INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani has entered the race to acquire English football club Liverpool FC, The Mirror 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.
A mail sent to Reliance Industries elicited no response till the time
This is not the first time that Ambani is eyeing a stake in the Merseyside club.
In 2010, The Times reported that Ambani and Subrata Roy
significant interests in sports in India.
The group owns Indian Premier League (IPL) team Mumbai Indians and runs the football league,
Indian Super League, along with the All India Football Federation.During 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
These include the Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and the Olympics.
Reliance 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 non-cricket sporting activity
stands at about 88 per cent of the overall sports ad spend.
The number for non-cricket sports has grown from around 8 per cent in the
pre-pandemic period.
The year 2020 saw the first Covid wave, resulting in a blip in overall sports sponsorship spends in the
country.
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.
