An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  The Kop was bouncing, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ filled the spring night air, the prospect of a trip to Moscow and victory over Manchester United making it the sweetest night ever was in our sights. Until John Arne Riise inexplicably popped up to head into his own net, and left us all floored.

  Almost on cue, a middle-aged man lifted himself out of his main stand seat to leave, and yelled at Hicks, ‘Happy now, you fuckin’ tosser? See what you’ve done?’ You couldn’t script that. As much as all Liverpudlians wanted to blame the resident cowboys for every failing, as much as they ached to run them out of town, only a madman could have believed it was Tom Hicks who had stooped in the Kop penalty area to score for Chelsea – not least because he had a comb-over worse than Gregor Fisher’s in the Hamlet photo-booth advert, meaning he would never have been able to nut it that sweetly.

  But we could all identify with the pain of Angry Main Stand Man. We were becoming so drained and stressed, we weren’t thinking in a sane manner. No one was flying over the cuckoo’s nest. How did we get here?

  It was almost reassuringly appropriate that when Rick Parry agreed to a meeting, we should have it in a nondescript service station off the M56.

  That was always, as Rick would put it, The Liverpool Way. That’s how Bill Shankly signed his future England captains for peanuts. After a meeting of Ford Cortinas over strong tea and Spam sandwiches by the side of a motorway. No fuss, no fancy setting, just somewhere quiet and ordinary away from prying lenses, where they could fade into the background. This was the 2010 version. Lattes in a Costa Coffee, weeks after the NESV takeover, halfway between Liverpool and Chester.

  I wanted the much-castigated former chief executive’s version of events. I wanted to put to him the widely held belief that whatever we thought about the motives or morality of Hicks and Gillett, they were global speculators who spotted a chance to turn a quick profit at a failing business. And to those American eyes Liverpool FC had been so badly run it was as ripe for picking as a lush field of Mississippi cotton in the fall.

  What truly angered Liverpool fans, who were put through a totally avoidable 44-month trauma, was not so much what the Americans did or didn’t do, but the fact they were allowed to stroll into Anfield in the first place and give us all such a royal shafting.

  We needed answers. I told Parry that he must have had many sleepless nights over the past years, as the scale of his mistake sank in, and asked how much he regretted allowing Hicks and Gillett to take over Liverpool.

  ‘I don’t think anyone looks back with anything other than regret but hindsight is much easier than foresight,’ he replied. ‘I wish David had decided not to sell because no one cared more for the club than he did. We could have borrowed the money to build the stadium, which would have cost less than £250 million, and been in it by 2009. But the credit crunch was just around the corner and we’d have been borrowed up to the hilt. If we’d had a bad year on the pitch, there’d have been no headroom to buy players. This wasn’t a risk David was prepared to take and I can understand why.

  ‘The one thing you can’t criticise Hicks and Gillett for, at least until the summer of 2009, is a lack of investment in players. They put in place the personal guarantees and letters of credit that enabled us to keep on strengthening the squad.’

  Yes, I told him, but it wasn’t their money, was it? It was our money, the club’s money, the fans’ money. I put it to him that Liverpool was ripe for a predator attack because it was so badly run. It was there for the taking, wasn’t it?

  ‘I don’t accept that at all,’ he replied.

  So why did Rafa Benitez constantly complain to me and other journalists that he could never get deals done because you held things up?

  ‘Look at all the evidence of the players we did sign – which is a substantial number. The evidence doesn’t support the claim. No one has ever equated buying quickly with buying well in football. Tell me who we missed out on?’

  I could, but I would simply be regurgitating a list Rafa had long ago trailed, and Parry was bound to have an answer in every case. Instead I told him it was patently obvious that Hicks and Gillett acquired Liverpool on the cheap, and one of the main reasons for that was that the club wasn’t performing off the pitch as well as it could have done.

