Liverpool have confirmed their intention to stay at Anfield and redevelop the ground, scrapping plans for a brand new stadium.
Big challenges
One of the main reasons a new stadium did not fit the bill was the financial aspect. The club would have spent upwards of £300million and yet increased match-day capacity by only around 15,000.
Ayre always maintained that - even with a naming rights deal which the club explored - did not make good financial sense and that is why they always leaned towards a redevelopment of Anfield.
FSG have a history of updating historic old stadiums as they did a similar thing at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, and they will now look to do the same on Merseyside.
"Over the last two years one of the things that we've had to do and was important to do was analyse the detail of what works, what doesn't work, what the economical situation is for either solution," Ayre told liverpoolfc.com.
"If you build a new stadium, for example, one of the big challenges is that you don't get 60,000 new seats in a new stadium, you only get the difference (with the existing capacity).
"That makes it very difficult to make it viable because the cost of building such a big new stadium doesn't work economically, particularly in this market.
"So one of the things we had to look at was the balance between that solution and a staying-at-Anfield-type solution.
"The work we've done on that showed us that as long as we could find the right solution to stay at Anfield, and get through the barriers and hurdles that we needed, we would have to find the best long-term solution for the club that had sustainability and worked economically."
