Person familiar with talks: Consortium including Goldman Sachs dropped Liverpool bid

AP source: Goldman Sachs dropped bid for Liverpool

LONDON — Liverpool’s owners have missed out on a major investment from a consortium including Goldman Sachs and owners of two U.S. sports teams, a person involved in the negotiations told The Associated Press on Tuesday night.

The person said Goldman Sachs, which was putting together the bid to buy all or part of the Premier League club, conducted due diligence with the bankers for co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr. but then decided not to make the offer.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the involvement of the parties was never announced.

The group would have included Goldman Sachs as an investor, as well as British and American institutional investors and an Asian real estate developer.

Hicks and Gillett are now preparing to announce the appointment this week of Barclays Capital, the investment arm of the bank that sponsors the Premier League, to find a buyer for the club, which has debts of $364 million.

To oversee the sale process, British Airways chairman Martin Broughton will be hired as interim non-executive chairman.

For more than two years, Hicks and Gillett have been trying to attract investors to reduce the debt resulting from their leveraged takeover. Money raised also would finance a new stadium to replace Anfield.

Preliminary work on a 60,000-seat stadium in Stanley Park, across from Anfield, began in June 2008 after government approval was granted. Work on the stadium, which could be expanded to 73,000, was stopped that October following the global economic crisis.

Liverpool has been financially hamstrung by the economics of 45,000-capacity Anfield, where there are few luxury suites and amenities to generate extra funding.

The lack of funds to strengthen the squad has impacted Liverpool’s performance on the field this season.

Last season’s Premier League runners-up are languishing in sixth place, six points out of fourth place and the final English berth in next season’s lucrative European Champions League.

While Liverpool is in the semifinals of the Europa League, it is in the continent’s second-tier knockout competition because it was eliminated from the group stage of the Champions League, which it won in 2005.

Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Rothschild were appointed in September to find investors, but Hicks and Gillett didn’t receive an offer acceptable to them. An offer for 40 percent of the club by the New York-based private equity firm Rhone Group was not accepted earlier this month.

Gillett sold the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens, the Gillett Entertainment Group and the Bell Centre back to the Molson family for $580 million last year. Hicks has an agreement to sell baseball’s Texas Rangers to Chuck Greenberg, but that deal has been held up as creditors try to get more money as part of a sale.

AP Sports Writer Ronald Blum in New York contributed to this report.