  ‘Not at all,’ argued Parry. ‘The price reflected the need for new owners to take the risk on developing the new stadium. In 1999 we finished seventh in the Premier League and we had to focus on getting things right on the pitch. Our philosophy was to focus on the core, i.e. football, and bring in partners who had more expertise than us in other areas.’

  But you were outsourcing all of our profit areas, letting other firms like Heathcotes, Granada and George Davies milk our fame and our fans, I said.

  ‘Bringing in Compass/Heathcotes and George Davies made a big impact on the quality of what we offered as well as increasing our profits in those areas. Arguably Granada didn’t perform too well commercially but they injected £42 million into the club at a vital time. This was invested 100 per cent in the playing squad and provided the platform for our success in 2001 and the subsequent regular Champions League participation.’

  What about the countless horror stories about the online store always being out of stock?

  ‘Forget the anecdotes. Our retail turnover increased from £5 million to £25 million and George Davies gave us an operation to be proud of. He did a great job.’

  So how come there’s been such a big jump in commercial revenues since you left?

  ‘The big jump has been from second in the Premier League to seventh. It’s not fair for me to comment on commercial performance without being aware of the numbers. But I’d love to see a line-by-line comparison of revenues and costs. And factor in the loss of Champions League revenue since our whole philosophy was to drive revenues through success on the pitch. We were great believers in the virtuous circle.’

  The general consensus, I told him, was that you couldn’t cope with all the various departments. When you took on the job there was no structure in place. It was run with a small-club mentality. Your problem was you had a weak chairman who didn’t want to be involved in the day-to-day running of the business and rather than take on a tier of senior management to share the load, it all went through you. You had total control of everything from the manager’s buys to the ticket office and the club shop and it just became too big a job, didn’t it?

  ‘I wasn’t running the online shop or the ticket office. We had loyal and competent people doing that. But one of the reasons we wanted new owners was to help expand our operations. There is always scope to improve. DIC were exciting because Dubai had made a great job of transforming a country brand and provided a gateway to the Far East. And Hicks and Gillett had extensive experience of running US sports teams. We wanted to draw upon their knowledge and their contacts.’

  Rick Parry is a lifelong Liverpool fan who went to Ellesmere Port Grammar School and the University of Liverpool, where he graduated in maths before moving into chartered accountancy and management consultancy.

  In 1991 he became involved in the planning of the new Premier League, and the following year was appointed its chief executive, brokering lucrative TV deals which would eventually make it the biggest football cash cow on the planet.

  As Liverpool’s veteran chief executive Peter Robinson neared retirement he singled out Parry as his natural successor, and in July 1998, David Moores made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. A few years later, with Liverpool falling behind its rivals and Moores deciding to sell up and bring in new investment, Parry was the man charged with selling the family silver. The stuff you only sell once. And he ended up selling to men who cared so little about the club they were eventually prepared to see it go into administration so long as they could turn a profit.

  Why was the deal done so quickly with the Americans, and why were they allowed to do virtually no due diligence when DIC had spent eighteen months doing theirs, I asked.

  ‘G
illett had been looking at the books since September, so had had five months.’

  OK, but did you judge Tom Hicks’s character purely on George Gillett’s word?

  ‘Effectively, yes. It’s the easiest thing in world to ask “shouldn’t you have taken your time and done your due diligence on Hicks?” but we’d known George Gillett for six months, got to know him quite well and thought we’d got a decent feel for him. So when George said “trust me, Tom’s a decent guy” we thought, well you obviously know him far better than we do, you’ve decided to give him 50 per cent of the club so you must have done your checks. That’s essentially what we relied on.’

  But surely, if you’d done your job properly and checked him out thoroughly, you might have found things you didn’t like, and said no?

  ‘I honestly don’t know because I’ve spoken to people in baseball and ice hockey who to this day say that from an official league perspective Tom Hicks was a model owner. They never had any issues with him.’

  Come on, Rick, half of America knew him simply as this big, leveraged buyout king, didn’t they?

