Speaking on the Blood Red Podcast, David Lynch has been discussing a potential Liverpool takeover from a joint Saudi Arabian and Qatari consortium.
The Reds are on the market, and as you can imagine, the Merseyside club are attracting interest from the wealthiest groups from across the planet.
As we’ve seen so often in recent years, a lot of interest in Premier League ownership is coming from the middle-east, and according to Lynch, a joint Saudi-Qatar bid could be lodged.
Interestingly, Lynch says that this partnership has come about due to improving relations between the two nations and the fact that both parties agreed that they didn’t want to drive the price up for the other.
Saudi-Qatar consortium want Liverpool
Lynch shared what he knows about this situation.
“Yeah, so it’s still early days in this takeover process, but I’ve been told that one of the parties that are leading the interest is a joint consortium of Saudi and Qatar investors,” Lynch said.
“It would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago given the diplomatic relations between those countries, but things have thawed considerably in the last couple of years. We’ve seen their rulers sat next to each other at the World Cup and things look a lot brighter, and that’s opened up the possibility of these two companies form these companies to bid for Liverpool.
“The opening bid they’re hoping to lodge to FSG is around £3.2bn, and that’s a bid that is going to come with a lot of wealth behind it. The fact they’ve paired up because they didn’t want to be the two richest sides of a bidding war and allow the price to get out of control is an interesting one. It’s not something you could’ve envisioned a couple of years ago.”
“Things have completely changed and Liverpool may be part of a strategy to be an olive branch of sorts to bring these two together and buy the club.”
Precarious
While being backed by a group combining two companies form two of the richest countries in the world sounds exciting, this could be a case of being careful what you wish for.
Indeed, while Lynch says that this takeover could act as an olive branch to smooth relations between the Qataris and the Saudis, middle eastern politics just aren’t that simple.
If things, once again, go awry between these two nations, Liverpool could be caught in the middle of a rather ugly dispute, and that’s the last thing any football club wants, especially one that has its own political and social identity in the way Liverpool does.
FSG need to tread carefully when considering this bid.
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