Published: 02:00 BST, 20 August 2026 | Updated: 10:52 BST, 20 August 2026
There's an old and barely documented story about Jeff Bezos that is worth excavating for a single reason – the yarn is the only one to suggest Liverpool’s newest shareholder held even a passing interest in sport as a child.
It dates to when Bezos, 62, was aged nine and living in Houston. As the mother to a bookish, scrawny lad, Jacklyn Bezos thought her boy needed to toughen up, which meant shifting him from his comfort zones of Star Trek and studying.
This would have been around 1973 and American football was the means to an end Jacklyn chose. In Texas, that is no small undertaking, so Jacklyn had her worries. ‘I thought he was going to get creamed out there,’ she said in the buried sections of an interview published by Wired in 1999.
Naturally, the profile didn’t conclude with a punchline about violent defeat. Instead, as Bezos’s late mother recalled it, the future founder of Amazon was the only child on the side capable of memorising all the plays. Not only his plays, but those of all his team-mates, too. She claimed he was made captain of the defence in the space of two weeks.
It’s a fun snippet but difficult to corroborate – Daily Mail Sport has trawled the archives of Houston’s multiple local newspapers from that period and found no mention of a ‘Coach Meisner’, which was among the few tangible details when the Washington Post – which Bezos now owns – repeated the anecdote in 2000. Emails to a couple of American football historians in Texas also proved fruitless.
If the story teaches us anything, it is the rarity of finding the young Bezos in any athletic environment whatsoever.
Jeff Bezos (pictured with his wife Lauren Sanchez), the world's third richest man, is part of a consortium that have bought almost 40 per cent of Liverpool
There is little evidence Bezos has any passion for sport, much less football – so why has he bought into Liverpool?
A young Bezos was encouraged by his mother to play American football in a bid to toughen him up – but we can't find any records of his sporting exploits
When Daily Mail Sport contacted his former school, Palmetto High in Miami, it required only six minutes to establish that the most famous of their alumni from the class of '82 never kicked, threw, jumped, swam, ran or sailed for any of its teams.
Wade Rowdon, once a third baseman at Cincinnati Reds and three years ahead of Bezos at Palmetto, told me he only recently found out they attended the same school – Bezos may have changed the world of retail forever but, evidently, he never left even the faintest of sporting footprints on his own playground.
All of which means nothing and something, because there are important questions to be asked of the ‘why’ whenever a financial behemoth lays hands on a sporting institution, and a deep-seated passion for the property at hand is often the first to be ruled out. In the case of Liverpool FC and its union with the world’s third richest man, that can be taken as a given.
A week has passed since Liverpool’s owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG) announced a ‘definitive agreement’ had been reached for a consortium named 1892 Holdings to buy a ‘minority’ stake in the club at the heart of a socialist city.
It has since transpired that the slice of the pie they have bought for more than £2billion is significantly bigger than initially reported – closer to 38 or 39 per cent rather than 30 per cent – and that options exist for 1892 to assume a majority shareholding within 12 months.