Why 'we' should be worried about a takeover

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

by Paul Wilson

Call me naive, idealistic, romantic, unrealistic or just plain Evertonian if you like, but I can't help feeling Bill Shankly would not wholeheartedly approve of Liverpool being owned by Dubai International Capital.

 

Perhaps the great man's egalitarianism has been overstated over the years - all he ever said on the subject was that to him socialism was not a matter of politics but a way of living where everyone works for each other and shares the rewards. Yet if Shankly was ultimately a football man he was also a man of the people and, if ever there was a people's club, it was the one - sorry Everton - he built through sheer force of personality. So if there is going to be a symbolic moment for future historians to point to and say that was the end of the people's game, it might as well be when Liverpool join DaimlerChrysler, Travelodge hotels and the Tussauds Group as part of the portfolio of an overseas investment fund backed by Dubai's billionaire ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

 

Of course Shankly would have been quick to acknowledge that in football terms, Liverpool have got a result. If money is now the name of the game, and megabucks are needed to compete with foreign-owned clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester United, Liverpool have simply taken the necessary steps to ensure they stay in the big league and will not become mere spectators like the rest of the Premiership. Liverpool are not even the first English club to lend their famous name to a Gulf state anxious to secure post-oil commercial prosperity. Do Arsenal not play at the Emirates Stadium?

 

But what would have saddened Shankly is that English football - so popular, so vibrant, so splendidly self-sufficient and proudly robust for so long - should have come to this. If you live in the North-West, as I do, you cannot fail to have detected a certain ambivalence among the many Liverpool supporters canvassed for television vox pops these past few days. No one was going to be disloyal to the club, especially not when stopped in the street by a television crew, though behind the platitudes and the cautious optimism there seemed to be a vague annoyance that this was the world football was now inhabiting. At some level a great club had been demeaned by having to wander the world with a begging bowl. On the blogs, where opinions can be aired with a degree of anonymity, Rick Parry was being congratulated on successfully pimping the club to the highest bidders. That sort of backhanded compliment summed up the mixed feelings of Liverpool supporters. Yes it was good news. It could have been a lot worse and at least it was not bad news. But it was not particularly exciting news, like signing a player or putting the skids under Manchester United.

 

Perhaps the exciting news will swiftly follow, now that Rafa Benitez can shop at Harrods and, in theory at least, prevent Chelsea getting everything their own way. And perhaps it won't, because this is not traditionally the way Liverpool have done things and Aston Villa and West Ham and maybe a few others are also supposed to be throwing their 'new' money around during the next couple of transfer windows. And while Benitez should get a formidable war chest if the takeover goes through, a DIC-owned Liverpool would still have to operate according to the conventional business model. The Dubai group might be generous, but they are not a charity. They do not expect to see the value of their investment go down. Liverpool could soon have more money than Chelsea, though that does not mean they can afford £30m to see if the owner's favourite player can manage a season in England without pining for Italy. In that sense Roman Abramovich, a football fan rich enough to destabilise whole teams and leagues on a whim and answerable to no one but himself, is still out on his own and uncatchable.

 

There is no sensible, financially prudent way for other clubs to chase or emulate Chelsea's success, or occasional lack of it, so let us assume Liverpool are not doing that. Let's assume instead they simply want the money to clear their debt, buy a few players and build a £200m new stadium next to their present one. That logic is clear enough. Just like Arsenal, they have worked out that Manchester United is the sustainable model to aim for, and that they cannot hope to compete against Old Trafford resources with only around half the number of paying spectators.

 

Fine, except United stopped being sustainable around a year ago and are now a mountain of debt. No one knows how that story is going to end either, so both the Premiership's top clubs are outside conventional business practice with a degree of uncertainty surrounding their future. Liverpool's destiny seems to be more in their own hands, yet this could be precisely the moment when it passes out of them. And as some of the supporters have been saying, while Liverpool might have no difficulty filling a 60,000-seat stadium every week, their new home and new wealth is only going to increase the Premiership's competitiveness at the very top end. Short of building moats round their shiny new homes the Champions League elite could not shout their separateness from the rest of the league any louder if they tried. It is clear what is happening. The top four are using global money to keep up with global brands like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Milan, not to mention DaimlerChrysler, Travelodge and Tussauds. The rest of the Premiership has become an inconvenient irrelevance, like peasants throwing stones at impregnable castle ramparts, whether Manchester City and Newcastle join the ranks of foreign-owned clubs or not. Easy to forget, counting the 15,000 empty seats in Blackburn, Lancashire last weekend, that Rovers won the title more recently than Liverpool.

 

Premiership peasants. Those are two words you won't often see together. Yet while accountants can claim the money has never been better, I think we all know the sporting ethos has become skewed. England might be the new Klondike for international moneymen, English teams might have all topped their Champions League groups for the first time, but when you hear Jose Mourinho arguing that Chelsea ought to be allowed to field a reserve team in the Championship you wonder how long the virtues that made English football so admired around the world can possibly last.

 

Someone like Shankly, who spent all his playing career under the crude maximum wage/retain and transfer system, could easily argue the game was healthier then, because for all the iniquities and injustices, the fact that every player was on more or less the same money meant you had at least two whole divisions that were competitive all the way down. That's how Preston used to reach FA Cup finals, and why Alan Ball won his World Cup medal as a Blackpool player. It wouldn't happen now, obviously. Ball would be sitting on the Chelsea bench most weeks, doing nothing, like Shaun Wright-Phillips. As that unhappy example proves, money is not everything. Shankly the football man, never mind Shankly the socialist, would be uneasy at the direction the Premiership appears to be taking. We should all be.

 

 

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/12/..._gold_wide.html

Edited December 10, 2006 by Macca

[Hassony]

surely its a good thing that the new owners are good businessmen and not some rich millionaires who will treat the club as a toy