would have seen FSG and its sporting properties that included Liverpool, the Boston Red Sox and RFK Racing all become part of that.
But as the SPAC phenomenon boomed and its 'in and out' nature not chiming with what Cardinale and Beane were about, as well institutional investors unable to reach a consensus over the valuation placed upon FSG, and a growing reluctance to take the business public due to the nature of the market at the time, the decision was taken to end talks in late January 2021.
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But Cardinale stayed at the table with his RedBird Capital Partners private equity firm, who clinched a $750m deal for 11 per cent of FSG in March of last year. FSG remained private and the value of the business has grown significantly in the last 12 months.
According to Forbes, who published its 2022 list of world sports most valuable empires, FSG have climbed one position and are now inside the top three, with an overall value of $9.8bn (£7.2bn).
Compared to the 2021 list, FSG have seen a $3.2bn (£2.3bn) rise in the value of their empire, according to Forbes. That represents a rise of 48 per cent year-on-year.
That rise saw them leapfrog Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, with the gap closed on the second-placed sporting empire, Stan Kroenke's Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which owns Arsenal, the Denver Nuggets NBA team and the Los Angeles Rams NFL franchise. That gap has been closed from $2.1bn to $700m.
The uncertainty around sport that was created by COVID-19 was a major part of thinking at the time of the FSG/RedBall talks, and RedBall ended up moving away from using the fund to invest directly in a sports team and instead acquired the ticketing platform SeatGeek, taking it public.
"We approached it through the SPAC because the other angle I wanted to bring into this as a guy who has been playing around with sports for 20 years, is that I thought it was about time for that kind of permanent capital, that institutional capital to come into sport and that we could be a catalyst for that," Cardinale told the Financial Times' US Business of Sport Summit in New York in October.
"The reality is that the SPAC phenomenon really started to take over, and the SPAC phenomenon is not right for sports right now.
"The SPAC phenomenon is that there is a certain type of capital that is in there and they are in there for a quick hit and come out. It is what it is.
"From when we started to today a lot has gone on and a flood has capital has come in and a lot of companies have been bought, and I don't agree with a lot of it.
"The SPAC for us was a toolbox and it was very easy for us, we had a view on valuation and we love the Fenway Sports Group ownership and management team, unparalleled globally, and as we started to learn more about SPACs we just moved it right over to our fund and made a $750m investment out of RedBird."
Given what has transpired with football clubs that are publicly listed over the past 12 months it seems like it was the right call.
The trend of the stock exchange indices over the past two has shown that, for European football clubs, the trend has been a near continuous downward one.
According to insights presented by US sports business website Sportico, European football has seen the greatest index decline in the sports eco-system, seeing a 41 per cent slump since the onset of the pandemic in February of 2020.
Clubs such as Manchester United, AS Roma, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Celtic and Juventus are among those to be publicly listed.
United's share price was trading at $19.98 a share in January 2020, prior to the impact of COVID-19 on financial markets, but by mid February it was trading at $13.69 a share, wiping hundreds of millions off the clubs value.
And while some bounce back occurred in line with fans returning to stadiums and even Cristiano Ronaldo's return to the club, the share price has never truly recovered and stands at $13.60 a share as of February 16, having fallen to a low of $13.35 last month.
John Hutcheson, managing director and head of Citi Sports Advisory, told Sportico: "Teams were losing money and they had debt and liability obligations to pay.
"In order to meet those obligations, a lot of them had to do capital calls, capital raises and rescue rights issuances, which increased equity dilution and put pressure on share prices."
No European team lost more from their share value than Juventus over that period, with their price falling by 57 per cent.
FSG and RedBall's decision to step away from the deal that had been proposed paved the way for private investment into the business which has, in turn, created increased value of the overall FSG empire and allowed for them to acquire new sporting teams such as the Pittsburgh Penguins, as well as spend money on infrastructure projects such as the Anfield Road End redevelopment and the multi-million dollar work that is going on around Fenway Park Stadium in Boston to transform the area's real estate.
There are few clubs that are listed on the stock market that have done much in the way of investing in future growth since the onset of the pandemic.
And as a lack of success on the pitch continues to hurt Manchester United it threatens their appeal to investors and risks their share price falling even further, especially if they were to miss out on the Champions League this season.
