One of the partners in Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group is eyeing a potential stake in Paris Saint-Germain.
Arctos Sports Partners are one of the firms looking to acquire a slice of the French giants, according to both CBS and Sky Sports. The American investment took a stake in FSG to become a partner back in 2020.
PSG’s owners, Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) have been looking to sell a stake since last year. They want to raise capital for the PSG project, in part to aid the plan for a new stadium, with the club having been tenants at the Council of Paris-owned Parc des Princes since 1974.
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In order to fuel the kind of growth that QSI wants to achieve with PSG, a new stadium is seen as core to their plans, and in bringing on board fresh investment they will move closer to achieving that aim.
Arctos has a considerable number of sporting investments in its portfolio, with indirect stakes in the FSG-owned Reds, Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins. It has also taken equity in NBA teams such as the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings and Italian Serie A side Atalanta, among many other sporting investments. The firm also has a stake in Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the owners of both the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils NBA team.
The firm, co-founded by Ian Charles and David O’Connor in 2019, launched its second investment fund in 2021 and is expected to close on it in the coming months with a $2.5bn (£2bn) target achieved. That fund will be deployed across various opportunities in sport, with PSG looking to sell between 10 and 15 per cent of the club at a €4bn (£3.2bn) valuation.
In 2021, Arctos brought in a man well known to Liverpool principal owner John Henry and FSG – the former Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein. His remit is to help in ‘advising owners of the teams Arctos invests in, across multiple leagues, on matters such as organisational leadership, culture-building and other business areas’.
Vice-president at Arctos, Peter F. Valhouli-Farb, is another face well known to FSG.
Valhouli-Farb served as chief strategy officer for FSG and the Red Sox and was ‘responsible for evaluating potential team acquisitions, sourcing and evaluating non-team investments, acquisitions and partnership opportunities, launching new lines of business within the FSG platform and assessing growth and monetization strategies for the existing FSG portfolio’.
Arctos’ modus operandi is not to take positions of outright control, but provide capital solutions to leagues and teams to enable growth.
Like QSI are in Paris, FSG are themselves currently in the process of seeking investment into Liverpool specifically. The Reds’ ownersm are understood to be leaning toward a ‘strategic partner’ – potentially a media and entertainment firm – to bring both scalable capital and expertise to allow for the growth of the club as a business. That could open the potential for a new part-owner to have the option to accrete a minority stake into a majority one further down the line.
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