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As Liverpool FC stars Mo Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Virgil van Dijk celebrated winning the Premier League clubs 20th title on Sunday, you can bet that across the ocean thousands of American fans were ordering shirts with their names on the back. There are 24 million Liverpool fans in the U.S. Many of them are spread across 67 different club supporters groups in 35 states. Americans buy more Liverpool kits and merchandise than any other international market. Sales were up 14% last season, and that coincides with more than 30 million U.S. fans watching the club on TV, up 42%. More than half of Liverpool’s partners are headquartered in the U.S., including Nike, Coca-Cola, Expedia, and UPS. The clubs success and ability to grow its business across the pond is a snapshot of how its overall approach to the business of global soccer has been directly tied to its ability to win on the field. Back in 2010, Liverpool FC was struggling financially. It was a celebrated and historic sports icon, but bad business had put the club on the verge of collapse. Boston-based Fenway Sports Group bought the club for about $380 million. In May, Forbes estimated the clubs worth at roughly $5.7 billion. Ben Latty, Liverpool FCs chief commercial officer, says it was about a decade ago that Liverpool really focused on specific areas of business growth. The way that we operate commercially, and from a revenue standpoint, is very different to American sports, says Latty, who joined the club in 2013. The Premier League controls the broadcast rights, so Liverpool put its emphasis on as many other areas as possible that it could control: licensing, partnerships, and retail. There’s other models out there, yeah, pros and cons of those. But we believe that we’ve got the right model to control our own destiny, Latty says. Heres how it works. [Photo: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside/Getty Images] In-house ownership In the NFL, most teams control their local broadcast rights. For retail, Fanatics designs, manufactures, and distributes the fan gear, and in many cases manages retail and ecommerce. Global football clubs operate much more independently from their leagues, so their ability to afford the best playersand therefore succeed on the fieldis largely driven by how well they run as a business. Latty says for Liverpool, that means owning and operating many of the primary points of contact fans have with the club. All its merchandise design and even manufacturing, except for its game kit by Nike, is club owned. We do everything ourselves, says Latty. That has pros and cons, but it allows us to control our own destinyscale up when we need to and, though we havent had to yet, scale back when we need to. Our retail business is really important as it relates to engaging with our fan base around the world, making sure we have the right products for the right regions, and the customer service that they expect. [Photo: Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC/Getty Images] Power in partnerships A key cog in the Liverpool FC global brand machine is its ability to attract and work with big-name corporate partners. In the past 18 months, the club has signed 10 major deals, including with Google Pixel, UPS, Japan Airlines, Peloton, and Husqvarna. And more than half of its major partners are U.S.-based companies, including Nike, Coca-Cola, and Expedia. Latty says it’s about balancing partners across different industries and product categories, and then working with them to create content that works best for them, the club, and its fans. The key word is impact, he says. We’ve got to make sure that what we provide to them hits their objectives and becomes impactful. These are brands from every corner of the planet, and the impact is to a global audience through broadcast, digital, and social. . . . These partners are a really important piece for us to engage with our fan base in all of those global markets. For example, as part of its partnership with Google Pixel, the club gave the smartphones to all its media and content staff to capture behind-the-scenes contentsome scripted, some not so much. There was this amazing moment last season, when during a goal celebration Virgil van Dijk . . . noticed someone from the media team behind the goal. He took the phone and filmed the celebration. It wasnt planned at all, Latty says. You can say that’s luck, but you also make your own luck seeding the right people in the right places with the right technology. A truly incredible angle of Darwin's winner and then celebrations shot by the skipper #AD | #TeamPixel pic.twitter.com/humiZ1djWl— Liverpool FC (@LFC) March 2, 2024 Content Club Liverpool FC was the first Premier League club to reach more than 10 million followers on YouTube (now it has more than 11 million). Its content is a mix of behind-the-scenes, interviews, fan engagements, and game highlights. The club also produces all its branded content fr partners in-house. Our content team is really at the center of working with our partnerships team to make sure that whatever we’re coming up with for our partners is going to resonate on our channels and give them the reach they signed up for, Latty says. The club has more than 46.7 million Instagram followers, and last season it reported 1.5 billion engagements across its social channels, a 40% increase from the previous season, and tops in the Premier League. To put our level of engagements into context, when we won the Carabao Cup back in February 2024, we got 61.3 million social engagements, Latty says. When Real Madrid won La Liga, they got 48.9 million engagements, and when the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl last year, they registered 12.7 million engagements. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Liverpool Football Club (@liverpoolfc) Latty says roughly 70% of the clubs content is watched by people who dont regularly follow soccer. He credits the quality of the content to how media and content is woven into the organization. I think some of the beauty of that is how closely theyre integrated into what we do as a football operations team so theyre there for the moments that matter, he says. As Salah, van Dijk, and the rest of the team prepare to officially lift the Premier League title trophy later in May, the goal for Latty is to make sure the business side keeps fueling wins like this. We’ve got to continue to protect what we’ve built up to now, he says. For me, the pressure is always to drive as much revenue as we can for the football club, so that we can do what we’re doing on the pitch now, and long may that continue.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active housing inventory for sale at the end of March 2025 was still 20% below pre-pandemic March 2019 levels, on a year-over-year basis national active listings are up 29% between March 2024 and March 2025. This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. One of the biggest year-over-year increases is happening in Californiawhere active inventory for sale is up 50% year-over-year. Despite the 50% year-over-year jump in active California housing inventory for saleincluding both single-family homes and condosCalifornia at the end of March 2025 still had 20% fewer homes for sale than it did in pre-pandemic March 2019. But more California housing markets are climbing out of that inventory deficit. And if the current trajectory holds, California could soon be out of its pandemic housing boom era inventory hole. Among Californias 36 major counties with at least 100,000 residents, nine have more active housing inventory for sale in March 2025 compared to pre-pandemic March 2019. The other 27 major California counties still have inventory below pre-pandemic March 2019 levels. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); In housing markets where active inventory for sale rises significantly, homebuyers are gaining leverage. In housing markets where active inventory for sale has shot up above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, homebuyers have gained considerable leverage relative to past years. Homebuyers in San Francisco (in particular San Francisco propers condo market) had a lot more leverage recently than homebuyers in, say, Orange County.
