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Reds Future Remains Unresolved

Published by Ian John on September 24, 2010

It can’t really get much worse if you are a Liverpool fan at the moment, already having written off any title aspirations after a total of five games, five places above last place in the Premier League and knocked out of the Carling Cup on Wednesday night by the mighty Northampton Town, at Anfield, things aren’t looking particularly rosy on the field.

However, fans of the once mighty Reds dodged a major bullet this week when one of their American owner, Tom Hicks, hatched a plan that would see him remain in sole control of the club, buying out his estranged partner George Gillett.

With the Royal Bank of Scotland ready to claw back nearly £300m of debt in October, Hicks had hoped to secure external funding to allow him to meet the banks demands and retain sole ownership of the club. The many Reds fans now so opposed to the American owners, will have been glad to hear that MD Christian Purslow rejected the plan out of hand.

So, Hicks won’t be the sole owner under the terms he drafted earlier this week, but as yet Purslow, Broughton and co have still made little headway in actually resolving the ownership issue and it isn’t difficult to see why.

Hicks and Gillette are still believed to be asking for around £600m for the club, which would represent a tidy profit on their investment. However the Americans have been told, in no uncertain terms, that given the clubs situation both financially and on the field, that they can only expect around £400m for the club.

Now potential investors may well baulk at that at present. Hence the silence. In October unless Hicks and Gillette can pay back the finance they owe to the Royal Bank of Scotland, which seems unlikely without a sale, the Bank will effectively take over the club and can sell it, for much less than Hicks and Gillette want, to the highest bidder.

Suddenly the silence that has greeted the sale of Liverpool becomes more understandable. Why pay £400 – £600 million to two reviled American owners, when you can wait a month and potentially get it for around half that price?

Hicks gambit to hold onto the club is less a move designed to maintain an interest in Liverpool, but merely to protect his investment. It is a business-move and something of a cynical one. It was merely an attempt to ensure that when the club is sold, Hicks gets the maximum possible return.

Fortunately, that notion has been rejected by the current Liverpool chairman and MD, which raises the possibility of what will happen in October, when the Royal Bank of Scotland demand repayment of their loan.

With Hicks and Gillett unlikely, unable or unwilling, to pay back that money. It seems possible that ownership, or at least a substantial part of it, will pass to the RBS. The bank themselves have already stated that they have no interest in holding the club and would seek to pass it on to a new owner as expediently as possible. To do so, would lower the asking price of the club to more within a realistic range for those investors, and there are several, who are interested, though not at the American duo’s inflated asking price.

It is perhaps too much to hope for Reds fans that the American owners will be forced to hand over the club and leave it with far less than they hoped, that a new owner will buy the club at a fairer price, come in and make the investment necessary to start work on the new ground and give manager Roy Hodgson the funds he needs to make Liverpool a viable top four prospect once again, if not this season than certainly next.

It is probably a pipedream but for Liverpool fans at the moment, it is the best they can possibly hope for. It says something about the current state of the club that Christian Purslow stating that Liverpool never wanted or intended to sell Fernando Torres or Steven Gerrard, is being treated as good news. That isn’t news. It is stating the bleedin’ obvious.

So it looks like being an uncertain month for the Reds. After a very difficult start to the season, the club may face a very uncertain month or two and yet, for fans, that may well be the best news in a long time.

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