Found this article with some interesting points I wasn't aware of, like the email from Shanks' Granddaughter. If that was done at the suggestion of SOS then hat's off to them for possibly pulling off this coup. Doubt it made their minds up to sell as they've never shown any care or concern towards the Club or the fans during their ownership.
It's an interesting and funny read.
Sale of Liverpool will end fear and loathing
Rod Liddle
WOULD you buy Liverpool Football Club for £500m, if you had the money (or indeed, as per the usual process in the Premier League, if you certainly didn’t)? That’s the price put upon the club by the right-wing Yankee leveraged buyout monkeys and turkey stranglers Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who seem to loathe each other even more than the Scouse fans loathe them. That’s almost double what the pair “paid” for the club just three years ago, so one assumes that the Hicks-Gillett partnership is adopting the stance of a stallholder in a Marrakesh souk and one should immediately divide the starting price by 10.
Hicks and Gillett — who claim, hilariously, to have “grown” the club — will leave Liverpool with pretty catastrophic debts, and if anyone is stupid enough to accept their asking price, with an enormous profit for themselves — loads of money to plough back into their Nascar, baseball or turkey strangling interests.
The Liverpool of today is more burdened with debt — to the tune of £237m — and less successful, on the pitch, than the Liverpool of 2007. I wonder who will step up to the plate with the vague promise of finance? The sale is being overseen by Martin Broughton, the chairman of British Airways, and a season ticket holder at, um, Chelsea. They never really quite got Liverpool, did they, Hicks and Gillett? Just bought what they read was the world’s fourth most lucrative football club, ignored the fans and piled up the debts as a consequence.
Still, at least they are probably going, having fallen out between themselves and suffered constant and justifiable vituperation at the hands of the Liverpool faithful who have, over the past three years, played a blinder. Patient and even indulgent with their slightly under-achieving manager, Rafael Benitez, still steadfastly behind their team even when it drops points at home to the likes of Fulham, they vented outrage and annoyance at the Hicks-Gillett partnership from day one.
In a strange sort of way it is probably a good thing that Liverpool will finish sixth or seventh — or even eighth — this season and thus well beyond a place in either the Champions League or the Freight-Rover Champions League, the Europa Cup. A semi-successful season (fourth, say) might have dampened the irritation felt by the Kop. Instead, you might suspect that comparative failure again has sharpened the cutting edge of their complaints, as well as suggesting to Tom and George that it was time to go.
I wonder what effect the fans had; my suspicion is that it was rather more than the two American gentlemen are letting on. They might say that it is coincidence that the sale was announced shortly after Bill Shankly’s grand-daughter, Karen Gill, waded in wearing a pair of Bill’s steel-capped football boots and said: “During the three years, time and again, Tom Hicks and George Gillett have shown that they are not fit and proper custodians of the club that my grandfather loved and devoted 15 years of his life to.”
You will note that cleverly barbed “fit and proper” reference, a challenge to the Premier League’s ludicrously lax definition of the terms that allowed the alleged Thai fraudster Thaksin Shinawatra ownership of Manchester City and let any Walter Mitty own Portsmouth if they could talk about their supposed wealth and commitment with sufficient conviction.
Karen Gill was brought gently into the fray by the excellent Spirit of Shankly campaign, which boasts 5,000 paid-up members and tens of thousands more offering less committed support from internet sites. And it is within here that might lie a glimmering of hope for football fans who feel estranged from the baroque economics of Premier League football and as a consequence alienated from clubs into which they have poured, over the years, rather more money than Hicks and Gillett poured into Liverpool.
A spokesman for Spirit of Shankly, a lad called James McKenna, urged direct action by fans of other clubs. “Can you imagine if all clubs had supporters’ groups like this? Where fans can say no, they’re not going to put up with £70 for a ticket for a cup semi-final, be it the Auto Windshield Cup or the FA Cup? And where the fans of every club will stand alongside them? I’d love to see the fans of every club stand together.” McKenna, however, told me he was less euphoric about the future of his own club, suggesting that there were “more questions than answers” raised by the sudden decision to sell.
I wonder who they will get? If you forget the asking price, Liverpool would be a valuable acquisition. Nor is there much wrong with the team, on a good day — two or three players would restore the Scousers to the top four of the English league and maybe beyond; a little more grit in midfield, someone else who knows how to score goals up front and maybe a winger to give them some width. There’s no doubt in my mind that the off-field uncertainties affected the team this season and almost certainly contributed to Rafa’s strange feelings of paranoia. If Liverpool get the owner their fans deserve, then they could be the team to watch next season.
www.timesonline.co.uk
