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The Brothers Grimm – A Liverpool Tale

Published by DSAdmin on January 3, 2009

The latest act in the pantomime that has become the contested ownership of Liverpool F.C saw the club announce a further delay in the development of the now seemingly mythical new ground, as well as further rumours of a DIC buyout being mooted by the local press. Liverpool fans, famed for their insular “world is against us” attitude, seem to have legitimate complaints with the way their club is being used as leverage in the bid to extort more money for the clubs owners, the vilified George Gillett and Tom Hicks. These recent events led on from last May, when Tom Hicks aired his views in a distastefully staged interview with Sky Sports. Never mind the laughable façade of him sitting in his Liverpool FC polo shirt, drinking from his Liverpool mug, whilst watching his charges via the satellite. The clumsy clichéd attempted at perceived fandom did not appease the growing swell of the Liverpool support that quickly condemned the outspoken Hicks for not running the club in the time honoured “Liverpool Way.”

As has seemingly become the tradition, Hicks’ assertions of incompetence at the highest level, were rebutted immediately by his former partner George Gillett, whom Hicks made it known he wanted to buy out and Rick Parry, the man who Hicks seemed to point the finger squarely at in terms blame for Liverpool’s financial predicament. Gillett, equally as stubborn as his Texan compatriot, asserted that he had no intention of selling his stake in the club to Hicks. Parry refused to even consider Hicks demands and pointedly stated that he is only answerable to “the board” and that “the board has not asked me to resign”. Legally a truism, but Parry is deluding himself if he feels that parts of Hicks outburst do not have a solid basis in the truth.

Parry’s role at Anfield has long been a mystery to many a Reds fan. He was brought to the club in July 1998 to oversee and develop the financial side of the business, a job he had previously completed successfully with the Premier League. The hope was that Liverpool, under Parry’s careful guidance, would claw back some of the financial ground lost to rivals Manchester United and subsequently Chelsea in recent times.

On those terms alone, his tenancy in the post has been, at best, disappointing. Indeed much of Liverpool’s ability to go and spend money on players has been based on the teams’ strong performances in the Champions League, rather than by careful fiscal management and the off-field promotion of the club oversees as a brand name. This is a salient point that Hicks makes in his diatribe. As a global name, Liverpool F.C is one of the biggest in the world, and yet they are lagging so far behind the likes of Manchester United, Barcelona, Chelsea, Real Madrid and now Arsenal, that it is having a measurable and obvious financial effect on what the club can realistically plan for, manifesting itself most obviously in terms of a lack of top quality playing personnel or the oft postponed and redesigned (for redesigned, read “smaller and cheaper”) new stadium. These once huge ambitions, such as a brand new 73,000 capacity stadium, are having to be radically postponed, redrawn and downscaled time after time, to fit in with the current financial climate as proven by recent events. To Liverpool fans this can appear as a lack of ambition from the owners, but the fact remains that if they or the club, cannot afford to pay for a new ground, or the players Rafa Benitez would like, then it is down to somebody at the club to put the building blocks in place, that will bring in the finance from other sectors, to enable the club deliver upon these aims. In essence, that is the job Rick Parry was asked to do by then chairman David Moores back in July 1998. It is this ability that Hicks is, justifiably, questioning.

You do not become a billionaire by being a bad businessman and it is naïve to assume that you and a business partner will agree on every aspect of how a business should be run. While Hicks’ outbursts have led to him being labelled, in most Liverpool fans minds, as public enemy number one, equally distasteful is the rather insipid pandering to the faithful, particularly by Parry and Gillett. In May 2008 they decried Hicks words by accusing the Texan of turning attention away from the team and its exploits ; “Here we are, a few days away from a vital Champions League semi-final match and Tom has once again created turmoil with his public comments.” Gillett bemoaned on the eve of the semi final with Chelsea last season. Point scoring of the pettiest but a comment I am sure most ardent Liverpool fans will be in complete accordance with, which is precisely why Gillett said it. However the American co-owner offers no “proof” that his support of Parry is based on the achievements of the latter at his club. He tellingly, offers his support, but doesn’t indulge us with why Parry deserves it. Instead, he blandly admonished Hicks timing, explicitly accusing the Texan of not having the best interests of the club at heart. The one issue that is sure to raise the hackles of almost every Liverpool fan.

