The bullish noises coming from Anfield last week that Liverpool is now on course to be the richest, most popular club in the world were tempered a little bit by their timing.
Having worked so hard to seal one of the most lucrative sponsorship deals around, Liverpool's owners would surely have been eager to have announced it a few weeks ago when Rafael Benitez might have been able to find some way to spend some money.
Instead, to the dismay of everyone at the club, Benitez was left with £1.5m to spend at the end of the summer when he had again shown his mastery of the transfer market by selling Xabi Alonso for £30m. Then, amazingly, a few weeks later, Liverpool announce they will be bringing in £80m over the next four years in a deal with Standard Chartered, which, appropriately given the club's financial situation, is a bank.
Of course, it came too late for Benitez to strengthen his squad but there is always January, by which time Liverpool may need to strengthen given their unpromising start to the season. Benitez will, of course, be blamed for this, even by those who should know better like Ronnie Whelan, who claimed on RTE last week that the side facing Debrecen had cost £250m and wondered why the manager had replaced Alonso with Alberto Aquilani who, as far as anyone can tell, has always been injured. The man he should ask is Tom Hicks.
With the transfer window closed, Hicks showed up last week to purr optimistically in his soothing Texan drawl.
If the Liverpool credo used to be that the club "exists to be a source of pride to its supporters -- It has no other purpose," Hicks has modernised that too.
"Our goal is to have less debt than any of the top clubs and that's a commitment we have made and will continue to make," Hicks said last week, an interesting statement considering the club was saddled with their current massive debt when he and George Gillett took over.
But Tom reappeared last week to make some new promises. With some reports questioning if Liverpool's new stadium would be built by 2018, Hicks made the right noises but pointed out that the "global financial markets" were not conducive to building anything right now.
When Tom Hicks took over Liverpool, the global financial markets were in love with guys like Tom Hicks and the new owners promised that the stadium would begin almost immediately, before deciding that they needed some new and impressive plans before anything could happen.
As they were working on those plans, the global financial markets that had been so kind to Tom Hicks imploded, thanks to men like Tom Hicks.
Tom now says he "doesn't know about the dates", a departure from a previous statement when he was able to give the date when the stadium would be built but not when it would be started.
Most of us would have assumed things worked the other way where a start date is set with a rough idea following of when the thing could be finished.
But then again most of us had no idea of the world of Tom Hicks until he came along, swiftly followed by the sub-prime credit crunch and the collapse of everything that was built on the highly leveraged philosophy. We would have assumed that to buy a club like Liverpool, you had to have a lot of money and we would have been wrong about that too. So we should say nothing.
We thought clubs were bought by people like the men who bought Manchester City, but Tom now says their plans to buy every good player they can is "unsustainable". When it comes to things being unsustainable, we should probably listen to Tom Hicks.
Having worked so hard to seal one of the most lucrative sponsorship deals around, Liverpool's owners would surely have been eager to have announced it a few weeks ago when Rafael Benitez might have been able to find some way to spend some money.
Instead, to the dismay of everyone at the club, Benitez was left with £1.5m to spend at the end of the summer when he had again shown his mastery of the transfer market by selling Xabi Alonso for £30m. Then, amazingly, a few weeks later, Liverpool announce they will be bringing in £80m over the next four years in a deal with Standard Chartered, which, appropriately given the club's financial situation, is a bank.
Of course, it came too late for Benitez to strengthen his squad but there is always January, by which time Liverpool may need to strengthen given their unpromising start to the season. Benitez will, of course, be blamed for this, even by those who should know better like Ronnie Whelan, who claimed on RTE last week that the side facing Debrecen had cost £250m and wondered why the manager had replaced Alonso with Alberto Aquilani who, as far as anyone can tell, has always been injured. The man he should ask is Tom Hicks.
With the transfer window closed, Hicks showed up last week to purr optimistically in his soothing Texan drawl.
If the Liverpool credo used to be that the club "exists to be a source of pride to its supporters -- It has no other purpose," Hicks has modernised that too.
"Our goal is to have less debt than any of the top clubs and that's a commitment we have made and will continue to make," Hicks said last week, an interesting statement considering the club was saddled with their current massive debt when he and George Gillett took over.
But Tom reappeared last week to make some new promises. With some reports questioning if Liverpool's new stadium would be built by 2018, Hicks made the right noises but pointed out that the "global financial markets" were not conducive to building anything right now.
When Tom Hicks took over Liverpool, the global financial markets were in love with guys like Tom Hicks and the new owners promised that the stadium would begin almost immediately, before deciding that they needed some new and impressive plans before anything could happen.
As they were working on those plans, the global financial markets that had been so kind to Tom Hicks imploded, thanks to men like Tom Hicks.
Tom now says he "doesn't know about the dates", a departure from a previous statement when he was able to give the date when the stadium would be built but not when it would be started.
Most of us would have assumed things worked the other way where a start date is set with a rough idea following of when the thing could be finished.
But then again most of us had no idea of the world of Tom Hicks until he came along, swiftly followed by the sub-prime credit crunch and the collapse of everything that was built on the highly leveraged philosophy. We would have assumed that to buy a club like Liverpool, you had to have a lot of money and we would have been wrong about that too. So we should say nothing.
We thought clubs were bought by people like the men who bought Manchester City, but Tom now says their plans to buy every good player they can is "unsustainable". When it comes to things being unsustainable, we should probably listen to Tom Hicks.
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