It might be a bit premature but I was thinking of where the future lies for G&H .........

Beware the sports mogul

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/10/08/beware_the_sports_mogul/

John Henry has work to do.

I don’t know what it will take to put Liverpool Football Club back on sound financial footing or make the team a contender again. But that’s not the job I’m talking about.

When Henry and New England Sports Ventures strayed far beyond Fenway Park and offered to buy Liverpool’s struggling soccer team for $477 million, they stepped up to a formidable task: erasing the legacy of Tom Hicks.

Hicks was already in contention for the title of America’s worst pro sports team owner when he drove the Texas Rangers — a popular baseball team in a big, prosperous city — to seek bankruptcy protection this summer. Now he may have outdone himself and laid claim to the title of worst sports owner in the entire world. Who would even be second?

Hicks didn’t simply make mistakes with players or coaches. His long track record of flagrant and reckless decisions with borrowed money transcends any one league or country and makes him a sports story for our overleveraged times.

Hicks belongs to a particular subset of the really rich people who collect professional teams. Count him among owners who made their fortunes in investing, a crowd with a lot of familiar faces to Boston sports fans. They often turn out to be especially good or bad news for their teams.

Henry was a successful hedge fund manager before he and his partners acquired the Red Sox. The partnership that owns the Boston Celtics is dominated by money managers of one kind or another. Both teams have been well run by those owners, who consistently make smart commercial moves and thoughtful decisions about sports legacies.

Hicks became very wealthy — worth as much as $1.4 billion at one time — as a founder of a private equity firm with a taste for deals that came with high risks and huge potential rewards. Leveraged buyouts made him that rich but ultimately unraveled most of his sports empire.

Hicks started collecting professional teams when he bought the Dallas Stars hockey team in 1996 and acquired the Rangers two years later. The baseball world really took notice in 2000, when he signed slugger Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year contract worth a staggering $252 million.

That and other bad decisions made mostly with borrowed money led Hicks to seek a buyer for the Rangers and eventually pushed the team into US Bankruptcy Court. New owners took over this summer.

Hicks got a taste of soccer in 1999, when his investment firm entered into a partnership with a well-known team in Brazil, Sport Club Corinthians Paulista. Big-money promises about a new stadium never worked out, and the partnership eventually turned into an expensive failure.

Hicks and a partner, George Gillett Jr., acquired Liverpool Football Club three years ago in another highly leveraged buyout that offered fans the dream of a new stadium. This time, it didn’t take long to get to the story’s sad ending. The team was collapsing beneath all that debt. Hicks and Gillett howled over the price Henry offered, but bankers were closing in by then.

Rich men — and, yes, they’re always men — buy storied professional sports teams because they can. But most also own teams to be a part of history and care at least a little bit about the legacies they leave.

Tom Hicks bought teams as business gambles and used other people’s money to play. That’s how he became the worst owner in the sporting world.

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This is an article from Boston. I sincerely hope that the new dawn turns into a very bright reign for the new owners. In any event - G&H imo are really stuffed in terms of prestige and finance.

That article tells us what we already knew.

he's a ruthless business man who should of stuck to what he knew best, i mean to make 1.4billion shows whatever he was doing he was doing it right, his ego got him involved in sport and he didnt know anything about it. i've no doubt after he is long gone from here he will go on to make another fortune in the lbo world, fuking people over on the way. id love to be wrong about that but its the only thing he knows

Then there's that episode where DIC came back in 2008 and (if the media was correct) £500m was on the table. Hicks threw a tizzy and withdrew. They could have walked with a decent profit but the bastards are greedy inbreds. Karma.