Jeff Bezos does not buy things on sentiment. So when Sky News reported that a consortium including the Amazon founder is close to buying roughly a third of Liverpool FC, the number attached to the deal mattered more than the name: a valuation of about $5.9 billion (£4.4 billion). One of the largest ever put on a football club.
The group reportedly includes Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and is led by Amit Bhatia, a former Queens Park Rangers shareholder. Fenway Sports Group, which has owned Liverpool since 2010, would keep control. Neither the club nor FSG has commented, and the deal could still change shape before it's announced.
But step back from the headline and a more interesting question appears. FSG paid about $480 million (£300 million) for Liverpool sixteen years ago. If the reported valuation holds, the club is now worth more than twelve times that. What happened? And why are the wealthiest investors on the planet lining up to pay record prices for football clubs?
The asset class hiding in plain sight
Bezos has circled sport before. He reportedly explored bids for the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and Washington Commanders and walked away from both. Amazon, meanwhile, pays billions to stream Thursday Night Football and is a partner in the NBA's new media deal. He has seen the economics of live sport from the buyer's side of the rights table for years. Now he's moving to the ownership side.
The returns explain why. According to the Ross-Arctos Sports Franchise Index, teams in the four major North American leagues returned 16.9% over the past year and 13.2% annualized over two decades, beating nearly every other asset class, Front Office Sports reports. In 2025 alone, the record for the most valuable team sale was broken twice in three months: the Boston Celtics at $6.1 billion, then the Los Angeles Lakers at $10 billion. The New York Giants topped $10 billion in a minority-stake sale weeks later.
Three forces keep pushing prices up:
Scarcity. There are 30 NBA teams, 32 NFL teams, and exactly one Liverpool. You cannot start a competitor to a 130-year-old club. When supply is fixed and demand grows, price is the only thing that moves.
Guaranteed media money. The NBA's new media deal is worth $77 billion. The NFL's runs to $111 billion over eleven years. Broadcast contracts turn a football club into something rare: a business with locked-in, decade-long revenue visibility. As one Goldman Sachs executive put it, investors know exactly what they're buying.
New kinds of buyers. The NFL opened its doors to private equity in 2024, and minority stakes now let owners raise money without giving up control, which is exactly the structure FSG is reportedly using with the Bezos group. More than half of NBA and NFL teams have considered similar sales.
The decade European clubs 2.5x'd their value
Football's version of this story is even steeper than "doubled." Football Benchmark's 2025 report values Europe's 32 most valuable clubs at a combined $75 billion (€64.7 billion), up 146% since 2016. That's a 10.5% compound annual growth rate, sustained through a pandemic that emptied every stadium in Europe for a year.
Inside that number:
- Real Madrid became the first club valued above $7 billion (€6 billion), and the first anywhere in football to top $1 billion in annual revenue.
- Seventeen clubs now carry billion-dollar valuations. In 2016, fewer than half as many did.
- Arsenal grew 29% in a single year. Aston Villa, not long ago a mid-table side, grew 42%.
One number in that report matters more than the rest. In 2016, clubs were valued at an average of 3.4 times their revenue. In 2025, the multiple is 4.9 times. Revenues grew, and on top of that, the price investors will pay for each dollar of revenue grew too.
What Bezos is actually buying
A revenue multiple climbing that fast means investors believe club revenues are not only growing but becoming more predictable and more expandable. And the source of that belief is the fan.
A football supporter is the most loyal customer in any industry. Nobody switches from Liverpool to Everton because of a bad season. Kids inherit the club from their parents like a surname. In business terms: near-zero churn and pricing power no consumer brand can manufacture. Top-10 clubs now earn nearly half their revenue commercially, from sponsorship, merchandise and partnerships, and all of it is priced on the size and intensity of the fanbase.
For most of football history, that loyalty was invisible. A club knew who bought season tickets and shirts. It knew almost nothing about the supporter watching every match from a pub in Singapore or a living room in Cairo. The last decade changed that. Streaming and engagement data turned the global, uncounted fanbase into something a club can actually see and measure. That's the gap between a 3.4x multiple and a 4.9x one: the money is betting that fan relationships, properly measured, are worth far more than clubs currently extract.
Bezos built Amazon on a simple idea: know your customer better than anyone, then compound that advantage for decades. A club with a global fanbase and sixteen years of engagement infrastructure underneath it is about the most Bezos-shaped asset sport has ever produced.
Your club is in the same business
Which brings us to clubs whose valuations have no billionaires attached. The force driving prices at the top, visible and measurable fan relationships, works at every level of the pyramid. A 2,000-fan club and a 200-million-fan club are in the same business; only the scale differs.
The clubs climbing fastest, at every level, do three things:
- They count everyone. Not just ticket buyers. The supporter watching from a partner pub, the one following from another country, the family that shows up to every home match. If your club only counts turnstiles, most of your fanbase doesn't exist on paper. (We wrote about this crowd in engaging your diaspora fans.)
- They reward showing up. Attendance is a habit, and habits respond to recognition. Clubs on Game Set Engage run GPS-verified check-in campaigns and reward being at the ground more generously than watching from a venue or from home, with point values the club sets itself.
- They turn engagement into evidence. Sponsors don't pay for vibes; they pay for verified numbers. A season of campaign data (who showed up, where they checked in, how often) is the small-club version of the revenue visibility that has investors writing nine-figure checks at the top. Our guide to getting sponsors for a sports club covers how that works in practice.
Nobody is valuing your club at 4.9 times revenue this morning. But the asset behind that multiple is one you already own: a fanbase that never churns. The only difference is whether anyone has counted it. Game Set Engage's Local plan is free for up to 1,000 active fans, with 350+ campaign scenarios to put a number on the loyalty you already have.
It took a consortium of billionaires nearly $2 billion to buy into fan loyalty. Yours is standing on the terrace already.