  ‘We asked him all about that and he said, “Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst used to be my day job. This is what I do with my family money. This isn’t Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst. This is me, Tom Hicks. It’s completely different.” So what do you do? Take the answers at face value or say we don’t believe you? On what basis do you say that, when he had bankers like Rothschild vouching for him?’

  Yes, but Rothschild’s were his and Gillett’s bankers. Of course they’re going to vouch for him. So long as they know they’ll get their money back they’ll vouch for anyone. Isn’t that how they earn their profits and bonuses?

  ‘Yes but they have a responsibility to ensure their clients are good for their money. There’s a statement to this effect in the offer document.’

  I take him back to February 2007. You’ve lost DIC, the fans are desperate, you’ve gone to the Echo and said ‘Trust Us’. Did you feel you had to put something in place quickly otherwise you were right back at square one, meaning you really wanted to believe that Hicks and Gillett were trustworthy and their offer was a good one?

  ‘Yes. I’m naturally more of a believing person than a disbelieving one. You wouldn’t be in football if you were an ultimate cynic. We did want to believe them and George had made a very good impression. He was a nice, plausible guy. We’d seen him in his own environment and everything stacked up. There were never any issues that said this is a wrong ‘un.

  ‘And don’t forget this had been a close-run thing in the December. It wasn’t as if Gillett had come up on the rails from nowhere. In reality we were reverting to Plan B. What David also had was incredibly senior people warning him about DIC. About having to go back to an investment committee to get decisions made. What’s it going to be like if you want to sign a player? Will you have to wait ten weeks for a decision?’

  What about the allegations that you only went with the Americans to feather your own nest, I ask. Did Hicks and Gillett offer you a job whereas DIC didn’t, and did that sway things?

  ‘I find it pretty offensive that people suggest I favoured Hicks and Gillett because I had a good offer from them, not least because they know there isn’t a shred of evidence to support this. It is just not true. I had three conversations with prospective bidders – Steve Morgan, DIC and George Gillett – and on each occasion I said that there could be no discussion about my position until after the deal was done. Feel free to check that with them.

  ‘With DIC the deal was effectively done in early December and I sat down in January with Sameer Al Ansari to discuss my package. Remember I’d got to know DIC over an eighteen-month period. DIC invest in companies rather than manage them and it was always clear that they would need a CEO.

  ‘There was no discussion at all with Hicks and Gillett until April. I have no doubt I would have been better off financially with DIC. Nobody can ever say with justification that I chose any option for the club because it suited me. Ever.’

  So how soon did it become clear that these two weren’t really partners but two strangers who loathed each other?

  ‘It soon became clear that they had very different philosophies on how the club should be run. One was hands-off, the other hands-on; one courted publicity, the other didn’t.’

  How did you feel watching that video when Hicks called you a disaster?

  ‘I’ve never watched it and I never will. My response was that someone had to focus on doing what was right for the club so I kept my head down and got on with it. It’s almost impossible to build a winning culture when you’ve got people at the top pulling in different directions but we had to try to concentrate on getting things right on the pitch. It’s pretty remarkable that we came so close to winning the Premier League in 2009, given all the distractions.’

  What struck me in our long meeting, of which these exchanges are only a small part, was his repeated references to The Liverpool Way, a phrase I believe became a convenience to hide behind. I asked Parry if the constant harking back to The Liverpool Way disguised a failure to modernise and stay in the real world?

  ‘Not at all. Given The Liverpool Way stems from the Shankly era, it can never be an excuse for failure. It is as relevant today as it was then. It is about being respected for the way you do things, whether that be playing the game or carrying out complex negotiations. And it is about treating others with respect. I will always hold my head up and say I’m proud that I tried to do things The Liverpool Way.’

