globesports.com: Doomed to walk alone?
Globe and Mail Update
Stephen Brunt
January 18, 2008
Suffice it to say, there is trouble in paradise.
The partnership between George Gillett and Tom Hicks, the Americans who own Liverpool Football Club, is in severe distress right now.
It's a safe bet that the team's immediate future might involve one of them, or it might involve neither of them.
But it almost certainly won't involve both.
When they purchased the club a little less than a year ago, Gillett and Hicks had to know they were in for a bumpy ride. Other outsiders had already made their way along that perilous path — most notably the reviled Glazer family with Manchester United and Russian zillionaire Roman Abramovich with Chelsea, who at least bought love by winning silverware — but still there remains that tinge of suspicion-bordering-on-xenophobia anytime outsiders grab a piece of England's national game.
Liverpool, with its glorious history and with its distinct local culture, would arguably present an even greater challenge than the other clubs. From the outset, the battle for scouser acceptance was an uphill battle, with the local press jumping on any suggestion that the Americans didn't fully comprehend the game or its idiosyncratic business, and didn't share the supporters' undying passion.
Gillett at least understood that kind of dynamic, having gone through much the same thing when he bought the Montreal Canadiens. He managed to defuse most of the resistance there by hiring good, unimpeachable people to run the hockey team, and by approaching the whole cultural issue from a posture of humility. With Liverpool, his son, Foster, moved to the city full-time to help run the team just as he had previously moved to Montreal, and though George Gillett quickly stopped talking to the local press, he stayed visible among the fans, employing his considerable charm towards convincing the supporter base that his heart was in the right place.
For Hicks, though, who owns the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball and the Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League, this was all new territory, and he stepped into trouble again and again. Much of the most recent media firestorm in the U.K. — including the admission that the owners had dallied with Jurgen Klinsmann (who subsequently accepted the job of managing Bayern Munich beginning next season) while Rafael Benitez was still under contract as the Liverpool manager — can be laid at Hicks' feet.
That clash in styles, as much as the oft-reported question of the club's refinancing in order to underwrite the construction of a new, much larger stadium to replace the fabled Anfield, seems to be at the heart the current ownership crisis.
It is highly likely that by next week, it will be announced that the owners' refinancing plan has been completed — a tricky proposition in these times of tight credit - allowing Liverpool both to turn sod for the new stadium this summer, with opening scheduled for 2011, and to be active participants in the transfer market going forward. The extra seats and extra revenue possibilities of the new Anfield will allow whoever owns the team to proceed from a position of strength in the ultra-competitive upper echelon of the English Premier League.
But just who is that going to be?
It's an open question right now. Hicks and Gillett are equal partners. The first option will be for one to buy the other out — whether or not Hicks's heart is still in the game is difficult to judge, but Gillett at the very least seems interested in continuing his association with soccer, either at Liverpool or elsewhere, where he might invest the proceeds of a buyout.
If either is seeking a new partner, there are a plenty of available candidates waiting in the wings, including Dubai Investment Capital, who were beaten to the punch by the Americans last year. Similarly, if both Hicks and Gillett's share goes on the open market, there would be no shortage of interested buyers, and the Americans could be expected to claim a healthy return on their initial investment.
But the sense is that Gillett, if he has his druthers, would prefer to hang in — if it's in a buyout scenario, almost certainly with a new partner.
That might not be the perfect ending for the hard-core Liverpool loyalists, who no doubt dream of having one of their own sitting in the front row of the directors' box, someone who has lived and breathed the team and the city their entire life.
But assuming that that's a fantasy now, that the choice is between one American, another American, and the investment arm of an oil-rich Arab emirate, it shouldn't really be so tough.
A hockey fan in Montreal could tell them that they could do much worse.
