SIX BIDDERS CIRCLE LIVERPOOL

A preferred bidder among the half a dozen consortia reportedly circling Liverpool will be named by the end of next week by the club’s chairman Martin Broughton.

Broughton and Barclays Capital, the firm chosen by the club’s co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett to oversee its sale, have been speaking to six bidders and media reports suggest that Chinese industrialist Kenny Huang is favorite. Some reports claim that Huang was holding direct talks with the club’s main creditors, Royal Bank of Scotland, but RBS have denied this.

Huang has promised to pay the £237 million due to RBS but is unlikely to meet the £600 million to £800

million valuation put on the club by the Americans, which would leave Hicks and Gillett millions of pounds out of pocket from their disastrous venture into English football. Another bidder is led by Yahya Kirdi, a former Syria international and funded by Middle Eastern businessmen, while Kuwait's al-Kharafi family, owners of a number of businesses in the Middle Eastern State, including a construction company that bears their name, are also reportedly interested along with three more as yet unconfirmed groups all believed to be from outside the United Kingdom. Al-Kharafi’s previous UK interests include a stake in British construction group, Costain.

GERMAN FANS GENERATE HIGHEST AUDIENCE SHARE

Television screenings of Germany’s matches in this summer’s World Cup generated an average market

share generated of more than 82% according to new research from Sport+ Markt. In contrast, the audience share in France, who had a disastrous World Cup and went out in the first round, was just 62% but the figure for the United Kingdom, whose representatives England fared little better, was 68%. “No matter if England is playing in the group stage or the last 16: the TV audience is always impressive”, comments Gareth Moore, UK & Ireland director at Sport+Markt. “The second game of the group phase against Algeria attracted even more than the knock-out game against the major rivals, Germany - but just because many English fans chose public viewing for the big-match”. In all the markets analysed, the top audience was a national team match but in Switzerland, the final between the Netherlands and Spain was the most watched and half of the Swiss spectators watched all the games not involving their national team. The average market share for the final was almost 70% across the most important European markets.{jcomments on}

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