When Chelsea were put up for sale earlier this year as a result of sanctions placed upon former owner Roman Abramovich it kick started a bidding war the likes of which English football had never seen before.
Teams in the so-called 'big six' of the Premier League hit the market very rarely. The tenure of ownership among Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur before the Todd Boely-led consortia acquired the Stamford Bridge club stood at a cumulative 97 years, an average length of ownership across those teams of 16 years.
The sale of Chelsea to Boehly, Clearlake Capital and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss closed at around £2.5bn, with a further £1.75bn committed to funding infrastructure development projects at the club. That deal was finalised in May, bringing an end to 19 years of Abramovich's spell in London, an era that changed the landscape of the English game forever.
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Speaking at the Financial Times' US Business of Sport Summit in New York last month, Colin Neville of the Raine Group, the US firm that was tasked with finding a buyer for Chelsea, said: "When we sold Chelsea earlier this year we had people from six out of the seven continents, all the continents besides Antarctica, looking to buy the club.
"We had some of the richest people in the world and in countries that would surprise a lot of people.
"In respect to assets like Chelsea there is a world of have and have not in the Premier League. There are six power clubs that really don't come up for sale, and several of them are owned by countries at this point. That deal was partially situation specific because it was Chelsea, in London, hadn't been sold for 20 years had this history of incredible success on the pitch.
"The broader situation due to the Ukraine situation created an intensity like I have never seen in my career, and hope to never see again. Once these one of a kind, once in a lifetime kind of assets come up there will be a tremendous amount of interest.
"These are global businesses.
"These are still under-monetised leagues. The Premier League is still the biggest league and the biggest sport in the world and it is significantly under-monetised relative to what it should be."
The interest in Chelsea and the subsequent fee that was paid to acquire it by Boehly's consortia has piqued the interest of existing owners, giving the first solid insight into the true market value of big six teams outside of simply relying on Forbes valuations, largely calculated via the method of a multiple of revenue. The total value of the Chelsea deal, when including the commitment to funding the £1.75bn infrastructure developments, takes the total to £4.25bn.
It is a little over a fortnight since Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group were revealed to have opened themselves up to offers to take the club off their hands. While the initial stance, confirmed by well placed sources in the US to the ECHO, is one that is more open to continuing as custodians of the football club and selling an equity stake, the fact that the owners would be willing to sell the club shows how buoyant they feel the market is, with sports proving a remarkably resilient asset class despite the macro-economic landscape at present.
The ECHO understands that a sum of around $4bn (£3.4bn) is around where FSG place the valuation of the club right now, although they would be seeking to push that figure higher around a full sale.
FSG have run the club in a sustainable fashion, something that hasn't always played well to some supporters given it has seen them somewhat hamstrung when it comes to competing with their more free-spending rivals among the top six.
But a strong balance sheet, predicted revenues of over £600m for the first time ever when the financials for 2021/22 are published early next year, investment in infrastructure having been significant through development of Anfield and the building of a new £50m training facility in Kirkby mean that should someone acquire the club in its entirety from FSG they would be purchasing a side already primed for success. There would, however, need to be considerable spend in the transfer market in order to address squad deficiencies and an ageing team in order for them to maintain their presence in challenging for the top honours and, crucially, their involvement in the Champions League year after year.
The availability of someone like Liverpool on the market has created a buzz of interest, with major US banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley tasked with fielding interest, while Mike Gordon, so long FSG's point man in Liverpool, having transitioned from his role and passed over responsibilities to Reds CEO Billy Hogan while Gordon heads up the search for investment or potential sale of the club.
Many of those who were in the running for Chelsea but lost out, the likes of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment and former Reds chairman Sir Martin Broughton; Boston Celtics and Atalanta owner Stephen Pagliuca; and wealth funds from the Middle East have all been linked. There will be more consortia featuring high net worth individuals and private equity firms with an interest in investing in sport that will be keeping a close eye.
But a market that was barren for so long, with no team having been sold before Chelsea in the top six since Liverpool were acquired by FSG (then New England Sports Ventures) in 2010 for £300m, is now fertile, as the huge rise in valuations across the past decade having prompted owners to reassess their positions and think whether the growth will continue to be on such an incline, or whether getting out now represents the best chance of the most lucrative return on their investments.
On Tuesday evening it was revealed that Manchester United's deeply unpopular owners, the Glazer family, who had acquired the club via a leveraged buyout back in 2005 and continued to plunge it further into debt while the club failed on the pitch and investment into infrastructure was not forthcoming, were also open to offers.