This graceless pandering to the masses does not make some of the comments Hicks made in his interview invalid. Indeed it is somewhat gutless to play the emotive “We only care about the team…” card to garner sympathy from the fans, rather than rebut Hicks claims with evidence to the contrary.

Under the benign and somewhat affable stewardship of Sir John Smith and then the Moores family, Liverpool became the most successful club in the history of English football. However that was in an era where football was not a huge global brand. Since the advent of the Premier League, Liverpool have lagged well behind “the best” in terms of generating finance from other markets and marketing of the brand name, especially in potentially vastly lucrative markets such as Asia. Rick Parry’s job was to address this. Parry has, as yet, failed to bring Liverpool to the level where the owners, and the fans, want the club to be. So in that assertion, Hicks has a valid point.

So Liverpool fans may well be angry at Hicks not doing things “The Liverpool Way”. His leaden footed, and badly misguided, attempt on the Sky interview to appear as a true fan will have fooled no one, and the recent announcements of further delays to the new ground will just compound his unpopularity with the Liverpool faithful who it seems, would rather have Sir Alex Ferguson as chairman than Hicks and Gillett. However that does not mean that some of Hicks’ comments are not valid. The evidence is there. It is just whether you choose to see it or not. Blithely putting your head in the sand and saying “The board hasn’t asked me to resign” is also not going to achieve what all Liverpool fans want. Nor is pandering to the faithful with the empty rhetoric of stating that the “club is bigger than any one individual”. Emotive words, and at the heart of every Liverpool fan. However these words are utterly trite and meaningless, in terms of actually proving Hicks accusations of Parry’s poor leadership, as being incorrect. They do not mean that you are doing the job you were paid, a reported, £500,000 a year to do, well at all. That requires evidence, and there is a significant lack of that.

In November 1959, Liverpool was a club well behind the best in the league. It took a radical, outspoken man to come in and shake the club from the very foundations. He did things his way, and if you didn’t like it, you were out. He, no doubt, upset a few people at the club with his outspoken ways.

His name was Bill Shankly.

Hicks is no Shankly of course, but as he has proven over the past ten years, neither is Parry. In Hicks’ controversial interview last May, the Texan made some salient points, particularly about the financial side of the club. These pertinent issues were quickly and effectively dismissed and ignored by Gillett and Parry’s who instead chose to make sycophantic attempts at winning the “Hearts and Minds” of the Anfield faithful, than rebut the issues Hicks made, a sin that many in the Liverpool local press were guilty of too. Liverpool fans may not like the way Hicks has chosen to express his opinions in the past, nor the timing of these outbursts, however he owns half the club, and that gives him the right to address the problems of the club as he sees fit to do so. Hicks feels the business side could and should be performing a great deal better than it currently is; that Liverpool should have the financial clout to build a new stadium and also to challenge realistically for the signature of the best, and most expensive, players in world football. I think most Liverpool fans, would happily agree with that. Hicks has argued that under Parry, the club have singularly failed to achieve this. Perhaps only Fernando Torres signing apart, he’s right.

However there is unlikely to be a quick resolution to the impasse. The stalemate between the two American owners, the fact they are obviously poles apart on deciding the best way forward for the club ,the fact that Gillett seems to be firmly behind Parry, not forgetting that all parties now seem content to conduct their business via the media rather than, as Liverpool fans would prefer, shrouded in secret at a board meeting and the continually embarrassing delays to the development of a new stadium and the looming spectre of DIC still in the shadowy background, means that the Liverpool pantomime still has a fair few dates left to run on the calendar. The sad thing is, for one of the proudest and most successful clubs in the history of the game, the rest of the football world is going to be in the audience, enjoying the rather sordid and distasteful spectacle. A pantomime that could have scarcely been produced any better, had it come from the blue-tinted mind of a certain theatrical impresario from across Stanley park

** Photo Credit – Southern_Comfort **

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