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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.

Daily Mail Sport has spoken to figures involved in the deal, financial experts and supporter groups concerned about the implications. But among the bigger mysteries within all of it is Bezos, a man worth £194.9billion, according to Forbes’ real-time listings on Wednesday morning.

Based on our conversations with individuals connected to the negotiations, Bezos was not on the frontline of talks, nor anywhere especially close. That role was taken by Amit Bhatia, the former co-owner of QPR and son-in-law of Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.

We understand Bhatia first met with FSG president Mike Gordon a year ago, after introductions from Will McDonough, the founder of Corestone Capital and a former agent to NFL legend Tom Brady. Interestingly, McDonough was also a senior adviser to the White House task force at this summer’s World Cup.

It was during the World Cup that FSG founder John W Henry is understood to have met Bhatia at an elite private members’ club in New York, Zero Bond, with the deal having moved quickly over the summer. ‘The past three months is when it all escalated,’ a source from the consortium told Daily Mail Sport.

Former QPR vice-chairman Amit Bhatia has been the face of the 1892 consortium, holding meetings with FSG president Mike Gordon a year ago

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin is also attached to the group, through his wife Elaine

It is well known by now that Bhatia will be abundantly visible as the vice-chair of the new Liverpool, pending approval of the acquisition by the independent regulator, and two more board seats will go to members of the 1892 consortium – Elaine Saverin, the wife of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and Bryan Baum, who is the managing partner of K5 Global.

Bezos, the lead investor in K5, is conspicuous in that he holds no precise role and will instead hover as an unseen force in the background.

Our sources characterised him distinctly as a ‘silent partner’ and K5 is yet to reply to multiple Daily Mail Sport requests for clarity on the precise size of his investment, with K5 said to have pumped $1billion into the consortium’s coffers. With that level of attachment, it is safe to assume that if Bezos wishes to pull a string at the club, the absence of a designated board seat would be little more than a furniture issue.

And yet the opaque nature of his involvement, and a perceived lack of transparency around the wider process, is part of the uncertainty that has brought some anxiety to the fanbase.

Daily Mail Sport has been told the influential supporter group Spirit of Shankly (SoS) will hold a meeting with the regulator next week to share a few of those thoughts, which are inevitably tethered to memories of the despised ownership of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, which preceded FSG.

A spokesperson for SoS told Daily Mail Sport on Tuesday: ‘We want to know what it all means for Liverpool. We know firsthand what it's like to have bad ownership, so we want to know how the club will be run and by whom.’

The same spokesperson got in touch on Wednesday, after it emerged in The Athletic that the stake was closer to 40 per cent, adding: ‘The fact we didn’t know the percentage has given us more questions to ask. It has changed the landscape – this is not a small investment and we need to know more about what it means for the club.’

There is some reading to be done between the lines here. Change can be good, of course, and there is no one so blind as to assume FSG have lacked mis-steps since taking over for £300million in 2010 – they were part of the grubby posse that tried for a Super League breakaway and have pushed for an assortment of unpopular price hikes.

But FSG, while overseeing multiple sporting victories from their base in Boston, have also shown, on occasion, a willingness to listen to public backlashes, notably after the fury that erupted around their plans to raise ticket prices this year. The fans forced a rethink, but it’s a dynamic that cannot be guaranteed with new faces – the jokes about discussing supporter issues with an Amazon chatbot will no doubt write themselves.

Sources involved in the 1892 deal have stressed that they will engage the supporters, but said those conversations will likely occur after the regulator has approved the purchase. The intervening wait of up to 90 days could supply a vacuum for fraught sentiments, especially as Premier League and UEFA spending rules mean the era of free-spending on popular new signings are over.

Bezos has only ever been spotted at one football match - USA's defeat by Belgium at the World Cup last month

Liverpool fan group Spirit of Shankly, who protested the club's involvement in the Super League under FSG, want answers around the nature of Bezos' investment

Quite why Bezos is investing in Liverpool is both obvious and difficult to decipher. Returns in the best-case scenario would be pocket change to a man of his wealth, but iconic sporting properties are hard to acquire. By extension, they are attractive.

After backing away from explored purchases of the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Commanders in 2019 and 2023 respectively, Liverpool is Bezos’s entry point to an alien world.

It is understood that he hasn’t yet stepped foot inside Anfield and his appearance, alongside his wife Lauren Sanchez, at Team USA’s World Cup defeat by Belgium in Seattle last month is the only clear evidence of him ever attending a match. The assumption of Kieran Maguire, the noted football finance expert, is that Liverpool will serve as something akin to a fancy new toy, which might tally with the separate impression that Bezos has grown fonder of a celebrity lifestyle in the past decade.

‘Bezos isn't in it for the money because even if he makes $500million out of this himself, it's not going to move the dial for him,’ Maguire told me.

‘It’s about the kudos, I think. It's about being able to own a room in a different way at a cocktail party. Everybody in that set has an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht, there's only 20 football clubs in the Premier League and there's only one Liverpool. It could just be a hobby, a trophy asset.’

That might serve as scant comfort for Liverpool fans, who will be cognisant that the presence of Bezos is no guarantee of success – masses of discarded staff from the Washington Post prove that point.

But Maguire does foresee key areas of potential for Liverpool from the wider alliance, especially as a means of capitalising on the rapid, recent growth of Indian interest in the Premier League.

‘Longer term, what are Liverpool looking for?’ Maguire asks. ‘They're looking to expand into international markets under the cost-control rules and where are the growth opportunities? Answer A is the United States. Well, hello, Jeff Bezos. And answer B is India. Hello, Mr Mittal (whose family trust is named alongside Bhatia in the purchase).

‘I think there is the opportunity there to use the knowledge of those individuals to enable Liverpool to extract further commercial income, to tap into their networks, to tap into their expertise.

‘As for Bezos personally, my gut reaction is that it’s a vanity purchase, but as a secondary thought, he will want to expand Amazon into new markets and having an involvement with an iconic club will help.’

'It's about being able to own a room at a cocktail party. Everybody in that set has an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht, but there's only one Liverpool'

Time will tell if that leads one day to Amazon sponsorship on the shirt or stadium wall – sources in the deal claim it was not part of the current thinking. We also understand there is no concern from the Premier League or UEFA about perceived conflicts of interest around Amazon Prime’s ownership of broadcasting rights to football. Precedents already exist in that area.

That said, there is a mild curiosity, expressed by one figure near the top of British football, about whether this involvement might encourage Bezos to put extra effort into tackling rights piracy, which is often linked to modified Amazon Fire Sticks.

For now, that is an unknown. So too is the question of whether Bezos might be faced with a rush of cancelled subscriptions if results go badly or fans dislike what they discover.

It might not go in that direction, of course, but football can be funny like that. Presumably Bezos has learned as much in his due diligence, because 53 years after he pulled on pads for a kids’ team, there are myriad ways he could still get creamed.