• You may have to login or register before you can post and view our exclusive members only forums.
    To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Redbird Capital Acquiring 10% of Fenway Sports Group for $750m

Status
Not open for further replies.
Dated 21 Jul 2020
[article]RedBird Capital Partners has entered into a definitive agreement with Toulouse FC to acquire an 85 per cent majority stake in the French Ligue 2 football club.

Toulouse FC was relegated, along with Amiens, from the top tier of French football in April when clubs voted to end the season early due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Founded by Gerald Cardinale, RedBird has over USD4 billion of equity under management. Its investment partners have included the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys and the United States Women’s National Soccer Team.

Toulouse owner Olivier Sadran has stepped down as majority owner and President, but will retain a 15 per cent ownership stake and remain on the Board of Directors.

Gerry Cardinale said that RedBird was “proud and excited” to help write the next chapter of Toulouse FC “and realise its tremendous potential”.

He went on to say: “We are committed to building a sustainable, long-term foundation for the Club’s success by enhancing its on-field sporting performance, business operations and contributions to its community. We look forward to working closely with Olivier, the City of Toulouse and the Occitanie Region to return Toulouse FC to an elite level and elevate the entire city of Toulouse through its long-term success.”

Damien Comoli has been appointed President of Toulouse FC, following a distinguished career across Europe, where he has worked at Liverpool, Arsenal, Fenerbahçe and Saint- Étienne.

“I welcome Gerry and RedBird as new partners in an organisation and a city that are big parts of my life,” commented Sadran. “I am also pleased that RedBird has brought Damien to Toulouse as a key member of our leadership team. Damien is a well-respected colleague in the Football world.”

Sadran said he was looking forward to working alongside them and “sharing the pleasure of winning”.

The deal is the latest in a series of sports-related PE acquisitions as private market investors seek out growth transformation opportunities in markets ranging from Formula 1 to the English Rugby Premiership.

In late 2016, Liberty Media agreed to buy the Formula One Group for USD4.4 billion from CVC, who owned it between 2006 and 2017. CVC also currently has a 27 per cent stake in English Premier Rugby and is weighing up a GBP300 million investment in the Six Nations tournament.

In Lega Serie A, the top tier of Italian football, authorities are currently weighing up bids from several PE houses, including Bain Capital and Advent International. As reported by Forbes last month, US investment house Bain Capital was believed to have made “a tentative offer” to buy a 25 per cent stake in Serie A for EUR3 billion.
[/article]

What have they got toulouse?
 
If you're referring to "a hog from Epicurus' herd", Lewy, that's not quite accurate. Our word "epicure" comes from the name of the original Epicurus (a Greek philosopher) to whom this quote itself refers back also.

I'll get my anoracus (except in this sentence such a word would translate into Latin as "anoracum").

See PM
 
Last edited:
So FSG get double what they paid for us to a ten percent stake.

It's quite insane how rich we will make them.

Yes, almost if incredibly driven and talented businessmen made an investment in a huge but underachieving brand, turned them into a CL and League winning club back on the world stage financially without bankrupting us and then want to see return on their investment. Weird.
 
Dated 21 Jul 2020
[article]RedBird Capital Partners has entered into a definitive agreement with Toulouse FC to acquire an 85 per cent majority stake in the French Ligue 2 football club.

Toulouse FC was relegated, along with Amiens, from the top tier of French football in April when clubs voted to end the season early due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Founded by Gerald Cardinale, RedBird has over USD4 billion of equity under management. Its investment partners have included the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys and the United States Women’s National Soccer Team.

Toulouse owner Olivier Sadran has stepped down as majority owner and President, but will retain a 15 per cent ownership stake and remain on the Board of Directors.

Gerry Cardinale said that RedBird was “proud and excited” to help write the next chapter of Toulouse FC “and realise its tremendous potential”.

He went on to say: “We are committed to building a sustainable, long-term foundation for the Club’s success by enhancing its on-field sporting performance, business operations and contributions to its community. We look forward to working closely with Olivier, the City of Toulouse and the Occitanie Region to return Toulouse FC to an elite level and elevate the entire city of Toulouse through its long-term success.”

Damien Comoli has been appointed President of Toulouse FC, following a distinguished career across Europe, where he has worked at Liverpool, Arsenal, Fenerbahçe and Saint- Étienne.

“I welcome Gerry and RedBird as new partners in an organisation and a city that are big parts of my life,” commented Sadran. “I am also pleased that RedBird has brought Damien to Toulouse as a key member of our leadership team. Damien is a well-respected colleague in the Football world.”

Sadran said he was looking forward to working alongside them and “sharing the pleasure of winning”.

The deal is the latest in a series of sports-related PE acquisitions as private market investors seek out growth transformation opportunities in markets ranging from Formula 1 to the English Rugby Premiership.

In late 2016, Liberty Media agreed to buy the Formula One Group for USD4.4 billion from CVC, who owned it between 2006 and 2017. CVC also currently has a 27 per cent stake in English Premier Rugby and is weighing up a GBP300 million investment in the Six Nations tournament.

