Soccer: Devoted sports fan with $1.1b burning in his back pocket

John Henry. Photo / Getty Images

Every sports mogul is both a fan and a businessman. Some are fans first, businessmen second. John William Henry II is a businessman first, a fan second. And that's worked out just fine for the Boston Red Sox, where the hedge fund manager's millions ended a World Series drought and won him the respect of fans and Major League Baseball executives.

It has worked out just fine for Henry, too, who now has a lifestyle he wouldn't have been able to dream of when he was growing up as a shy, asthmatic son of farmers in the southern state of Arkansas.

Recently turned 61, with a net worth estimated at US$840 million ($1.1 billion) he has all the accoutrements of the super-rich.

He has the obligatory US$34 million yacht, he has the obligatory Florida mansion, he has the obligatory second wife, half his age; he and Linda Pizzuti were hitched last year. Three weeks ago, the couple reportedly welcomed the birth of their first daughter. Henry has a teenage daughter, too, from his first marriage.

Most of all, Henry has the Red Sox, after the New York Yankees the most lucrative franchise in baseball.

Not bad for a kid who played second base in Little League.

In a nation that prides itself on its social mobility, it is nonetheless rare to find someone of farming stock in the billionaires lists. While it wasn't exactly the family business that made Henry rich, it certainly inspired him in the business that did - namely, futures trading.

Futures are fiendishly complex in practice, but simple in outline: they are contracts to buy or sell commodities, such as farm produce like wheat or soybeans, at a point in the future. Farmers invented them to protect themselves from unexpected moves in the price. Mr Henry, a maths whiz, was fascinated.

"When my father died in the late 1970s, I decided that I needed to understand agricultural markets," he explained. "So I spent a few years studying markets, game theory and probability. I was immediately fascinated with market movements. I retain the same fascination today."

What lit the touchpaper under Henry's fortune was his refusal to submit to guesswork, or even forensic investigation, over what might affect prices in the future. Instead, he built a mathematical model of the financial markets, and used that to predict what prices would do. No humans necessary.

"The first week of trading was in June of 1981. I was so confident in my research and philosophy that I left the country."

By 2007, Henry's hedge fund, JWH, had grown to be one of the largest traders of futures in the world.

He first invested in sport with baseball, in 1991. He has been in and out of various teams, holding a sliver of the Red Sox's arch-rival, the Yankees, and spending three years as owner of the Florida Marlins, where he contrived not to lose any of his money, despite the team's poor on-field performance.

For the dream chance to buy the Red Sox, he pulled together powerful co-investors, including veteran baseball executive Larry Lucchino and television producer Tom Werner.

Don Garber, Commissioner of Major League Soccer in the US and a man with a keen eye for business savvy, says of the Red Sox owners: "They have a tremendously robust understanding of the sports business and an understanding of how to protect and enhance the legacy of a brand."

The new owners embraced the history of the team, Garber said. "They are tremendously good team owners." For Liverpool fans, then, they sound far better than the last lot.

- INDEPENDENT