It was at 7.22 this morning that the news Liverpool’s fans have waited more than three years to hear officially broke. A plainly-worded statement released on the club’s website confirmed that the Anfield board had agreed a deal with New England Sports Ventures, owners of the Boston Red Sox, to end the despised reign of Tom Hicks and George Gillett on Merseyside. Yet no street parties were planned. No bunting hangs from the terraced roofs of L4. The Kop’s banners, the images and slogans of revolt, remain. The future has not arrived. Dawn has yet to break on Anfield’s perpetual dusk.
Indeed, in some senses, all that Liverpool’s night of the long knives has served to do is deepen the darkness. A club that has simmered with factionalism for months and years is now in a state of outright civil war. The owners, Hicks and Gillett, the carpetbaggers, the panhandlers who still cling by desperate fingernails to an asset they have done so much to strip, tried to sack two members of chairman Martin Broughton’s board, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre, after learning they wished to sell the club to John W Henry, the owner of the Red Sox, or another, mystery bidder.
That much was declared in a staggering statement released on the Liverpool website yesterday evening, as the three-man sub-committee of non-owner directors staged their coup, seizing the means of communication, launching the rebellion. The Americans’ riposte came later – not published on the website – revealing their reasons for seeking to appoint Mack Hicks and Lori Kay McCutcheon in Purslow and Ayre’s stead. It was couched in diplomatic terms, it was persuasively phrased, it contained a defiant logic of a sort. But the basic message, the brass tack, was that neither of the two bids on the table offered them enough money. Hicks and Gillett, whose only notable contribution to Liverpool has been to laden the club with £282 million of debt, want a tidy profit out of their venture.
And then came this morning’s statement from Broughton, detailing that the sale of the club was now dependent on establishing whether Hicks and Gillett have any legal right to sack Purslow and Ayre. If they do, then Hicks will have a 4 to 1 majority on the board and can veto any sale. If they do not, then the sale should go through.
If only it was that simple. Nothing is, at Liverpool, and in truth it would hardly be in keeping with Hicks’ and Gillett’s tenure had they chosen to walk quietly into the night. It had to end this way. It had to end in chaos and confusion. There could not just be answers. There had to be questions.
Even for all the stark talk of a binding agreement upon Broughton’s appointment in April that allowed the board to sell a club they did not own, can Hicks and Gillett, holders of 100 per cent of the shares, be forced out without their agreement? Why are the two potential appointees to Liverpool’s board Hicks loyalists, denying Gillett a strengthened presence? What happens, if Hicks succeeds in his bid to block the sale, and the Royal Bank of Scotland call in their £282 million debt on October 15th? Why did Liverpool have two “excellent” bids at 8.30pm yesterday and yet agree a sale less than 12 hours later? When Broughton suggests that NESV “best met” the criteria laid out for new owners, does that mean they do not meet all of them? Will Henry’s bid involve debt? If so, are Liverpool simply jumping out of their Texan fire and into a sizzling Bostonian pan?
All will need to be answered, and satisfactorily, whatever happens, if Liverpool are to emerge from the darkest period of their history. In the boardroom, the battle lines are drawn, sides chosen. On the terraces, the fans wait to learn their club’s fate. There is no hope at Anfield any more, only fear. Fear of what has been, and what will come, if Hicks remains. Fear of what is to come, if the legal challenge drags on for weeks, as it may do. And fear of what might be, if Henry and NESV prove to be no different to what went before. The fans, the club’s stakeholders, cannot yet see a glimmer of light. They have learned to be afraid of the dark.
