Liverpool bidder has Wall St. flair, Beijing connections

Chinese businessman Kenny Huang is a master at grabbing people’s attention. When it comes to hype, his bid to buy Liverpool football club may be his biggest score yet.

Liverpool club chairman Martin Broughton has confirmed Huang is one of several potential buyers to submit a bid to buy the popular English Premier League team.

The Hong Kong-based sports promoter mixes Wall Street flair with strong Chinese government connections, the key to business success in the Asian nation.

Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Jianhua, became the first mainland Chinese graduate to work at the New York Stock Exchange in the late 1980s, according to information provided by his company, QSL Sports.

He now primarily focuses his attention on Chinese basketball and baseball, as the owner of the Jilin Northeast Tigers in China’s top pro basketball league and a master marketer, but has interests abroad as well.

He made headlines last year by announcing he was leading a bid to buy a 15 percent stake in the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team in the United States, where global superstar LeBron James was then playing.

The deal never materialised, but despite QSL confirming in a statement in April that Huang does not own any stake in the NBA team, media reports continue to describe him as owning a minority share.

QSL says it is only the Cavaliers’ marketing partner in China. SportsCorp China, another company founded by Huang, plays a similar role for the New York Yankees.

Huang helped to broker a four-year deal announced this week for instant noodle maker Uni-President to sponsor the Yankees.

As part of that deal, Uni-President will also sponsor the QSL China Baseball League, which Huang co-chairs, and the Yankees will donate to money to the QSL Youth Sports Development Foundation — Huang’s sports charity.

Huang’s biggest international sports coup so far was helping to broker the deal that led to China mega-star Yao Ming signing with the Houston Rockets in 2002.

On the mainland, beyond his ownership of the Jilin squad, China’s government this year granted Huang an eight-year exclusive management rights deal for the lower-level National Basketball League with an option to renew for eight years.

QSL also signed a six-year exclusive partnership in May with an extension option to develop the China Baseball League, the country’s only official professional baseball league.

On the marketing front, Huang sold the naming rights of the Jilin Tigers to a tea company for 1.8 million dollars. They are now the Long-run Tea Basketball Team.

In April, Huang parted ways with QSL’s co-founder and main financial backer, Adrian Cheng, the son of Hong Kong developer Cheng Yu-tung, whom Forbes ranked the world’s 106th richest man, worth 6.8 billion dollars.

“QSL will now be 100 percent owned by Mr Kenny Huang,” the company said in a statement.

As world interest in Huang swelled this week, public relations firm Hill & Knowlton continued to issue statements for QSL, but QSL’s website was not working and the phone number at its Beijing offices was out of service.