Billionaire Mukesh Ambani has entered the race to acquire English football club Liverpool FC, The Mirror newspaper reported on Sunday.
The club has been put up for sale by its current owner Fenway Sports Group (FSG), which bought it in October 2010, The Mirror said.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been appointed to assist FSG in selling the team.
According to ‘The Mirror’, the FSG are willing to sell the club for 4 billion British pounds.
The Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL) has significant interests in sports in India. The group owns the Indian Premier League team Mumbai India and runs the football league, Indian Super League, in the country along with the All India Football Federation.
In the last few years, RIL along with other corporates such as JSW, Hero MotoCorp and the Adani group have joined the ranks of the Tatas to invest in football.
The Tata group has been running the Tata Football Academy in Jamshedpur, an elite football academy, for the last 35 years.
Apart from football and cricket, RIL has tied up with the Indian Olympic Association and the Athletics Federation of India to support athletes in multiple events including the Commonwealth, Asian and Olympic Games.
The group will also set up the first-ever India House at the Paris Olympics in 2024 as part of the association.
A recent GroupM report on sports sponsorship in India says that emerging or non-cricket sporting activity including football and kabaddi contributed to 12 per cent of the Rs 9,500-crore overall sports advertising spends in 2021.
Cricket stands at about 88 per cent of the overall sports ad spends in the country. The number for non-cricket sports has grown from around 8 per cent in the pre-pandemic period. 2020 was marked by the first wave of the pandemic and saw a blip in overall sports sponsorship spends in the country.
While cricket will still remain a key contributor to sports advertising expenditure (adex) in India, given its wide following and reach, non-cricket sports will increasingly grow its share in sports adex in the years ahead, GroupM said.
