The LFC Rich List 2011

October 5, 2011
This Is Anfield

FourFourTwo magazine released their annual Football Rich List on Wednesday, with plenty of Liverpool FC players and staff featuring.

Principal owner John W. Henry is named 20th in the overall 100, with an estimated worth of £600m. They write;

Completing a £300m takeover of Liverpool in October 2010 – days too late for the last Rich List – makes John W Henry this year’s highest new entry. It feels like he’s been around for longer, a blessed relief following the antagonism towards his compatriots and predecessors George Gillett and Tom Hicks.
Widely welcomed, if cautiously in some quarters, Henry is a different kind of owner to Gillett and Hicks. Quietly considered and approachable (he runs his own Twitter account), Henry struck popularity gold by replacing Roy Hodgson with Anfield legend Kenny Dalglish and rubber-stamping a squad rebuilding process at considerable cost. Henry knows how valuable emotional ties are in sports: having bought the Boston Red Sox for $700m in 2002, he abandoned the previous owners’ plans to demolish the iconic Fenway Park stadium and instead renovated it, an option he is likely to repeat at Anfield. But popularity is also aided by success: in 2004 the Red Sox won their first championship in 86 years. How Liverpool fans would welcome a first title in 22 years.
Henry, who hails from farming stock in the mid-West, made his fortune first in commodity trading before moving into sports management. Today his New England Sports Ventures owns Red Sox, Fenway Park and an 80% share of the lucrative New England Sports Network TV company. Henry is also an auto racing buff who owns 50% of NASCAR’s Rousch Fenway Racing. He co-founded online racecar site iRacing in 2004. In early 2011 his fortune was assessed at £630m by Forbes in its list of world billionaires.

Sheikh Mansour of Man City comes in top with a whopping estimated worth of £20bn.

Manager Kenny Dalglish came in 8th position of the top 10 richest Premier League managers – ahead of new Chelsea boss Andre Vilas-Boas but behind Sunderland‘s Steve Bruce. FourFourTwo estimate The King to be worth £8m. They write;

“King Kenny is back. The Kop’s favourite son is now managing Liverpool again and the Anfield faithful hope that the wee Scot can return the Reds to the glory days and overturn the dominance of hated local rivals Manchester United at the top of the Premiership. In 1990 Liverpool won the third league title of their first five seasons under Dalglish, but the following February he resigned due to stress.
Dalglish popped up later that year at Jack Walker’s nouveau-riche Blackburn, leading them into the Premier League and then to the title, becoming only the third manager to lead two clubs to the top-flight title, after Herbert Chapman and Brian Clough. Less happy spells followed at Newcastle and later Celtic, where he left in 2000 with a £600,000 pay-off.
In 2009 Dalglish returned to Liverpool to help its youth academy and act as club ambassador. But in early 2011 when Roy Hodgson left as manager, Dalglish returned as caretaker. In May he was confirmed as the new manager on a three-year contract worth a reported £4m a year. A strong supporter of charities, Dalglish should easily be worth £8m for now. If he returns Liverpool to their glory days, he will go a lot higher.”

England boss Fabio Capello tops the managers list, with Alex Ferguson second.

Club captain Steven Gerrard is the highest ranked player on the list. Sixth among the players, with an estimated worth of £27m. FourFourTwo write;

In 2009 Steven Gerrard signed a four-year deal that will take him beyond his 33rd birthday and probably keep him a Liverpool player until the end of his career. At £140,000 a week, the contract made the captain the best-paid player at Anfield. With a lucrative deal with Adidas worth £1m a year, plus a tie-up with Lucozade, to add to his Liverpool wage, Gerrard is earning close to £9m a year, more than enough to allow him to invest in a friend’s restaurant business as he has done with the Warehouse Kitchen & Bar, in Southport, close to his home. He has invested £5m of his millions in Merseyside and Dubai penthouse apartments. Steven Gerrard Promotions, his company showed £3.7m net assets in 2009-10.