The Portuguese media today brings reports revealing the attempt from ‘Liverpool owners’ to buy some of Sporting’s huge debts.
The story originally comes from outlet ECO, who says the RedBird Capital Partners were one of the investors who placed a bid to sort part of the Lions’ financial issues.
The American company were known for turning into a stakeholder of the Fenway Sports Group back in March, with their money injection reportedly having an impact in the Reds’ financial recovery following the pandemic crisis.
Sporting currently owe €240m to BCP and Novobanco. At the start of the year, they hired Rotshchild to sell the debt to potential investors.
Some of the bids arrived from RedBird Capital, Carlyle, Bank of America and even the very own Sporting, who had the help from the Apollo fund and now try to sort the issue on their own.
It turns out that RedBird Capital, whose impact in the sports market is described by ECO, made the highest bid, as they were offering over €100m for the money due, of course counting on the discount they get by paying it in cash.
Part of Sporting’s debts are the so called VMOC, which would ‘allow their holder to enter the company’s capital if they are not reimbursed within the deadline’, and would basically make the RedBird capital new partners at the Lisbon side.
ECO claims to have questioned the American company, but did not get a response. The outlet wanted to know if the interest was ‘purely financial’ or if there was the intention for a potential society with the Lions, but there’s no answer on that yet.
In the end, all companies, including RedBird, took their offers off the table, due to complaints about the lack of ‘access to information regarding Sporting’s finances’.
Therefore, Sporting have the priority and should end up sorting the issue using this new aforementioned partnership with Apollo.