In Lega Serie A, the top tier of Italian football, authorities are currently weighing up bids from several PE houses, including Bain Capital and Advent International. As reported by Forbes last month, US investment house Bain Capital was believed to have made “a tentative offer” to buy a 25 per cent stake in Serie A for EUR3 billion.
[/article]



On a side note, Brendan MacFarlane, Brentford’s lead scout in France (their signings from French league included Maupay and Benrahma) has joined Toulouse.



[article]Ligue 2 title chasers Toulouse on Monday announced the hire of Brendan MacFarlane as the club’s new Head of Recruitment.

MacFarlane enjoyed major successes as a scout for Championship side Brentford, working on deals including for Neal Maupay, Said Benrahma and others.

He had the following to say upon the announcement:

“It has always been a dream for me to work at the heart of a French club and I am very happy that Toulouse offered me this opportunity. The project that Toulouse are embarking upon is truly interesting and I hope to help it become one of the best clubs in terms recruitment. The work done in recent months is already very good and the aim will be to continue to adopt an intelligent recruitment strategy. I am coming here to bring my experience and to help Toulouse to perform even better.”
[/article]
 
Last edited:
Taken at face value the "e" on the end of "bienvenue" indicates this Brendan's a woman. Is that some kind of French PC gesture?
 
£536m FSG deal to have no ‘direct impact’ on ‘mini Disney’ Liverpool
[article]The potential £536m ($750m) investment in Fenway Sports Group will reportedly have no “direct impact” on Liverpool.

RedBird Capital Partners are set to take a 10 per cent slice of FSG’s assets, which includes the Boston Red Sox as well as the Reds.

FSG have been actively seeking investment to raise money through the pandemic to keep projects like the redevelopment of the Anfield Road End on course.

The proposed investment from RedBird Capital led to speculation that Jurgen Klopp could be handed a hefty transfer pot to strengthen the Liverpool squad this summer, but that is unlikely reports the Liverpool Echo.

They money is set to be deployed in the expansion of Fenway Sports Management, something Liverpool minority shareholder and basketball legend LeBron James is a part of.

And it is thought that James could start to have more of an influence with FSG and therefore with Liverpool.


However FSG decides to spend the investment, the management structure will not change.

Michael Silverman, sports business reporter at the Boston Globe newspaper, told the Liverpool Echo: “My source who has knowledge of the deal informs me that the governance roles of John Henry as principal owner, Tom Werner as chairman and Mike Gordon as president of FSG will remain exactly the same.

“This investment will not have a direct impact on Liverpool, the Red Sox, NESN and Roush.

“For now at least that means that another arm of the FSG family is Fenway Sports Management, a sports marketing and consulting firm.

“That’s the LeBron James connection, he is a part of that and as we know LeBron James has been a minority shareholder in Liverpool for some time and is now a client of Nike who now do Liverpool’s kits. That was a big part of the Liverpool and New Balance court case.

“As far as I know to date we haven’t seen much from LeBron on that relationship aside from a picture of him in a Liverpool kit. That to me signals that we are going to see, with this potential investment, a bit more of that LeBron James influence with Fenway Sports Management, we may see some moves there.

“It is really interesting how they want to deploy the money. Just because they may say it won’t have a direct impact on Liverpool or the Red Sox that doesn’t mean that, if they so choose, if they are trying to increase their revenue streams by diversifying their portfolio they still have the freedom to redirect money, if they want, to their teams.

“They (Liverpool and the Red Sox) are not totally siloed operations. If FSG as the parent company decides that they are doing the Fenway Park real estate development deal, they are growing bigger with Fenway Sports Management and they are getting new clients and trying new things and revenues are increasing then sure, if they want to give their teams a boost I am sure that this investment would allow them to do that more freely.

“I don’t get the impression that they are trying to grow for the sake of growing, it is a case of what are they going to do with the increased revenues.”

Gerry Cardinale, the American billionaire financier fronting RedBird Capital Partners, is a man who has successfully managed to monetise sport and business.

He’s a major stakeholder in America’s biggest regional sports TV network, YES Group, has served as a board member of Yankee Global Enterprises, the corporate holding company of the MLB franchise the New York Yankees, has recently gone into business with Hollywood actor Dwayne Johnson, and also bought a large stake in Wasserman Media, a talent agency that looks after entertainment and sports stars including Joe Gomez and Aymeric Laporte.

Cardinale, in an interview with Sportico in December said: “Making an investment is easy, what’s not so easy is owning these things well. What we really look for in what we do is owning it well.

“I look at these teams like mini Disneys. They are multinational conglomerates, the trouble is they didn’t start that way and technology has both enabled it and challenged it and it has to keep evolving.

“You have to run these great pieces of intellectual property like Disneys. I admire what they did and they went out and were ahead of the curve and bought other forms of intellectual property and plugged them in to an infrastructure that monetises them and doing that very accretively. I look at sports teams the same way and they have got to keep doing that.

“The teams I have worked with have all done that and they are going to keep on doing that.”[/article]
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom