On a related note, we could have had a very different American owner from Boston. Well worth reading, especially for insights on FSG:
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FSG nearly lost Liverpool ownership to Boston rival, and Anfield would have been very different
Twice, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, almost acquired Liverpool. Twice, he pulled out of a potential deal.
FSG’s Liverpool tenure has, all things considered, been a success. There have been tremendous highs — A European Cup, the refurbishing of Anfield, the appointment of Jurgen Klopp — and some troubling lows: the ticket pricing fiasco, the recent furloughing then reversal of the non-playing staff.
But things could have been oh-so-different for the club and the Boston-based group.
Twice, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and a direct-rival to John Henry, Tom Werner and the ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, looked into purchasing Liverpool. Both times he was first-in-line.
Depending on who you talk to, Kraft’s interest ranged between kind of, sort of intrigued and fired up, ready-to-go. Both times he backed out.
Kraft was first mooted in 2007, before George Gillett and Tom Hicks managed to slither their way to Merseyside. “Robert Kraft would have been a magnificent owner,” former Liverpool CEO Rick Parry told the Anfield Wrap in 2005. “Another person with a great track record in Boston, with the Patriots and the New England Revolution. He came over and visited Anfield.”
Kraft is one of the most celebrated sport's owners in American culture. When President Donald Trump recently convened a COVID-19 sporting taskforce, looking for ways to restart the sporting calendar and give a boost to a flagging economy, he called on the commissioners and CEOs of all the top sports – the NFL, NBA, MLB, UFC, tennis, etc. – and there, alongside the official power-base, was Trump’s old friend, known in NFL circles as the “shadow commissioner”. There was Bob Kraft.
Valued at $6.7 billion, Kraft has become one of the most influential figures in American life. Sports, real estate, paper and packaging, the Kraft Group has a hand in it all. He is still viewed by those in charge of negotiations to sell Liverpool, first in 2007 and then when Hicks and Gillett left in 2010, as the one who got away. Talks of mysterious buyers from the Far East and the Middle East came and went, but there, at all times, plotting and pondering was Kraft. All he needed to do was sign off on the deal and it was done; a historic football, a depreciated asset was his -- at a bargain price to boot.
So, why didn’t he? And what would the impact have been had he?
To understand Kraft and his success, you have to understand the culture of the NFL, New England, and the franchise he inherited when he became owner back in 1994.
Prior to his arrival, the Patriots were a joke. Seasons in which the team stunk were a nice reprieve from the ones in where they were an apocalypse. Merely being bad was good enough; just don’t be a complete and utter embarrassment.
Under Kraft, the Patriots transformed into the most successful organization in the history of salary-capped sports. Six Super Bowls. A legendary coach. The greatest quarterback to ever play. Franchise value soaring from $172 million he paid for it in the mid-90s to an estimated $4.1 billion today. His wisdom has been sought from the likes of Silicon Valley to Gucci Mane, all trying to grab a little of that Bob Kraft magic dust.
During Kraft’s run, the Patriots have had the greatest coach-quarterback combination the sport has seen, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. They will spend the next century as part of more “who deserves the credit” discussions than Noel or Liam or John and Paul. Given that, it would be easy to diminish Kraft’s influence. But owners always deserve more of the credit than they get and less of the credit than they wish.
Owners are like relationships: When you have a good one you find a way to nit-pick the flaws. But a bad one is soul-sapping. It feels impossible to escape.
Look at Manchester United. For years, Sir Alex Ferguson was able to cover-up for the Glazer's inadequacies. Through the early part of the Glazers run, United experienced the most successful period in the club’s history. Trophy followed trophy. Parade after parade. A team featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and a hoard of world-class players was the envy of everyone at home and abroad. It was easy to sneer at those United fans who saw the Glazers as an issue, dreamed of the Red Knights riding in to save the club – save them from what, exactly?
But the whole thing was a house of cards. You can only mask incompetence in football for so long. United was rotten to the core – the Glazers understood nothing of the culture or ethos of what made the place successful. They were and are professional leeches.
As soon as Alex Ferguson and David Gill, the club’s CEO, walked out the door, the whole thing came tumbling down. With them went any semblance of success as the club had come to know it. Stability was out. Debt payments skyrocketed. The club was sapped of some of its soul, not to mention the Champions League cheques. The owners panicked, leaping from one manager, one philosophy to the next. The fan's worst fears were actualized. The only way the ghoulish owners could think to restore it? Hire a fan as manager whose career credentials up to that point included an underwhelming stint with Molde and guiding Cardiff to relegation.
The Glazers, for what it’s worth, are a somewhat successful ownership group stateside. In fact, if you bundle together their success with Ferguson, they’re the only current group to win one of American sports top titles (a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), a Premier League title, and a European Cup – when the Premier League eventually resumes, FSG will join them on that list.
