09/30/2026
The setting was Tom Werner’s office at Boston’s famed Fenway Park on a sweltering hot July afternoon.
It was 2019, and the Liverpool chairman was reminiscing about a cherished night in Madrid seven weeks earlier.
Werner pointed to a large framed photograph on the wall of Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson lifting the Champions League trophy as the ticker-tape tumbled down. Images from the Boston Red Sox’s four World Series triumphs under the common ownership of Fenway Sports Group (FSG) were positioned around it.
The American television producer and businessman had shared the unbridled joy of Liverpool’s sixth European crown with co-owners John W Henry and Mike Gordon. Up to that point, FSG’s near nine-year reign at Anfield had yielded just one League Cup, but manager Jurgen Klopp’s side had finally taken the leap from challengers to champions by delivering the biggest prize in club football.
The 2-0 defeat of Tottenham Hotspur in the final had eased the heartache of missing out on that season’s Premier League title to Manchester City by a solitary point.
Liverpool had collected 97 points (it remains the highest total for any side finishing as runners-up in England’s top flight) and suffered just one league defeat across the 38 matches, but it wasn’t enough as Pep Guardiola’s relentless City team finished the campaign with 14 successive league wins.
The conversation with Werner turned to whether it had been a fair fight.
After all, four months before, the Premier League had confirmed that, like European football’s governing body UEFA, it was conducting a formal investigation into alleged breaches of financial fair play (FFP) regulations by City.
Asked if there were concerns about the rules not being properly enforced, Werner told The Athletic: “Yes, there are. It’s no secret that we are big supporters of FFP. We believe it makes sport and on-pitch performance more competitive. If there are infringements, then we would expect punishments. Everyone should abide by those rules in a very transparent way.”
Werner picked his words carefully, keen not to further inflame tensions between the two clubs. However, the FSG hierarchy had long since made it clear that they felt there wasn’t a level playing field at the top of English football.
Back in July 2011, when City unveiled a record-breaking £400million sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways, Liverpool principal owner Henry posted on Twitter (now X): “How much was the losing bid?” Etihad Airways was chaired at the time by the half-brother of City’s owner Sheikh Mansour.
A few days later. Henry posted a link to a story from the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which then Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger questioned the market value of that deal and accused City of attempting to bend FFP rules. “A club’s best player has to be worth at least 10 per cent of your naming rights,” Henry tweeted. “Mr Wenger says boldly what everyone thinks.”
Henry soon became less active on social media, but FSG’s bemusement at City’s rocketing commercial revenues, which enabled them to invest vast sums of money into their squad, remained.
UEFA’s commitment to ensuring that clubs lived within their means by only spending what they could generate fairly had been key to FSG’s decision to buy Liverpool in the first place in October 2010.
The U.S. group was never going to bankroll Liverpool in the same manner as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour at City had done in the pre-FFP age, but it was attracted by the prospect of gradually reviving the club’s fortunes by raising revenues across the board.
“The biggest challenge for us has been the ignoring of financial fair play,” Henry told reporters in 2014. “It makes it very difficult to compete. We really don’t have financial fair play, or at least people are not abiding by it.”
There was frustration for FSG when City were only fined £17million (with a further £32m suspended) by UEFA for failing to satisfy FFP rules later that year.
When a two-year Champions League suspension was issued to City in February 2020 following further breaches, FSG viewed the punishment as UEFA finally baring its teeth. However, when the ban was lifted by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) five months later and the accompanying fine reduced from €30million to €10m, there was a sense of dismay. FSG felt that City had effectively got off on a technicality.
By then, Liverpool had ended their 30-year wait for domestic title glory in emphatic fashion, but Klopp didn’t pull any punches when asked about the CAS decision.
“I don’t think it was a good day for football,” he told reporters in July 2020. “FFP is there for protecting teams and protecting competition, so that nobody overspends. Otherwise, the richest people or countries can do whatever they want. It is a little bit like Formula 1 — if you open the door to a private jet and you see who is quicker, the aeroplane will win. I am really happy we won the championship this year because it will not be easier in the future.”
Klopp’s words proved prophetic as another Premier League title narrowly eluded him when Liverpool again finished a point behind Guardiola’s City in second place in 2021-22.
Since City were charged with more than 100 rule breaches in February 2023, the length of the process has been a source of growing irritation for senior FSG figures.
So much has happened since — Klopp’s exit when he felt drained at the end of 2023-24, the rise and fall of replacement Arne Slot, and the appointment of Andoni Iraola as the latter’s successor this summer.
When The Athletic broke the news last Friday that City had been found guilty on almost all charges, the reaction was far from celebratory among the Liverpool ownership.
That won’t have changed on Monday evening when the Premier League confirmed that judgement and published a redacted version of the independent commission’s report, which stated that City had arranged “sham contracts” with commercial partners to “inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs” to the tune of more than £900million between 2009 and 2018.
It was the outcome FSG had long since expected. However, given there’s as yet no sanction to accompany the verdict, Liverpool’s owners are likely to remain tight-lipped while the process remains ongoing. There’s also a weary acceptance that, with City set to appeal as they continue to emphatically plead their innocence, this saga could drag on for a long time yet.
If the guilty verdicts stand, then Liverpool will have suffered more than anyone. As well as those two title near-misses under Klopp and the defeat by City in the 2015-16 League Cup final, there was the 2013-14 title race, when a Brendan Rodgers-managed side were dramatically beaten to the big prize by the men from the Etihad Stadium on the season’s final day.
City spent around £91million on the signings of Fernandinho, Jesus Navas, Alvaro Negredo, Stevan Jovetic and Martin Demichelis in summer 2013 — more than double Liverpool’s outlay in the same window.
If City had played by the rules and not possessed such squad depth, would Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard, whose cruel late-season slip in a home loss to Chelsea proved so costly, have got the crowning glory to his Anfield career that he craved?
Last Friday, Spanish left-back Jose Enrique, who was part of that Liverpool team, tweeted a mocked-up photograph of him kissing the Premier League trophy.
The prospect of trophies being reallocated seems unlikely. Football is about memories and moments, and they can’t be restored years after the event.
A personal opinion is that if City lose their appeal, leaving the honours board blank for the years when they triumphed, just like the Tour de France did with shamed American cyclist Lance Armstrong, would be a fitting way to mark a saga that’s done so much damage to the integrity of the Premier League.
Although the charges only relate to 2009 to 2018, what City have won since then is indelibly linked to how they conducted themselves previously, as it put them in such a strong position to dominate.
In terms of the extent of the forward-facing punishment, with a massive points deduction and potential relegation down the football pyramid on the table, there can be little mitigation, given the commission details City’s lack of co-operation with the investigation and says that “a number of important club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence”.
Liverpool were one of a number of Premier League clubs who served legal notices on City in late 2024, reserving the right to seek compensation if they were found guilty of serious charges. That now looks inevitable. Loss of income would include prize money both for trophies they missed out on and related to league placings, as well as the impact commercially.
However, no matter how much is recouped in the coming years, it won’t make up for what Liverpool were denied. The cost goes way beyond the balance sheet.
The sheer scale of City’s offences provides vindication for FSG, which for so long argued that the rules weren’t being either properly respected or enforced. But this is no victory. How can it be when you were robbed of so much by financial doping?
James Pearce
Liverpool Correspondent
