A Tale of Two clubs and Many Yanks

What all the brouhaha at Liverpool, resulting in this week’s court case by Tom Hicks and George Gillett to stop the sale of the club for £300m, means is a simple case of businessmen wanting value for money spent on their investment.

When Hicks and Gillett, who clearly are now seen in a very bad light everywhere on Merseyside bought Liverpool in February 2007 for £218.9m, they, like all good businessmen, believed they could build up its value and later sell it on for two-three times that amount. That was almost four years ago.
Global market crash, club under-performance and fans’ unrest later, up pops another American John W. Henry ready to put £300m on the table and take the club off Hicks and Gillett’s wrinkly hands. Exasperated and pressurised by the Bank of Scotland who lent Hicks and Gillett over £200m, the club’s board now deeply divided are quite happy to take Henry’s money and end the era of the bad Yanks.
Obviously unhappy to let go and believing they can flog the club for £500-£600m, at least to pocket some profit on their initial outlay, Hicks and Gillett headed to the courts this week to block the sale. Knowing fully well that the success of the deal will see almost all the money going to bankers, while they will be left with next to nothing. Three years of investment surely couldn’t be allowed to go so lamely down the drain.
It would have made such a fine script for a melodrama if it wasn’t happening to an institution such as Liverpool FC.
If only the men at the helm who sold off the club in 2007 had paused awhile to consider their actions before pawning it away to Hick and Gillett. If only they had bothered to look across the country at another club sharing similar history and prestige with Liverpool and learning a couple of things from them.
For the past five years or thereabout, Liverpool and Arsenal have effectively been bridesmaids to Manchester United and Chelsea in what has gloriously come to be known as the Big Four of the Premier League. Neither of them finished the last five seasons better than third as the Chavs and Mancunians have swapped the league title between themselves.
Liverpool made an exception in 2009 when they ran Man Utd close until they finally succumbed to second place. Their performance that year was actually the result of millions and millions of pounds poured into expensive and often-dodgy player purchases in a desperate attempt to win the league and erase that blot from the club’s history. For Rafa Benitez their erstwhile coach and the board of the club however, ending the season behind Man Utd was a case of so far, so impossible. Their subsequent body language clearly suggested that despite never having won the premier league title, the inability to win it in 2009 was a rubicon they would never cross. At least in the near future.
After one more season, Rafa and his tired tactics was booted out as the club realised he was actually taking them backwards with even Champions League qualification proving beyond them.
It was to be the end of the Big Four, as we had known it for almost a decade.
Liverpool’s story runs slightly parallel to Arsenal in that for five years now, the Gunners haven’t won a trophy and have remained perpetually like second-class citizens where Man Utd and Chelsea are mentioned. Where the parallel ends is the patience and understanding demonstrated by the Gunners’ board in persevering with Arsene Wenger’s youth project, as the club relocated to a new stadium; rebuilt its playing staff and dealt wisely with the albatross of bank debts before they became dragons.

While Liverpool sought success in a hurry, Arsenal adopted the softly-softly approach – preferring to endure years of trophy-barreness and avoiding a wholesale flogging of the club to some beady-eyed sugar-daddy. Today, Stan Kroenke (yet-another American) and Uzbek, Alisher Usmanov have emerged as leading investors in the club but cannot lay claim to total ownership to it. The club has truly fallen behind on the pitch but its coffers are being swelled daily with stadium revenue and a well-crafted property investment. Whoever dreamed up the property idea in the most-attractive city in the world, London, deserves a knighthood.
While Liverpool lurches between bad Yanks and the Henry-led New England Sports Venture now seen as good Yanks, the one thing that lay behind that 2007 sale to the Hicks and Gilberts – success on the pitch – is very, very far from being achieved.
I’m quite certain two-three years ago no one in their right mind would have associated Liverpool FC with words such as ‘administration’ and being ‘ducked nine points’. Such scenarios belonged to the Portsmouths and Southamptons of this world. How quickly the tables can turn.
The refusal of Arsenal to toe the line and sell its soul like almost every other club in the league has done, is now being proven as conventional wisdom. Better still, a masterstroke. By 2012 when Uefa’s book-balancing policy for all clubsides goes into force, even Man Utd and Chelsea will have to curb their spending and live within their means.
By 2012, Arsenal’s penny wise ways would even make Kroenke look like the best Yank of them all.
Therein lies the lesson that Liverpool and the rest of them all missed so glaringly.