Frank McCourt

Frank H. McCourt Jr. (born August 14, 1953) is an American business executive and philanthropist.

As of 2023, he is the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, owner of the football club Marseille and founder and executive chairman of international non-profit Project Liberty.

He was raised as a Catholic and attended Georgetown University, where he earned an economics degree in 1975.

He met his future wife, Jamie Luskin, when they were both freshmen at Georgetown.

In 1977, McCourt left working for his father's road contracting company and founded The McCourt Company, which specialized in the development of major commercial real estate projects.

The McCourt Company developed multiple condominiums in Boston, including the first and most notable development, the Union Wharf Condominium on Boston Harbor.

McCourt later purchased a 24-acre plot of the Boston Seaport and played a role in the development of what became the South Boston Seaport District.

They married in 1979.

The McCourt family has a long association with real estate and construction in the Boston area.

Instead, the Red Sox were sold in 2002 to John W. Henry, Tom Werner and Red Sox president Larry Lucchino.

In 2003, under NewsCorp ownership, the Dodgers' record was 85 wins and 77 losses.

Shortly after purchasing the team, McCourt fired then general manager Dan Evans, replacing him with Paul DePodesta.

DePodesta is featured (along with Billy Beane) in the book Moneyball, as it discussed their sabermetric-based approach to using statistics to build the Oakland A's.

He was the owner and chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dodger Stadium from 2004 to 2012.

In 2004, he purchased a controlling interest in the Dodgers from Fox Entertainment Group, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Prior to purchasing the Dodgers and moving to Los Angeles, McCourt was a Boston real estate developer, whose family resided in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The McCourt Company headquarters moved to Los Angeles in 2004 in connection with the family relocating to Los Angeles.

The McCourts owned a $16 million, 13000 sqft home in Brookline, Massachusetts, that was acquired by John W. Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Before buying the Los Angeles Dodgers, McCourt made a bid to buy the Boston Red Sox, planning to build a new stadium on the land he owned and used for parking lots on the South Boston waterfront.

In 2004, McCourt bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for US$430 million from NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch's flagship enterprise.

McCourt's purchase of the Dodgers was financed mostly by debt.

In 2004, McCourt's South Boston parking lot property was used as collateral for some of the financing to acquire the Dodgers from NewsCorp.

Later, the South Boston property was turned over to NewsCorp in exchange for canceling acquisition debt.

In Los Angeles, DePodesta made a trade in the middle of the 2004 season that sent the Dodgers' starting catcher, Paul Lo Duca, its set-up man, pitcher Guillermo Mota and outfielder Juan Encarnación to the Florida Marlins for the high on-base percentage first baseman Hee-seop Choi, power pitcher Brad Penny and pitching prospect Bill Murphy, who was in turn flipped with Koyie Hill and Reggie Abercrombie to the Arizona Diamondbacks for Gold Glove center fielder Steve Finley and catcher Brent Mayne.

NewsCorp received approximately $200 million when they re-sold the property to Morgan Stanley and Boston real estate investor John B. Hynes III in 2006.

The Dodgers assets acquired by McCourt included significant real estate assets related to the stadium in Chavez Ravine, including stadium parking lot land.

Plans were announced for new real estate developments at Dodger Stadium however those plans never came to fruition.

One discussed plan was for an NFL stadium and adjacent retail complex.

However after the Boston Herald reported the details of the plan, political pressure forced both the NFL and McCourt to deny that either party was aggressively pursuing the idea.

To offset the purchase, McCourt raised ticket and concession prices every year.

By April 2009, the team and its related assets, in which McCourt had invested heavily in improvements, had increased in value to $722 million according to Forbes.

In 2010, the value of the team was estimated at $727 million according to Forbes.

In 2013, he donated $100 million to establish the McCourt School of Public Policy, the ninth school of Georgetown University.

He made a second $100 million gift to Georgetown University in March 2021, for the express purpose of ensuring that "the McCourt School can open its doors more widely and build a pipeline of future public policy leaders that reflects the true diversity of our communities."

In 2016, he purchased French Ligue 1 football club Marseille from Russian-born billionaire Margarita Louis-Dreyfus.

The takeover was completed in August after months of negotiations.

In 2021, he founded the non-profit Project Liberty.

The initiative has multiple components which includes the development of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), the founding of the McCourt Institute with founding academic partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris, and a network of partners within the Unfinished network.

In 2023, he transitioned from CEO of McCourt Global to executive chairman and announced Shéhérazade Semsar de Boisséson, former POLITICO Europe CEO, as McCourt Global's CEO.

McCourt was born in Boston, Massachusetts.