Michael Edwards has left his role as CEO of Football for Fenway Sports Group. The official statement will be gracious. The reality is that he told FSG last August he was done, and nobody who watched the 2025-26 season unfold could be surprised.
Edwards returned to the Liverpool orbit in March 2024 on a specific premise. FSG wanted to build a multi-club network – a Red Bull or City Football Group structure with Liverpool at the top. Edwards, who had been Liverpool’s sporting director during the Jürgen Klopp era and was widely credited with assembling the 2019-20 title-winning squad, was the man to lead it. He accepted the role of CEO of Football on the explicit condition that the multi-club expansion was real. It was not.
FSG explored Bordeaux. It collapsed into administration. They looked at Getafe. Nothing materialised. Malaga was discussed. A minority stake in AS Monaco was floated. Each approach died quietly, and by the summer of 2025 Edwards had concluded the project he was hired to build was never going to happen. Paul Joyce of The Times reported that Edwards was “frustrated as far back as last summer by the lack of progress with regard to the purchase of a second club.” He gave notice not long after.
The season that made everything worse
If the multi-club failure was the structural collapse, the 2025-26 season was the public humiliation. Arne Slot won the Premier League in his first campaign – Liverpool’s first title since 2020 – and 12 months later he was sacked. The final table told the story: 17 wins, 9 draws, 12 losses, 60 points. The defending champions had conceded 12 league defeats and finished well outside the title conversation. In May, FSG acted. Andoni Iraola of Bournemouth is now the frontrunner to replace him. The club that had a long-term plan for managerial succession is now looking for its third manager in four years.
The Slot decision was driven in part by Edwards and sporting director Richard Hughes. The Times reported that the pair presented “cold, hard holistic analysis” that convinced FSG a more aggressive approach was needed. That analysis cost Slot his job. It may cost Hughes his as well. Al-Hilal have formal interest in the Scot. Ben Jacobs reports Hughes will stay this summer to lead a revamp with three or four senior signings, but Joyce has noted he is “not at Liverpool for the long term.”
Mike Gordon and the drift
Mike Gordon, the FSG president who personally recruited Klopp in 2015, is now the only senior figure with meaningful institutional authority at Liverpool. Edwards has gone. Hughes may follow. Slot is out. The coaching staff is in flux. Gordon must now hire a new manager, and perhaps a new sporting director, and perhaps a new CEO of Football – all under an ownership group whose most visible strategic move of the past two years was to abandon its own strategy.
David Ornstein put it bluntly in The Athletic: “FSG is allowing Liverpool to drift – and that is dangerous.” He was writing before Edwards formally exited, but the point applies with greater force now. A club that built its post-Klopp identity around a clean division of powers – head coach, sporting director, CEO – is now watching each of those roles fall vacant in rapid succession.
FSG can point to the league title and a rebuilt midfield. It can argue that the Slot sacking was decisive, not panicked. But the sequence is hard to spin. Promise a multi-club network. Abandon it. Win the league. Collapse. Sack the manager. Lose the CEO. The one constant is Gordon, who has been here before – his recruitment of Klopp saved the last FSG project that was drifting. He is about to be asked to do it again.