FSG have £350m fall-back option if Liverpool fail to qualify for Champions League

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Fenway Sports Group will use Liverpool’s £350m credit facility rather than injecting more money into the club should they fail to qualify for next season’s Champions League, says Kieran Maguire.Liverpool lost 1-0 to Galatasaray in the Champions League round-of-16 first leg last night, with the return leg in a week’s time a high-stakes affair both on and off the pitch.The Reds have benefited to the tune of around £90m from UEFA’s central £4bn pot this season. And that’s before FSG even account for the five extra matchdays at Anfield, which will likely be worth at least £25m.John Henry and his Fenway colleagues lobbied for the new Champions League format, which some finance experts have called a Super League by stealth.

And the costs associated with those competitions – player appearance fees, administrative expenses, stadium logistics and utilities and so on – mean that some clubs don’t even break even.The Champions League also offers a ticket for the expanded Club World Cup, which could be worth up to £100m in its next iteration if FIFA can repeat their commercial offering from the 2025 edition.So, with Liverpool currently outside the last of the Premier League’s five Champions League spots on goal difference ahead of hosting Tottenham on Sunday, could the absence of elite European football combined with the legacy costs of their huge summer transfer window mean they need external investment from the owners?Photo by James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images“Football player salaries are very closely linked with success on the pitch,” Maguire, who is a football finance lecturer at University of Liverpool, told Rousing The Kop.“A standard contract might include a 25 per cent bonus if you qualify for the Champions League. That said, the wage bill went up in 2023-24 despite having no Champions League football.”Per the most recent set of accounts, Liverpool’s wage bill was a club-record £427m in 2024-25.

In layman’s terms, they spent more than they earned.“In terms of needing short-term capital, the first route FSG would take if they didn’t qualify for the Champions League would be to use their overdraft facility. Interest costs are a non-issue from a PSR perspective, but FSG don’t want to pay it unless they have to.