Anfield’s New Investors: Why the Bezos Talk Should Make Us Uneasy | OneFootball

Bill Shankly once said that the socialism he believed in was ‘everybody working for each other’, and that this was how he saw football and how he saw life. It is worth holding that line in your head this week, because the news drifting out of the boardroom is about as far from the boot room as it is possible to get.

According to the Guardian, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the fourth richest man on the planet, has been holding talks about buying himself a slice of Liverpool Football Club. Cue jokes about how often the Reds will be able to deliver.

What is Actually on the Table

Let us deal with the facts first, because they are eye-watering enough on their own. The bid is being led by Amit Bhatia, once a co-owner of Queens Park Rangers, whose consortium has made a provisional offer of £1.35 billion for around 30% of the club. That values Liverpool at roughly £4.5 billion, more than Manchester United were worth when Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought his quarter of them a couple of years back. Bhatia is bankrolled by his father-in-law, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, and now, by the sound of it, the talks have widened to include Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, of course, boasts a personal fortune that sits somewhere near $257 billion. That is not a typo. None of this has come out of nowhere, of course. Fenway Sports Group have been selling bits of the club off for years. They paid £300m for Liverpool back in 2010, hauling us out of the wreckage that Hicks and Gillett left behind, and they have since taken money in from RedBird Capital and handed LeBron James a stake, before selling 3% to the private equity firm Dynasty Equity in 2023. Little by little, the club has become a thing to be sliced up and traded.

That is before you even get to the question of who is doing the buying. Here is where the cynic in me has something to say. Whatever the accountants make of the arithmetic, this is a man whose company has spent years being investigated over how it treats the people who actually do the work. An 18-month US Senate inquiry, led by Bernie Sanders, concluded in late 2024 that Amazon had massaged its own numbers to hide an injury rate roughly twice that of other warehouses. Amazon employs a little over a third of America’s warehouse staff, yet accounts for more than half of the injuries in the sector.

It is no prettier on this side of the water. Workers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse, represented by the GMB union, have staged strike after strike over pay, safety and the simple right to be recognised at all. Across in New York, staff at the Staten Island depot had to scrap tooth and nail just to form a union in the first place. Liverpool supporter Oobah Butler even made a documentary about the urine-filled bottles that Amazon drivers toss out of their trucks because they’re not allowed to stop to use the toilet. This is the record of the business that built the fortune that is now being dangled in front of Anfield.

Joe Piette, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

You do not have to be a card-carrying trade unionist to feel the jar of it. This is a club whose supporters have spent decades boycotting a certain newspaper in the name of the truth, whose anthem is a hymn to never walking alone and whose greatest manager preached that a football club was a collective or it was nothing at all. Bezos stands for very nearly the opposite of all that. The money might look clean enough on a balance sheet, but the story sitting behind it does not.

What it Means on the Pitch

In fairness, there is another way of looking at this. FSG have run a tight ship, sometimes far too tight for supporters who have watched the squad go a summer or two without the reinforcements it plainly needed. A wealthier ownership picture, in theory, means Andoni Iraola finally gets the wingers he keeps asking for and the likes of Alexis Mac Allister and Alisson are not flogged off to balance a spreadsheet. Investment is not automatically a dirty word and there is no doubt that this squad could badly do with some. But that isn’t an excuse to sell investment in the club to just anybody.

FSG are deserving of some criticism for certain aspects of their ownership, to say nothing of the fact that a group of people who have made their fortune through hedge funds aren’t exactly squeaky clean, but if Bezos really does end up with his name on a share certificate, I would wager a good deal that the matchday experience for the rest of us gets no cheaper and probably a lot worse. The Reds have outlasted a genuinely catastrophic pair of Americans and are in stable hands right now. Shankly would have had a word or two to say about all this, and I doubt many of them would have been printable.