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If youve followed Apple for any length of time, youve no doubt come across the notion that the company doesnt rush into adopting cutting-edge technology; instead, it waits until it can do it right. We dont feel an impatience to be first, CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg in 2017. Our thing is to be the best and to give the user something that really makes a difference in their lives. But Im starting to wonder if something else is going on. Sure, a lot of Apples Android competitors have sometimes been accused of throwing features at the wall. These days, though, I think their hardware is often just markedly betterand it hits the market earlier. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} There have certainly been times when Apple has waited and knocked it out of the park with its own implementation of a new component or product category. Touch ID was far faster and more reliable than any previous fingerprint reader. Apple Pay was a comprehensive use case for Near Field Communication that worked seamlessly compared with prior solutions. The Apple Watch might not have been perfect at launch, but it was (and is) light years ahead of other smartwatches. Other examples fall into a gray area. Take wireless charging. Having to create another device you have to plug into the wall is actually, for most situations, more complicated, Apple senior VP Phil Schiller said in 2012. Five years later, the iPhone X and 8 launched with Qi charging that worked the exact same way, without any particular special sauce. Today, Apple has by far the most convenient setup with its MagSafe ecosystem, and it has set the bar for the new Qi2 standard. But that doesnt change the fact that it was years behind on the basic functionality. More recently, there have been cases in which Apple is simply late. AI is an obvious example, but camera hardware is more pertinent. For many years, Apple could and did lay claim to having the best phone camera around. But its impossible to make that case today if you have any experience with the top Android phones on the market. Some of that comes down to software tuning, but hardware plays an equally big role. In fall 2023, Apple introduced its tetraprism camera to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, upping the focal length from 3x to 5x. Apple presented this as a new approach to lens design, and in some ways it is; it doesnt have the characteristic rectangular shape of periscope telephoto lenses on other Android phones, although the principle is the same. But Apple couldnt claim any major performance breakthrough, except over itself. Take the Xiaomi 13 Ultra, released at the start of that year; its 5x telephoto lens was paired with a bigger sensor, and the difference in clarity was stark. Apple had been rumored to be lining up suppliers for periscope telephoto cameras since 2020, and even had filed patents on the technology in 2016, but it doesnt seem to have gained anything by waiting so long to bring the concept to market. Huawei and Oppo, meanwhile, were shipping impressive periscope cameras back in 2019. It was a similar situation with 48-megapixel image sensors, the main new feature on the iPhone 14 Pro camera in 2022. Again, its not clear what took Apple so long to introduce thisthe first 48-megapixel sensors made their way to Android phones in early 2019, and they worked the exact same way by combining four pixels into one for better 12-megapixel shots. In recent years, the state of the art in Android phones has been 1-inch image sensors, the same size youll find in enthusiast compact cameras like Sonys RX100 line. Once youve used one, its hard to go back; these phones take photos that just dont look like they came from a phone. The technology is mature, but at least from the outside, Apple does not seem all that interested in keeping up. Its possible that Apples scale makes it harder for the company to secure cutting-edge components in the quantities it requires for each launch. The first tetraprism lens was only available on the iPhone 15 Pro Max before making it to the smaller iPhone 16 Pro the following year, for example. Android OEMs ship so many more individual models that its easier for them to reserve high-end parts for certain flagships. Ive been thinking about this dynamic lately when reading reports of Apples belated entry into folding phones, a category Samsung kicked off in 2019albeit with some well-publicized hiccups. Last month Bloombergs Mark Gurman reported that Apple plans to use technologies from a slimmer iPhone this year in a folding phone that could land as early as 2026. Im not sure this checks out. According to Gurman, the 2025 iPhone Air will be around 2 millimeters thinner than current models; the iPhone 16 Pro is 8.3 millimeters thick. The thinnest folding phone out there today is Oppos Find N5, which has a near-invisible crease in its display and is just 4.2 millimeters thick when unfolded. At this point, what could Apple really be learning by producing a phone closer in thickness to the iPhone 16 Pro? The Find N5 isnt just impressive hardwareits a phone that makes you wonder how much thinner it could even be. Make it a fifth of a millimeter thicker, and Im not sure it would still fit its USB-C port. (Gurman does note that Apple also plans to investigate the possibility of port-free iPhones.) But more to the point, the Find N5 is already on the market. At this point, I would not expect Apples first attempt at a folding phone to break new ground on a technical level. Six years on from the original Galaxy Fold, it seems unlikely that foldable hardware is going to get meaningfully better than whats out there right now. Apples software is broadly excellent and its ecosystem is unparalleled, which is why I continue to buy iPhones myself. The Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch really are the best products available in their given categories, so Ill always want a phone that works well with them. But something is going on with the iPhone. Its simply no longer the case that Android companies cant compete on hardware or design. If Appleever wants to dazzle the world with mobile devices againor at least hardware obsessives like methe window may be closing. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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