George Gillett made a rare visit to Liverpool yesterday to see his club beat Manchester United, but while fans celebrated their victory, large numbers of them protested against the American owners. As one of them said on Sky Sports News, he wished the American owners would just take their profit and go. It was the way in which United eclipsed Liverpool on the pitch and their continuous expansion of Old Trafford that led Liverpool into an urgent search for a new stadium to replace Anfield.
George Gillett made a rare visit to Liverpool yesterday to see his club beat Manchester United, but while fans celebrated their victory, large numbers of them protested against the American owners. As one of them said on Sky Sports News, he wished the American owners would just take their profit and go. It was the way in which United eclipsed Liverpool on the pitch and their continuous expansion of Old Trafford that led Liverpool into an urgent search for a new stadium to replace Anfield. The principal reason the club was put up for sale was to find ‘investors’ who would fund a new stadium at nearby Stanley Park. It was hoped that this would push Liverpool’s earnings somewhere near a level at which they would be able to compete with United. Club chairman and major shareholder David Moores favoured the Americans over the wealth of Dubai International Capital because Hicks and Gillett were more positive about their ability to get the stadium built.
In their formal offer to take over the club, they stated ‘their intention to take forward the Stanley Park development … and to commence building one of the leading stadia in Europe as soon as is reasonably practicable.’ In order to buy the club, pay off debts and fund player signings they took out a £350m credit facility with Royal Bank of Scotland which now has a mortgage over everything owned by Liverpool. That £350m has been borrowed just until January 2009, with the option extend it only as far as next July. Having brought debt to the club rather than investment, many analysts considered that they would struggle to borrow another £400m to fund the stadium. Hicks blamed the credit crunch rather than the level of indebtedness for the failure to make progress on the stadium project.
The revised aim is for Liverpool to start playing in the new stadium a year later than planned for the start of the 2012-13 season. Even if that does happen, putting Liverpool £750m in debt, by then United will have had four more seasons at their 76,000-capacity Old Trafford stadium. Arsenal will have had the same time at the Emirates (although they have been constrained by the repayments) and Chelsea will have had four more seasons spending Roman Abramovich’s money. That is before you factor the wealth available to Manchester City into the equation. Liverpool are probably the most vulnerable of the top four clubs, particularly if they were to be knocked out of the qualification places for the Champions League which earned them £21.6m last season. The best hope for the fans must be that Gillett and Hicks sell out to Dubai Investment Corporation and bring this unhappy episode to an end.