  There are many who have been around since the days of Shankly, myself included, who disagree. I respect where it came from and I know what the phrase aspires to, but in reality any trace of what it was disappeared when Graeme Souness tore down the Boot Room. Since then it has been used too often as a cop-out in the face of change. It defined a certain time but time moves on, and it’s no coincidence that Liverpool haven’t won a league title since the wrecking-ball swung through the Boot Room walls.

  Rafa Benitez spoke about it being an albatross around his neck. A myth that held the club back because people kept looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, rather than forward with the blinkers off.

  It wasn’t only people employed by the club. Many older fans used and abused that phrase too. To them The Liverpool Way was the magic ingredient in a world-beating formula. Like the secret part of the Coca-Cola recipe, it would be handed down from generation to generation to maintain world-beating success. The problem was, unlike Coca-Cola, the genie had long escaped from Liverpool’s bottle.

  Some of the extreme Liverpool Way-ists reminded me of God Squad nutters who march around Arkansas schools with sandwich boards around their necks screaming ‘Kill All Faggots’ when they suspect the sixth grade teacher is gay. Hypnotised robots bending quotes from the Bible to prove God decreed that all homosexuals should be stoned to death.

  Liverpool Way-ists usually recite their mantra in a context that says ‘Shankly would never have approved of that.’ But, like the Bible, you can twist the Gospel According to Shanks to make it say anything that you want it to say.

  Just as Parry did in February 2007 when he said Shankly would have approved of the way George Gillett pulled off a ‘masterstroke’ by bringing Tom Hicks in to conclude the takeover.

  Would he really? Does that make Shankly a fool then? Or does it make Parry one for assuming personal knowledge of what a man he never knew would be thinking had he lived another twenty-six years?

  Maybe it’s time Liverpudlians ceased assuming what Shankly or Paisley would have thought thirty or forty years ago, and did their own thinking, because that’s what they did. Which was why they were so forward-looking and so successful. To be fair to Parry and Moores, a deep strain of Scouse cynicism has rebelled against progress since the 1980s. We weren’t United or Chelsea. We were Liverpool and we didn’t want to be tainted with anything as common as money.

  If we’re honest, we even found the bumbling incompetence of the old regimes
funny to the point of being almost quaint. We were crap when it came to commercial activities but our activity on the pitch made us an awesome trophy-winning machine. It’s what set us apart. We operated the right way, the old-fashioned way in this old atmospheric ground in this old working-class area of a proper footballing city.

  Yet Anfield, the district, perfectly symbolised the club. It had been allowed to rot and was neglected. Bad decision-making, a lack of foresight and weak leadership had frozen it in time, so it looked like it hadn’t moved on since the days when Thatcher put her iron boot through the old industrial landscapes.

  The players, fans and managers, the worldwide appeal based on seventies and eighties success, were papering over the cracks. Istanbul was a magnificent, almost heaven-sent reminder of what we had been and could become again. But the reality of what we were was that the club was incapable of capitalising on a moment the biggest PR budget in the world could not buy.

  That’s why we fannied round for two years before falling into the lap of the American sharks. If we couldn’t capitalise on Istanbul, and sell ourselves after that momentous triumph which showcased everything special about Liverpool, something was seriously lacking at the top of the club.

  A senior Liverpool figure involved in the sale to NESV had some sympathy with Parry and Moores: ‘It’s not as easy as you think to flush people out. They want to buy something, you’re questioning their ability to buy it and the banks are telling you that they’re good for their money. It’s easy to be wise after the event.

  ‘So I don’t blame them for selling to Hicks and Gillett. What they’re more culpable of is allowing the club to get into such a state they had to sell it. Because if they’d managed the business properly they wouldn’t have had to.

  ‘Moores didn’t have the revenue streams to secure the loan. The club was only making a £13 million profit in 2007 when it could easily have been making £40 million.

  ‘That would have been enough for banks to lend them the cash to build the stadium, and once that was up and the revenue grew further, there would have been no need to sell at all. Liverpool could, and should, have stayed in local hands.’