FSG and Liverpool at 15: Why they are likely to remain for the long term

The Liverpool owners have overseen remarkable growth of the club

Where does the time go, hey?

This week marks 15 years since Liverpool Football Club were involved in one of the most dramatic takeovers in football history, one where the stakes couldn’t have been higher, and one where the trajectory of the club changed forever.

Back in October 2010, the club was staring down the barrel of administration, buried under a mountain of debt, £237m of it due to Royal Bank of Scotland to be precise, and tangled in legal chaos, with the deeply unpopular former owners of Tom Hicks and George Gillett facing huge fan ire for their near ruinous running of the club, taking it to the brink of bankruptcy, something that barely seems believable as we sit here in 2025, where the main problems are how to integrate £125m Alexander Isak and £116.5m Florian Wirtz into a new look attack.

Hicks and Gillett were forced into selling Liverpool, placing the club up for sale in April of 2010 after their leveraged ownership model collapsed under mounting debt issues. The American duo had borrowed heavily to finance their £174m takeover of the club in 2007, but by 2010, they were unable to repay the RBS loan, thus sparking a race to the finish line for prospective new owners.

Gillett had already defaulted on a separate £75m loan, resulting in his shares being seized by Mill Financial, a US hedge fund, while Hicks, meanwhile, scrambled to sell his stake to Mill Financial in a last-ditch effort to retain control. But with the club facing administration and the Premier League refusing to recognise Mill Financial as a legitimate buyer, the board—led by chairman Sir Martin Broughton—pushed through a sale to New England Sports Ventures, now, of course, better known as Fenway Sports Group.

The financial pressure and legal dead ends left Hicks and Gillett with no viable path to hold on, and they would be defeated on a sale of the club to FSG, with Broughton, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre voting in favour of a sale, while Hicks and Gillett voted against, desperately trying to retain control.

Hicks even filed a restraining order in a Dallas court and attempted a last-minute handoff to Mill Financial, but the Premier League wasn’t having it and the High Court in London shut down the legal block. Present to witness the occasion was the softly spoken, reclusive figure of John W. Henry, FSG’s supremo, a man who has retained that same level of mystery and intrigue throughout the past 15 years.

With their options running out, Hicks and Gillett dropped the restraining order and watched the club slip from their grasp. Their lawyer called it “tragic,” but for Liverpool fans, it was anything but. RBS welcomed the sale, the courts dismissed further claims as “abusive,” and FSG officially took the reins on October 15, 2010.

So, that’s how it all came about. For Reds reading who lived and breathed every moment of this saga as it played out, it is a tale they will know well. You’ll also know what has transpired in the past 15 years, the successes, the failures, the missteps, the euphoria, and the despair. Anfield has changed for the better, the team has changed for the better, the structure of the football club has changed for the better, and the prospects for the future changed for the better.

This is a football club that competes for the greatest prizes that world club football has to offer again, and while you can’t please all of the people all of the time, if one were to look at this objectively, zooming out from the noise around net spend and transfer windows, if you were to rate FSG’s homework, so to speak, then it should really score higher than most other owners in European football over the same time period.

The idea around infoRED, and why I’m passionate about it, is that I’m not aiming to tell readers what you already know. There are a myriad other places you can read wonderful writing about Liverpool Football Club and its rich tapestry of stories from on and off the pitch. For me, the aim is to make what has for so long been seen as the rather dry topic of football finance accessible, interesting and relevant to what is happening at Liverpool now and in the future, and how it will directly impact what happens on the pitch, which is the only place that truly matters.

This isn’t about FSG’s last 15 years, this is about what happens in the next 15, if indeed they decide to stay that long as owners of the football club. It aims to debunk some of the myths that exist around their motives and what the future might hold for the owners and the club itself.

So, here we are. It’s launch day for infoRED. It’s Monday, October 12, and this week it has been 15 years to the day since FSG acquired Liverpool. It seems an apt place to start this particular journey.

But where are Liverpool at right now? What does the current state of play look like, and what do we know that gives us some clues as to what the next few years might bring.