On the strength of the Anfield Road expansion, Liverpool will aim to significantly increase matchday revenue.

Liverpool had requested to start their 2023–24 season away from home, it was revealed earlier this week.

Liverpool requested a special dispensation from the League to play their first game of the season away from home so that the £80 million project could receive its finishing touches as the Anfield Road redevelopment project nears completion this summer.

The Main Stand underwent a significant renovation that opened in 2016, and work on the new stand began in 2021. Since Fenway Sports Group acquired the club in 2010, Anfield has undergone two major renovations.

Anfield’s capacity will increase by 15,500 since before the Main Stand work was finished seven years ago with the addition of 7,000 more seats from the most recent construction, bringing the total to 61,000.

One of the important choices that FSG had to make when they took over Liverpool was whether or not to stay at Anfield or look for a new purpose-built stadium elsewhere in the city. Options were considered, but ultimately it was decided to stay at the team’s spiritual home and redevelop the stadium to match the kind of revenue potential the owners had envisioned.

Matchday revenue at the end of the 2010–11 fiscal year was £40–9 million when FSG acquired the club 13 years ago. When the most recent set of accounts, for the year ending May 2022, were published, the club was bringing in £86.8 million. Despite a roughly 18% increase in capacity over the past ten years, matchday revenue has more than doubled.

With the completion of the £114 million Main Stand redevelopment in 2016, the stadium’s capacity increased by 8,500 seats, and a new matchday experience and significantly improved corporate offering helped Liverpool increase revenues.

Matchday revenue for Liverpool was £62.4 million in the financial reports for the 2015–16 season. Matchday revenue reached £73.5m in the accounting period that followed, 2016–17, an increase of nearly 18% from the previous year. Since the Main Stand was finished, matchday revenues have increased by 39%.

In the Premier League right now, only Manchester United (£110.5m) and Tottenham Hotspur (£106.1m) have been able to surpass the £100m revenue threshold for matchdays. But Liverpool, once the Anfield Road End expansion is finished, will probably join that club by the time 2025 rolls around and the stadium has had the advantage of more than a year of being in full swing at increased capacity.

Additionally, there will be an increase in revenue potential due to higher food and beverage sales, which will be made possible by higher ticket demand being met.

The Eagles, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John performed at Anfield during the summer of last year, helping to boost revenue. There won’t be any concerts this summer due to the need to speed up the development’s final stages, but they are anticipated to return for the summer of 2023, giving the Reds more opportunities to take full advantage of Anfield’s premier location.

Sam Kennedy, one of FSG’s most senior leaders and partners, said at the Sportico Invest in Sports conference in New York in October, where the ECHO was present: “We found an unbelievable facility, a venue that means so much more to the community than football. When you consider what Anfield means to Liverpool, it is a place where generations have literally shared memories, connections, and bonds that are unmatched by any other location in sports.

However, it needed a significant amount of investment when we arrived. There was little attention paid to food and drink, there was no real premium offering, and the gameday experience was, to put it mildly, lacking.

“There had been talk of perhaps a joint development with Everton and perhaps constructing a single stadium for both clubs. For reasons that may now seem obvious to people who are familiar with international football, I can assure you that was a bad idea, and it would have been a bad idea for us to come out in support of it.

“We decided to preserve Anfield, protect it, and expand it, just like we did at Fenway Park. To get fans to the games earlier and to improve their experience there, we have invested several hundred million pounds in the facility. We have built a new main stand and an Anfield Road stand that is soon to open.

We established a commercial office in Liverpool and one in London to oversee the process because it is obviously much more difficult to manage design and construction when you are 4,000 miles away.

“I believe it has received favorable feedback. Even though the venue is still small by Premier League standards and there is still a high level of unmet demand for tickets and access, we believe that is acceptable given how unique the location is.”