Hopefully help calm abit of the hysteria surrounding FSG at the moment and quash this suggestion that they have no backbone.
John W. Henry ready to lift Liverpool’s standard after Luis Suárez furore
By Rory Smith
Trying to enjoy a family vacation, John W. Henry watched the final, radioactive fallout from the Luis Suárez affair settle on Anfield from Fort Lauderdale, deep in America’s Sunshine State.
It is unlikely to have been a particularly restful holiday, such is the work that awaits him. Next week, Liverpool’s principal, principled owner will fly to Merseyside, where the storm clouds gather.
Contrary to a popular perception too easily guided by soap opera narrative, the arpeggio of apologies issued by Suárez, his club, and Kenny Dalglish, the manager, on Sunday afternoon was not orchestrated by Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s parent company.
There was no directive from Henry or his chairman, Tom Werner, that the Uruguayan’s failure to shake hands with Patrice Evra at Old Trafford was of such repugnant moral vacuity that contrition was compulsory. There was no kneejerk response to savage words in the New York Times, a former investor in FSG, and the Boston Globe, Henry’s local paper, demanding intervention in the closest thing the Barclays Premier League has to a pariah state.
Rather, Ian Ayre, Liverpool’s managing director, in consultation with Dalglish, established the direction the club would take and sought confirmation from his employers that they agreed with his blueprint. This was local self-determination in action. There was no American cultural imperialism.
That is not to accuse Henry of idleness, or absenteeism, a charge he and Werner have been desperate to avoid ever since replacing Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr on a rather happier October day, exactly a year before Suárez turned his spiteful tongue on Evra. That the 62-year-old will be in England within the next seven days, indeed, is evidence of how things have changed. FSG will fight for its investment.
Henry’s first job is likely to be mollifying Standard Chartered, the club’s prime, £20 million-a-season shirt sponsor, unsurprisingly unhappy to find its brand, its logo, suddenly associated rather too readily with a player charged with issuing racist abuse. There is no suggestion as yet that the bank, which boasts 1,700 branches worldwide and considerable reach in the Far East, is reassessing its involvement with the club.
Henry, though, knows that assuring them such toxicity will not be a feature of their association with Liverpool in the future will soothe troubled minds.
Although Henry will also meet Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, in an attempt to smooth relations with the English game’s hierarchy, it is telling that it is when the brand is imperilled that he acts. An editorial in Massachusetts costs nothing; fear rising in the Orient could be expensive indeed.
FSG, like Dalglish, has no intention of selling Suárez; anyone with the briefest knowledge of football would know that the game’s moral compass tends to point in whichever direction leads to success, that clubs do not routinely sell their best players simply to dampen an outcry, no matter how serious the offence. Henry has been long enough in sport to know that another controversy will be stirred, another hellion conjured soon enough to distract attention.
But he has also been aware, from the moment Evra first levelled his charge at Suárez, at how poisonous such an allegation might be. For the player, of course, and for the club. But most of all for the brand. Such corporate jargon is anathema to fans, no more so than those on the Kop whose traditions are pinned to their jackets and daubed on to flags. But that is what Liverpool, and all of their competitors, have become: brands that require consumers, brands that stand and fall by their sponsors.
If Henry’s investment is to work, and Liverpool are to compete once more, he needs a club he can sell worldwide. Ideally, he needs a star player.
It seemed before October that Suárez could be that cornerstone. Now that is in doubt. Player, club and brand have been damaged. It is Henry who must begin to arrest the decline, to begin the Herculean task of wiping the slate clean. There is work to be done.
