Jeff Bezos as part-owner of Liverpool? We'd rather have walked alone

There is nothing that Amazon cannot deliver: a SpongeBob SquarePants bobblehead? No problem! A swastika wall decal? You got it! Mass data breaches, Dickensian working conditions, egregious anti-trust practices? Certainly! A wooden spoon with disgraced Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace’s face engraved on it? Unfortunately, very much yes.  

You would be forgiven for thinking Jeff Bezos has it all. The Amazon founder has such power and influence that he can take over an entire city, as he did during his Venice wedding. But there is something beloved by oligarchic overlords that Bezos does not yet possess: a sporting empire. In his quest to acquire one, the Washington Post-ruiner is about to infuriate a whole other European postcode, for our Lex Luthor-adjacent antihero is leading a consortium that has signed a deal to buy a third of Liverpool Football Club.

This is the latest example of two not unrelated truths: football’s gruesome transformation from unifying sport into monstrous, degenerate enterprise (a special shoutout to Fifa head – with the emphasis very much on head – Gianni Infantino); and the now indisputable fact that there is nothing the billionaire class, often those of the tech persuasion, will not suck the joy out of with their inexorable greed. 

Liverpool FC is a club whose supporters’ union is named after its vehemently socialist and iconic former manager Bill Shankly, and has a stadium that sits in a culturally working-class, 70% Labour-voting, constituency. Recent coach and fan favourite Jürgen Klopp was considered a perfect fit because he said things like “I believe in the welfare state” and “I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate”. Bezos, meanwhile, is a billionaire who manages to pay zero federal income tax some years; once made $6.2bn in five minutes; and somehow thinks that wearing aviators indoors will make him look less, not more, evil. 

The members of the consortium (which also includes fellow menace and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, as well as entrepreneur Amit Bhatia) will join a lineage of nauseatingly rich, morally questionable investors in Premier League teams, an epoch which kicked off with Roman Abramovich’s 2003 purchase of Chelsea. (Abramovich was forced to sell the west London club in 2022 on account of his being best mates with a dictatorial war criminal, but none of us is perfect.) Current proprietors of top teams include a porn baron accused of sexually exploitative behaviour and, ultimately, a guy who may or may not have ordered the murder-by-bone-saw of a journalist.

Sure, Liverpool has been valued at $6.2bn, but Bezos is worth circa $280bn alone. The post-World Cup boom certainly offers a lot of growth potential for England’s historically most successful club, but this is about prestige: a shot at being known for something other than owning the company whose workers had to urinate into bottles for lack of bathroom breaks. Remember: thanks to Blue Origin, this is a man whose ego is not even restricted by the Kármán line.

Bezos has been encroaching onto the pitch for some time. Prime, the streaming arm of his capitalist kraken, broadcast 20 Premier League live games per season from 2019 until 2025, and owns the UK rights for Tuesday Champions League games through to 2031. It also produces the successful football documentary franchise All or Nothing. It may not even be Bezos’s first flirtation with team acquisition; there was a rumoured failed bid for the NFL’s Washington Commanders back in 2023.

Of course, there are individuals with deep pockets who have a genuine passion for sport. Before the Abramovich era, industrialist Jack Walker helped his hometown club, Blackburn Rovers, become champions in the 90s; and a current crop of celebrity stakeholders – Hollywood actor and Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds most prominent among them – has alleviated initial supporter cynicism by providing actual commitment in addition to funds.

It’s also true that money isn’t everything – Liverpool’s current owners, FSG, spent almost half a billion on transfers last summer; the club promptly had a disastrous season, toppling from first to fifth. But it sure helps. In the case of Manchester City –  still facing 115 charges of breaching financial fair play rules since its 2008 acquisition by Emirati billionaire Sheikh Mansour, a period which has seen its trophy cabinet holding on to its hinges for dear life – one might argue money has helped an awful lot.

And so, the takeover of one of the world’s greatest sports teams by one of the world’s worst dressed men once again raises the question: who should be allowed to own a football club? A club being – hackneyed line though it may be – not just a business, but a community asset. 

There used to be a measure colloquially known as the “fit and proper person” test; but then Boris Johnson’s government encouraged, and approved, Newcastle’s takeover by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Public Investment Fund (PIF) – despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is ruled by the aforementioned alleged bone-saw enthusiast Mohammed Bin Salman. That rather undermined the whole “fit and proper” thing.

As of last year, the Football Governance Act has established an independent regulator which will ostensibly prohibit unsuitable ownership by assessing the “integrity” and “competence” of interested parties, as well as conducting source-of-funds checks. If that offers some hope for positive change, then perhaps the elevation to prime minister of Andy Burnham provides more. 

Burnham is a lifelong football fan (and supporter of the city of Liverpool’s other great club, Everton; itself no stranger to catastrophically gluttonous mismanagement), who has earned the trust of terraces for his dogged work on the Hillsborough inquiry and advocacy for fairer club ownership models, going back to his New Labour tenure as culture secretary. Burnham also spoke out last month against Infantino. And yet there appears to have been no official impediment to Bezos’s bid. Not even accounting for the conflict of interest when it comes to television broadcasting rights and his ownership of the UK’s second biggest streaming channel  –  probably the least egregious mark against it. But spare a thought for Reds fans. For the other person who was reportedly interested in buying the club? Elon Musk. 

Hannah Jane Parkinson is an award-winning journalist and the author of A Joy of Small Things (Faber). To order at a discounted price, go to the Nerve bookshop.