Bill Gates Approached As Potential Owner Before FSG Takeover

These last few weeks haven’t been good ones for Liverpool as a club, and doubly so for its current owners. With a severe downturn in form, the fans have grown restless, put on their tinfoil hats, and have starting turning on the Fenway Sports Group, and even manager Jürgen Klopp (who, until about a month ago, could do no wrong).

To add fuel to the fire, old emails recently surfaced wherein John Henry referred to the purchase as “a steal.” Which is apparently bad, somehow.

As if 2017 hasn’t seemed like enough of a strange alternate reality, the latest twist is that Liverpool’s former owners, Hicks & Gillett (apologies for those of you who instinctively spit on the ground upon hearing their names, my reaction was the same) apparently approached none other than Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a potential owner. Bill Gates—one of the richest men in the world, with a net worth valued around £68.3 billion (really, anything over £60 billion is just showing off)—could clearly afford to buy Liverpool.

That he was approached, however, shows more than a little desperation on the part of Hic...the previous owners. To my knowledge, Bill Gates has no great love of sports, or a deep desire to own a team. And as much as purchasing Liverpool in 2010 would be considered a charity case, his funds would almost certainly be put to better use in his own foundation.

This approach makes it seem as if they were just trying to offload the team to any billionaire they could think of, and in a hurry. It would also seem to confirm that the club could be bought at a cut-rate “steal.”

So hey, Liverpool. Writing about this stuff is all doubleplus ungood. Can you like, go back to winning football games pretty please?