Just to repeat some of the stuff I've said about FSG before, for the record.
The partnership itself is very diverse in terms of membership. We tend to hear about Henry, Werner, and Gordon - they are the guys with the major stakes in the ownership (although I think Mike Gordon may have stepped back a little). As I understand it, LeBron is a fairly minor player but he obviously has major profile. Beyond them are 40-50 people with small stakes, likely less than 1% each, and the odd co-investor like Red Bird or Dynasty. But those small stakeholders are serious people, either financially (billionaires) or politically (at least one former senator, surprisingly a Democrat), and in some cases their wealth and influence extends via family interests as well. So although you could out-vote them, they're not the sort of people you want to piss off. And they all basically like baseball and NASCAR. So long as the Red Sox are looked after, they don't really care about LFC (for good or ill).
The main stakeholders, who genuinely do have a sporting interest in LFC, not just financial, try to manage it under the radar. So long as LFC isn't a drain on central resources, the minority FSG stakeholders don't really care, and if they get the odd Champions League final to attend then it keeps them amused while they wait for another World Series. When I was there, Mike Gordon was the guy who was hands on and did all the day to day stuff. He's a good bloke, and was always polite and respectful when dealing with the staff over here (although he did pooh pooh the original ticket pricing proposal for the expanded stadium because the number of price points was a prime number - we had to add an extra category).
In the time I was there I would have regular interaction with the finance team in Florida, but rarely with anyone above them. The only real time we had serious interaction with the shareholder group was over the Main Stand expansion - even then it was just issuing a memo and liaising with the people at the Red Sox who dealt with them directly. There were two reasons why that interaction needed their approval - firstly that Fenway was proposing to fund it from central funds (they had capacity to borrow the money at less than a quarter of the cost we were quoted for a private placement bond) and secondly that they had done a refurb of Fenway Park a few years before that didn't go well (financially) so the wider ownership group needed convincing (John, Tom and Mike were all on board).
And that's essentially why we have to do everything else on a self-funded basis, and as long as we do nobody really cares. It's why we try to manage to cash-flow neutral each year - there's no begging bowl to top us up, there's no surplus that the shareholders might want to get their hands on.
Annie Road and the Training Ground were, combined, bigger projects than the Main Stand but we self-funded (via constraining our transfer spend) as the returns for them won't have been as compelling as the Main Stand was, ad we might have been turned down by the shareholders if we'd asked them for funding. And I've said before that we should thank Jurgen for both of those things - he agreed to manage on a comparative shoe-string so we could afford them, and they are as much a part of his legacy as the squad he left for Slot and the shiny things in the museum.
I should also add that, whilst they haven't put significant sums of money into the club (nothing since the Main Stand, as far as I can tell and before that it was just topping us up after the takeover) FSG are scrupulous about not taking anything out (even down to ensuring any hotel bills or meals that we may have paid on behalf of the shareholders were recharged to them). I think that latter point was based on some tax advice they'd had which was probably a bit OTT to be honest. But other than some partial repayments of the Main Stand loan, they've not taken anything out.
