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Liverpool are European football champions and the Boston Red Sox are the most recent winners of baseball’s World Series, yet the firm that can currently claim to be the most effective cross-sport owners on the planet do not have a central office. It helps that the home of the second-largest shareholder is just around the corner from the biggest one in Brookline, Massachusetts.



By public road, Mike Gordon lives just a four-minute walk away from John W. Henry, Fenway Sports Group’s controlling influence. But a private footpath means the pair can be in discussion, face to face, inside 90 seconds without anyone knowing, such is the level of privacy in the surrounding terrain, where the trees are so tall there is almost a permanent canopy of protection from the sky and the shade beneath can slip into darkness.



Few in Boston in a position to know about Gordon are able to...