Around the time Kraft was looking into purchasing Liverpool, American owners had become all the rage. Words like “franchise” were being bandied about. The MLS had had some nominal success, but it was just a drop in the soccer bucket. Ironclad broadcasting contracts, booming franchise values, freewheeling banks, and the FA’s lack of regulations meant that American sports owners could pick up a Premier League club on a never-never deal if they so wished. As long as they had the cash or collateral to operate the day-to-day, it was free money. The Glazers came to town and then Stan Kroenke followed. Surely, the NFL’s leading impresarios, Kraft and the Dallas Cowboys Jerry Jones, would follow? Kraft certainly had an interest.
“We helped found MLS in America,” Kraft told the BBC in 2011. “Our league here is starting to really develop, and with our soccer team we've gone to the championship game five times in 21 years.”
Success in soccer had followed the same trend line as in the NFL for Kraft: immediately and sustained. “I'm just concerned in the Premier League,” Kraft cautioned. “I wanted to take over Liverpool. But in the end my instinct was – without a salary cap, or a stadium ... I wasn't sure how we'd get a stadium built quickly and efficiently.”
Kraft spotted in Liverpool the same issues he walked into New England with when he first purchased the Patriots: A crumbling stadium, a lack of modern infrastructure. It took Kraft eight years after he bought the Patriots in 1994 to get a new stadium, in a deal that was, umm, interesting. Did he really want to go through all of that again? No.
Kraft is genial and smart and passionate. He invested in the Patriots not because he saw it as a potential business boom, but because he was a lifelong fan, and was worried that another investor would move the team out of New England. A sense of place and belonging drove the purchase, as did the launch of his MLS franchise. He wasn’t just in it to hold the scarf and say the right things then deposit broadcasting cheques. Being successful for the region really, really mattered to him. Remember: When Kraft bought the Pats in ‘94, Boston was not, as it is dubbed today, the City of Champions. It was Looserville. Every team sucked. And if they didn’t suck, they were chokers. The only team with a pattern for success was the hockey side, the Bruins. And they had found most of their success in a time when the league had six teams. The Celtics, the region's biggest winners, were dominant in basketball from the 60s through to the 80s. After that, though, they fluctuate between awful and appalling -- all the worse having been so good throughout the history of the professional game.
And that is why Kraft is so revered within the region. He didn’t just help his team win; he changed the entire tenor of the city. A place that was first in the queue when God was dolling out arrogance got a fresh spoonful, year after year, week after week, Duck Boat parade after Duck Boat parade.
In New England, John Henry, Tom Werner, and Fenway Sports Group as a whole were and are viewed as cold, hard businessmen. There is a sense of distrust about FSG locally in Boston that you might not see if you're just looking from the outside, mostly due to a bunch of big picture, societal issues.
The Sox have also been buying up property all across the city. They’ve shuttered local businesses around Fenway Park in order a bid to create a modern stadium-style megaplex around what is an old-fashioned, working-class borough. The walk from the centre of Boston to Fenway and the centre of Liverpool to Anfield are remarkably similar. All the same local landmarks are there: the go-to pubs, the knock-off matchday paraphernalia, the burger stalls. But those things have been slowly stripped away from the locals and acquired by the baseball franchise. Sox ownership is trying to own and monetize everything in and around their stadium, stripping out some of the emotion that made the team and the city so intertwined in the first place.
Further, Henry purchased the city’s dominant media entity, the Boston Globe, back in 2013 to go alongside the region’s preeminent sports broadcaster NESN. That it was a clear and obvious conflict of interest caused a ruckus amongst the fan-base and journalists, but didn’t stop the deal. Now, the Globe’s Sox coverage is viewed locally as little more than a PR machine, sewing a further fissure between the team’s ownership and its fans.
Boston is a city built on one mantra: “What, you think you’re better than me?” FSG’s detachment in recent years has stoked that resentment among the Sox’s hardcore fans. Worse still, there’s become a feeling, whether true or not, that Sox ownership looks upon their fans with sneering condescension. Can’t you guys just be grateful? We broke the curse for you. Now, let us make our money.
After FSG helped end Boston’s near-century title drought, everything since has mostly been gravy. The three championships that have followed that magical 2004 night has had varying degrees of meaning to the city — the “ Boston Strong” title of 2013 is about much more than sports. Yet nothing will ever, ever, ever match the feeling of the first. Death rates ticked up in the city for goodness sake; people we’re finally willing to pass — at least that’s how lore has it.
For that, FSG will always earn credit. But the love, the adulation that you would expect to follow has never quite been there. That they’ve been so removed, so in the background, means Henry and Werner and Kennedy are often only seen at the extreme moments: the hirings, the firings, the scandals, the parades. If people don't see you, and things aren't going great, they start to speculate. Rumours that the Sox could be looking to cheapen their payroll, finish the surrounding areas of Fenway, then look to sell the team have been rampant for a couple of years now -- one mega pay-day involving two media companies, one of sports most revered sports franchises, its infamous ball-park and all the stores and bars and malls that go with it.
It's a rumour Henry has denied, but it has helped feed paranoia among a fan-base that is looking for anyone, at all times, to be ticked off with. Locally, Sox fans refer to Henry with a moniker that rhymes with Dr. Sleepy.
