RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Mike Gordon avoids the limelight more than his co-owners John Henry and Tom Werner, but he has played a key role in turning the English soccer club into Fenway Sports Group’s most valuable asset. W hen the Boston Red Sox were in the midst of an early-season swoon, the principal owner of the holding company that controls the team was moved to make rare public comments . “When I arrived to live and work in Boston 25 years ago, I was told if you win the World Series in Boston, you’ll never have to buy another drink in this town,” Fenway Sports Group’s John Henry recalled in May.
Unfortunately, “it doesn’t actually work that way,” lamented the 76-year-old billionaire, who has become a lightning rod for criticism—including some “sell the team” chants from Boston’s notoriously passionate fans—even after snapping an 86-year drought with a storybook championship in 2004 and adding three more World Series rings in the ensuing 14 years.
Perhaps that is why Mike Gordon, Fenway Sports Group’s president, prefers to stay anonymous.
Unlike Henry, whose face is recognizable to most Red Sox fans and who can often be spotted in the owners’ box at home games, and Tom Werner , the group’s billionaire chairman, who likewise has spoken publicly about the team over their quarter-century of ownership, few fans would recognize Gordon well enough to buy him a drink even if they wanted to. Still, the 61-year-old partner owns a stake of around 10% in FSG, which Forbes values at around $1.4 billion, making him a billionaire.
After living in Boston for nearly two decades, Gordon joined the ownership group in 2001 for its successful bid of approximately $700 million for the Red Sox, Fenway Park and regional sports network NESN, and he was around for the group’s subsequent acquisitions of sports assets including the Nascar team now known as RFK Racing and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, purchased in 2021 and sold two months ago. These days, however, Gordon’s primary role at FSG is managing operations for Liverpool FC, the Premier League soccer team the group bought for about $475 million in 2010.
Last week, FSG sold between 30% and 40% of the club at a reported $7.4 billion valuation to 1892 Holdings, a consortium that is led by Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of Indian mining billionaire Lakshmi Mittal , and that also counts Jeff Bezos as an investor. That price tag makes Liverpool more valuable than FSG’s original crown jewel, the Red Sox, a franchise Forbes estimates is Major League Baseball’s third-most valuable at $5.25 billion .
“Liverpool has always been built by thinking beyond one season and making decisions with the club’s long-term interests in mind,” Gordon said in a statement announcing the deal.
Gordon declined an interview for this article through an FSG spokesperson, as he does for almost all media requests, but others have been happy to sing his praises over the years. In 2020, then-Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp told the Boston Globe that Gordon is “the brain behind all the things at Liverpool,” and Henry also told the Globe that Gordon is “by far FSG America’s most knowledgeable person with regard to soccer.”
Long before he was overseeing one of the world’s most prestigious teams, Gordon got his start in sports as a teenager growing up in Milwaukee, where he sold popcorn at Brewers games, according to a 2015 Boston Globe article . His mother and then-Brewers owner Bud Selig were friends, a relationship that later helped connect him to Henry, after Selig had become MLB’s commissioner.
In 1996, Vinik left Fidelity to start his own hedge fund, Vinik Asset Management, and brought Gordon along as a cofounder. Over 17 years before unwinding in 2013, the fund averaged a 17% annualized return, outpacing the S&P 500 index’s 10% growth rate during that timeframe.
“To an extent,” Vinik tells Forbes , “he was under my shadow, where it was Vinik Asset Management and he was helping me out, but he was also running his own money, doing extremely well. For the many years that Mike and I both ran our own money, he beat me almost every single year, so Mike on his own is an exceptional money manager.”
When Henry was putting together his bid to buy the Red Sox, Vinik recalls, Gordon walked into his office one day to say Henry had reached out to speak with them, and both secured a small stake in the investment group, originally called New England Sports Ventures. By around 2009, Vinik says, Henry asked the two of them to travel to Liverpool to begin to vet the team as an acquisition target.
“Mike felt very strongly about the potential there that it was one of the great sports assets of the world when it was completely out of favor,” Vinik says of Liverpool, which dominated English soccer in the 1970s and ’80s but hadn’t won a top-division championship since 1990—two years before the Premier League in its current form was established. “To him, it was very clear that it was an attractive asset.”
Around that time, Vinik shifted more of his focus to the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, which he bought at a reported $170 million valuation in 2010 before selling a majority stake at a $1.8 billion valuation in 2024. Meanwhile, Gordon doubled down on FSG. The New York Times , which also owned the Boston Globe at the time, was selling off its 17.5% stake in FSG, receiving $225 million in a series of sales from 2010 to 2012 from a $75 million initial investment. Gordon bought a chunk of that equity, becoming one of FSG’s top partners.
Henry and Werner put him to work as the point person for their new toy in Liverpool, and he was instrumental in the 2015 hiring of Klopp, who led Liverpool to victory in the UEFA Champions League in 2019 and finally to the top of the Premier League table in 2020. The club won another league crown in 2025 under manager Arne Slot after Klopp’s departure the previous year.
Gordon has also helped improve the team’s financial situation, with revenue increasing from about $300 million in the 2010-11 ...
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