Like FSG, United's owners are open to both offers of an equity sale or a full takeover, but it is understood that they are leaning towards the latter given the major need for them to raise funds for a crucial redevelopment of a dilapidated Old Trafford and the continued financing of the club in the transfer market to try and return it to former glories that have been absent since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager back in 2013.
Figures as high as £5bn have been quoted around a United sale, the club, who are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, having seen a surge in share price since it emerged that the Glazers were willing to part company with them for the right price, or at least ready to accept further outside investment to aid their growth.
It has been a challenging decade for United. After Ferguson's departure the club are on their fifth manager and their haphazard approach to the transfer market, void of any real strategy, has seen them fall away from the likes of Manchester City and Liverpool with their noses pushed out of the top four conversation regularly.
Former vice-chairman Ed Woodward famously told investors on a call that the club didn't need to perform on the pitch to achieve commercial success, something that held true for a while. But where United were undoubtedly the biggest juggernaut of English football on the world stage their failures on the pitch have seen them fall into decline, something that has now impacted revenues.
From record revenues of £627.1m for 2018/19, United's revenues dropped to £494.1m for last season, the club having been impacted to a far greater degree than Liverpool when it came to the financial effects of the pandemic. Liverpool have outpaced them for revenue growth and have now overtaken them, something set to continue when the Reds reveal their financial results in early 2023.
But United remains a truly global brand, and with them arriving on the market at the same time as Liverpool it dilutes the pool of potential bidders, with those who had been interested in Liverpool likely to be opportunistic and assess the options available to them when it comes to Manchester United. Two of English football's biggest teams, both global powerhouses with enormous reach, will attract plenty of attention for those with deep pockets and a vision of how football will be greater monetised in the future.
FSG pressing the button on opening themselves up to investment or a full sale will have undoubtedly emboldened the Glazers to test the waters themselves, although a decision of this magnitude wouldn't have been done on a whim. Seeing the strength of the market and where they sit in it will provide them with some answers as to whether cashing in is best now or holding on for further growth and not leaving any money on the table is the best course of action.
But with two of the biggest US ownership groups in sport both considering an exit from the Premier League, does that serve as a warning that they feel the rapid growth is set to slow down, and the failure to implement structural change through the European Super League and Project Big Picture has impeded their prospects to grow their assets they way that they truly want to?
"Fenway getting out would be a significant signal to the market, it would signal to some that the party was over in some ways," economist Stefan Szymanski, author of the lauded 'Soccernomics' and the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, told the ECHO.
"We have seen a lot of investment into Europe, a lot of it from the US and through private equity. It strikes me that a lot of what happened here is part of it pandemic related. The pandemic devastated European football's bottom line, according to UEFA the total lost revenues were in the region of €5bn. That created a huge hole, and if you take a huge hole out of football clubs they are basically bust. They were more or less bust going into COVID.
"That meant that there was an opportunity for the gap to be filled by capital from private equity. People have been coming in and buying assets on the cheap. On the other side of that, private equity has been sitting on a boat load of money because the people who profited from COVID were businesses that had huge handouts, and a lot of that money has gone into private equity. There is a natural marriage between the capital and where the capital is short.
"The whole premise of private equity is go in, hang around five years and get out. Restructure the business, cut costs, refocus on your core activities and then sell out. The problem with that is the economic structure of European football doesn't allow you to do that. What are you going to do to cut costs, sign crap players?
"In the 1990s there were a lot of clubs that floated on the London Stock Exchange because Manchester United had been such a success. Investors thought 'yay, football, this will be a huge success'. It wasn't, Manchester United were exceptional not typical, the typical thing is you spend it all on players. That is what happened and now nearly all those clubs are no longer on the stock exchange.
"What might happen is these private equity guys might go in and in five years time realise that there is no money in it. What that says to me is that the source of this investment will disappear when that realisation sinks in, so the likelihood that American private equity coming in will be a fairly short-lived phenomenon until they learn the lessons that generations have learned going in to football not knowing."
For FSG there will now be something of a tougher battle to attract investors or would-be new owners given that another rare asset has made itself available for purchase. That may force them to rethink their strategy somewhat. The scarcity value that exists within English football's top six is something very real, but the potential sale of two assets valued at a potential £8bn-plus combined would require an extremely fertile sports investment market, and one that would be able to attract those with the deepest pockets. Some of those have already ruled themselves out.
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