Liverpool's disenchanted fans took their dissatisfaction with Tom Hicks and George Gillett across the Atlantic on Thursday, sending hundreds of emails to leading US media executives, news outlets and financial institutions pleading for increased coverage of the club's current state.
Appealing to the memory of the Beatles, the special relationship between the UK and the USA and the thought of a British businessman destroying the New York Yankees or Washington Redskins, Liverpool's fans called for the situation to be reported in an effort to persuade Wall Street that allowing Hicks and Gillett to refinance their ownership of the Anfield club would be a mistake.
The campaign came at the end of seven days of confusion at Anfield. Last Friday, widespread reports emerged that Hicks was seeking to refinance and continue his ownership of Liverpool. The reports came less than four months after Hicks told journalists of his desire to quit the sports industry for good. "It's never been my primary business," he told Dallas Morning News reporters Gary Jacobson and Brendan Case on May 26. "And it's a business I no longer want to pay the price to be in." Weeks later, at the start of August, Hicks completed the sale of the Texas Rangers MLB franchise to a group led by Pittsburgh attorney Chuck Greenberg and Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan.
Liverpool's owners put the club on the market before the start of the summer but, according to managing director Christian Purslow, no firm bids have been made. Perhaps Hicks' stance this week has been a bargaining tool. He certainly has no intention of selling Liverpool on the cheap, making clear in the same interview with Jacobson and Case that he intended to make back "a couple of hundred" million dollars that he had lost on the Texas Rangers with the Anfield club. Nor will he want the club to be taken out of his hands by RBS, as has been mooted.
From a business perspective, there is little doubt that Hicks and Gillett should be able to command a higher asking price than they paid. Their ownership may have been distressing for fans, but it has seen a rapid turnaround of the club's commercial fortunes. Two examples stand out.
Firstly, Liverpool's previous shirt sponsorship, with Carlsberg, was worth a few million pounds per season - less, for example, than Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa will collect from Autonomy and FxPro this year. The new deal with Standard Chartered, negotiated by a commercial team headed by Liverpool's commercial director, Ian Ayre, matches Manchester United's £20 million per season as a British record.
Secondly, Hicks and Gillett arrived in early 2007. Later that year, the Premier League began a new cycle of broadcast rights for 2007-10, in which Liverpool's income from television money rose by 65 per cent. Another cycle, 2010-13, is now underway, and the club's broadcast income has risen again. The television money may be none of Hicks' or Gillett's doing, but there is no arguing with the fact that, off the pitch, Liverpool are a far more attractive commercial proposition than in the winter of 2006.
Unfortunately, the club's decline on the field has been far more obvious. For many years, Liverpool's success on the pitch masked a poorly run business; now poor first team performances obscure improved commercial fortunes. And even the business side of things is unsatisfactory to many fans, coming as it does with heavy debt loaded onto the club.
Put simply, though, the satisfaction of fans with an owner comes down to success on the pitch - hence the ease with which the Glazers continue to ride out discontent at Old Trafford. You can secure as many sponsorships as you want, but losing to Northampton will test the patience of the fans of any Premier League club. Liverpool fans' patience has long since run out.
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