Liverpool’s ownership saga finally reaches the end of the storm
Perhaps none of this would have happened if Rafael Benitez wasn’t such a workaholic.
As Liverpool supporters woke in the open air and rain of Athens’ Syntagma Square on the morning of May 24th 2007 – many of them with sore heads – minds would have been less on their club’s defeat to AC Milan and more on just how they were going to get back home. Not so Benitez.
Instead of reflecting on the achievement of reaching a second Champions League final in three years, the Spaniard was already focussing on how to improve his squad ahead of the coming campaign. He was already confident that he’d secured the services of Atlético Madrid’s star striker Fernando Torres, but the manager was eager to tie up a deal for the Lyon winger Florent Malouda, particularly with Chelsea lurking.
Knowing he had to move quickly, Benitez pressed Liverpool’s owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett for transfer funds, but the Americans – who had only been at the helm for two months – wondered why the Spaniard was acting with such haste, this wasn’t how transfers were conducted in the States after all. When Benitez missed out on Malouda, a mutual distrust was born.
It came to the surface the following November.
With the Reds riding high in the Premier League, Benitez was keen to bolster his squad ahead of a trip to Newcastle United, and asked for around £3million to sign defender Kahka Kaladze of Milan in the January transfer window.
With January two months away, and perhaps still fully unaware of the way transfers work, Hicks told the manager to focus on the players he already had, leading to an agitated Benitez answering every question at his pre-Newcastle press conference with the insistence that he was simply focussed on “coaching and training his team”, before appearing in the 3-0 win at St James’ Park sporting a tracksuit and trainers – true coaching attire.
Petty and pig-headed it may have been, but he knew that fans would back him against the Americans, which they duly did. His mistrust of them had now spread to the supporters.
Things were to really explode on the morning of a Monday night match with Aston Villa in January 2008. In an interview with Hicks, the Liverpool Echo newspaper had discovered that the widely held suspicions about the pair holding talks with Jürgen Klinsmann over the manager’s job were true.
There were protests at that Villa clash, and as later revelations about the way that Hicks and Gillett had financed the deal to buy the club finally came to light, it became apparent that the pair had indeed “done a Glazer” and heaped masses of debt upon the Reds in a leveraged buyout, just as they promised they wouldn’t do at their introductory press conference. If the broken new stadium promise – to have a spade in the ground “within 60 days” – was bad enough, this was a whole lot worse. It was all out war now.
Tommy Hicks – son of Tom, a member of the board and later famous for a less than polite e-mail to a supporter – was spat at and had a pint swilled over him in The Sandon pub, where Liverpool FC was formed, as fan groups, protests and marches became commonplace.
In the midst of it all, the owners even fell out with each other as their businesses crumbled due to the credit crunch. Benitez unwittingly briefly united the pair by asking for money to buy midfielder Gareth Barry, with both Hicks and Gillett agreeing that the fee would be better spent on a forward. Robbie Keane – a Benitez target but not a priority – arrived, Barry didn’t.
Then, for a while at least, common sense prevailed and everyone kept their mouths shut.
Liverpool’s best-ever Premier League season followed, as the Reds finished second in a 2008/09 campaign that included such memorable moments as a 4-0 thrashing of Real Madrid and humiliating Manchester United 4-1 at Old Trafford. Things were calm on the pitch, but off it Hicks and Gillett were already desperately negotiating refinancing deals to keep hold of the club and avoid repaying their debts to the Royal Bank of Scotland. The credit crunch meant that Liverpool were already slipping out of their hands.
Then, inevitably, the on-field fortunes began to mirror the off-field problems. An awful 2009/10 campaign saw Liverpool tumble out of the Champions League before the turn of the year, fail to qualify for it again and slide to seventh in the domestic table. Benitez and his players were of course responsible for that, but outside factors weren’t exactly helping, and with their unpopularity growing by the week, Hicks and Gillett had to go.
They eventually put the club up for sale, but typically they weren’t going quietly.
Ludicrously high valuations of between £600million and £800million were always going to stall the selling process, and ensured that Liverpool – now managed by Roy Hodgson after Benitez departed – were forced to make a hefty profit for the fourth consecutive transfer window. With Hodgson desperately needing to overhaul his squad, it wasn’t exactly ideal.
Which brings us to last week, when Martin Broughton and the other two English members of the board decided that enough was enough. By accepting New England Sports Ventures’ bid for the club, they were accepting that Hicks and Gillett were no longer acting in the best interests of it.
A legal challenge was always going to be the way that the charmless Americans were going to end things, but even their harshest critics – and there is no shortage of competitors for that title on Merseyside – could not have dreamed it would end this badly for them.
No club, no money, no real chance of winning an appeal (although that might not stop them lodging one), they now lie broken.
As broken as the promises they made when they took over, in fact.
http://www.senore.com/Liverpool-FC-win-court-case-against-Hicks-and-Gillett-a33579
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