Things are different with the Patriots. People like Kraft on a more visceral level. He’s warm; he’s present. They want to hang out with him. When I told one Patriots fan I was writing this piece they responded, “Oh, I love Mr. Kraft.” Mr. Kraft. Not Bob. Another: “What’s the general vibe of the article? hopefully bleeping on John Henry?” Weird, right?
Henry and his co-owners broke the curse. They helped bring four World Series titles. And it barely even registers on the affection scale. There’s respect, of sorts, but no love. FSG is that group that owns the Sawks. Mr. Kraft is one of our own.
That impression gnaws at the FSG guys, Henry particularly. At least that’s the impression at One Patriot Place, home to all things Patriots. Talk to those in Kraft’s orbit and he’ll tell you that’s why the Boston Globe’s coverage of his personal life and the Patriots is poor. They’re jealous, the theory goes. Talk to those on the other side of the equation, or those working in the middle, and they’ll tell you that’s why Kraft flaunts his influence. And it’s also why he’s so happy to speak about Liverpool in public. Egos, man.
And Kraft has an almighty ego. To paraphrase that Oakland A’s scout in “Moneyball”, he’s the kind of guy who walks into a room and his bleep has already been there two minutes. More accurately, Kraft is the kind of guy who sends someone ahead to remind you that he should, at all times, be referred to as Mr. Kraft. Upon entering the room he will extend a hand and ask you to, please, call him Bob. (That’s a true story)
This tussle for the city was part of Kraft’s thinking when he circled back on the idea post-Hicks and Gillett. As Liverpool were swamped in financial difficulty, Martin Broughton was brought in to try to find the cowboys a prospective buyer. Kraft looked, but, again, had no intention of doing anything. “Bob got involved in that deal because he knew those guys [Henry and Werner] were sniffing around the English Premier League,” an ex-Patriots executive told Liverpool.com. “He had no interest – he couldn’t afford it -- but if he could tick them off that was a win in our book. And he only cares about winning.” Kraft's interest the second go around was never viewed as really real. It was for show, a favour called in on one hand, a reminder of his standing on the other.
Ultimately, Kraft in Liverpool would not have been a fit. He knew that. It would have taken on the familiar cycle of a whole batch of modern, big-name owners in the English game: A sparkling opening press conference, scarf raised, promises made. But once the reality of the situation set in, the enormity of the task and the finances involved, Kraft would have lost interest. Cost-cutting would have come, first-team performance dipped with it. Had a stadium been built, Liverpool would have been playing in s soulless bowl with an absentee owner, one of his sons running the day-to-day operations and assuring you good thing were around the corner.
Kraft could not have competed financially, one of the reasons he is said to still be reticent to invest in a top-flight club, He is, to-his-bones, a winner, a competitionaholic, whose mood fluctuates depending on whether his team is winning or losing. ““You want to be playing by the same rules,” he told the Evening Standard in 2011. “so it's not just about who has the most money. If the salary cap was there, we would have done it."
When FSG arrived on Merseyside, they found a club on its knees. It needed a complete and utter overhaul. Every single facet of the business and football operation needed a re-think. It needed modernizing.
In that world, ruthless business operatives were needed. Those with spreadsheets and numbers were over someone with heart and desire. Kraft is all heart. It’s his son Jonathan who has served as the Patriots business head for the better part of three decades.
FSG brought a little of that later, thanks to the appointment of Jürgen Klopp. But what the club needed when the group first arrived was a steady hand. It needed a group who had experience taking a historical, depreciated asset and turning its fortunes around; marketing the team’s past to pay for its now and the future.
Kraft is smart in the way your dad’s mate Bill is smart. He knows people and he knows stuff. He knows just the right thing to say and exactly when to say it -- some people just do, you know. Kraft is a gut kind of guy, not the analytical type. That’s partly why Patriots fans love him: he sounds and talks like them. He is one of them, albeit one with a slew of private jets, perhaps an island or two and a direct line to the President. FSG, by contrast, are cold and conceited. They are calculated.
But that’s what you need in the modern Premier League, unless you’re funded by an oligarch or an oil-state. Gut doesn’t cut it anymore. You have to be able to market to the Far East and gladhand in the Middle East. You need to be, at all times, thinking about how that recent chant on the Kop can be turned into a marketing ploy in Cambodia or Zambia or India. You have to think globally, not regionally -- you use the very pulse of the region as a way to sell internationally, to make people from wherever feel like they want to be a part of a local community. That’s the magic formula for modern ownership groups.
None of that is in Kraft’s wheelhouse. He’s gutsy and bold and he is loyal -- man, is he loyal. He will go down as one of the greatest owners in the history of sports. He revitalized a lackluster franchise, turned it into a commercial powerhouse, won, and in doing so transformed the identity and philosophy of an entire region.
That stuff matters; it’s really, really important. But the tale of any good owner is also the tale of the right fit at the right time. Nobody was better suited for the job of owning the Patriots than the Kraft family. But all the traits that made him such a success in New England would have been to his detriment in Liverpool.
