Shy John W Henry has track record to please Liverpool fans

John W Henry prefers to fly below the radar but the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team has an attention-grabbing track record both on and off the field to warm the hearts of concerned Liverpool soccer fans. 

While the board for England's most successful club has agreed to sell Liverpool to Henry's New England Sports Ventures (NESV) for £300 million ($477.6 million), the deal's completion could be held up in court due to a legal challenge from its current owners. 

Until then, Liverpool backers can only wonder what changes the media-shy Henry and his group might bring to improve the fortunes of the Premier League team off to its worst start to a season in more than 50 years. 

While Henry, 61, could not be reached to comment, NESV promised to bring back Liverpool's winning culture, and sports bankers, soccer executives, officials in the futures trading sector and friends said Liverpool fans should celebrate.

"What this group did with a legendary franchise, the Red Sox, which was moribund when they bought it ... from a business perspective they''ve done a superb job," Dave Checketts, owner of the Major League Soccer (MLS) in Utah, as well as the NHL St. Louis Blues, said at the Leaders in Football conference in London. 

"From a PR perspective -- superb -- and they got success on the field. They'll repeat the model at Liverpool."                                                                                   

'Loved baseball'                                           

Born in Quincy, Illinois, Henry, who built his fortune as a futures trader, has loved baseball since childhood, crunching stats for his boyhood favourite St. Louis Cardinals because he could not wait for the Sunday paper, said John Damgard, president of the Futures Industry Association and a guest at Henry''s wedding last summer.   

"His love of numbers came from his fascination with baseball," said Damgard, who believes Henry will turn Liverpool into the toast of English soccer within three years.

He may not relish talking to the media but Henry is not slow to interact with the fans.                                           

"I love to listen to and interact with fans," Henry said in a rare comment on the Red Sox media guide. "Perhaps not every fan can identify with me, but I think I can identify with most of them."  

Henry held a minority stake in the New York Yankees and owned the Florida Marlins before leading a group that purchased the Red Sox in 2002 for a then league-record $700 million.  

Two years later, the Sox won their first title in 86 years, breaking a storied curse fans said had haunted the team due to its sale of baseball great Babe Ruth to the rival Yankees after a World Series title in 1918. Another championship was won in 2007.

That kind of success will carry across the Atlantic, Robert Reynolds, chief executive of Putnam Investments, said at an event in Boston to announce a sports sponsorship.

"The skill set you need to run a professional sports franchise, whether it's soccer, football or baseball, is the same," he said.                                           

Henry came by his skills early. After a stint trying to outsmart the Las Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables, he became interested in analysing futures markets when he inherited the family farm at age 26. 

He developed his firm's trends-following algorithms and rode them to great success.                                           

In a 2009 profile, Boston Magazine described Henry as "often up until 3 am, checking the Japanese markets, strategising with Sox GM Theo Epstein, or playing with his iRacing simulator, which mimics the cars of his Roush Fenway NASCAR team."                                           

It is that focus to detail that has made Henry and his partners successful, said Randy Vataha, president of sport investment bank Game Plan llc.  

"They've done as good a job in professional sports as anybody has ever done," Vataha said. "They took the Red Sox, certainly a good franchise, and made it into a real business, plus more competitive and professional."

NESV not only owns the Red Sox, but its historic home field of Fenway Park, an 80 percent stake in a successful regional sports TV network, a 50% stake in NASCAR's Roush Fenway Racing team, a sales and marketing firm that serves other sports properties and more.                                           

Forbes this year ranked the Red Sox and Roush Fenway as the second most valuable teams in their sports at $840 million and $238 million, respectively, while estimating the baseball team was the league's second most profitable.                                           

A deal earlier this year by New York Times Co to sell a 1.2% stake in NESV for a reported $14 million set an enterprise value for the entire company at about $1.2 billion.  

Fan friendly                                        

However, if NESV were sold in one piece it would likely draw bids of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion, said one sports banker, who asked not to be identified.       

Red Sox fans, known affectionately as Red Sox Nation, have certainly been won over by Henry as his group has poured over $200 million into making ageing Fenway more fan friendly.

Not everything Henry has touched has always turned to gold, however, as a lack of clear marketplace trends in recent years has led to weaker returns at his futures trading firm John W. Henry & Co in Boca Raton, Florida. 

In fact, after estimating Henry's net worth at $1.1 billion in early 2009, Forbes did not rank him among the world's billionaires this year.    

His firm said on its website that it oversaw $276 million in assets at the end of September. That is down from about $2.5 billion in 2004 as many investers pulled their money out of the company's funds.   

However, Henry's track record is still enviable as the firm's largest GlobalAnalytics fund, which invests in futures contracts on everything from the price of gold to corn, wheat and hogs, has gained an average of almost 12% a year since it opened in 1997.  

Henry''s longest-running fund, which concentrates on metals and financial contracts, has gained an average of 21% a year since its launch in 1984. 

"To maintain a compound annual return of 20% a year over a 20-year time period is a very rare occurrence," said Sol Waksman, president of Barclay Hedge, which specialises in analysing returns of hedge, commodity and currency funds.                   

"It's a notable achievement."