An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  Thanks for your prompt response Tom. Your command of the English language is nearly as good as your knowledge of English football and Liverpool FC. Why not address some of the points raised in the piece written by Dominic King in the Liverpool Echo or has it touched a nerve?

  And then he sat hunched, like an angler on a riverbank, and waited. Four minutes later, he hooked a whopper:

  ‘Blow me, fuck face. Go to hell. I’m sick of you.’

  The shit had hit the fan (kind of literally) and the blow came at him like a Yosser Hughes headbutt. ‘I was just left absolutely stunned, but when it sank in I was really saddened that a Liverpool director could respond to a supporter in such a manner,’ said Horner.

  He was now certain it was from Hicks Jr., as the email was copied in to the club’s finance director Philip Nash and commercial director Ian Ayre. He had clearly caught him off-guard at a bad time, probably, with it being 3.40 a.m. over there, just before going to bed in a ‘tired and emotional state’ (as bank managers’ wives say after necking a bottle of Gordon’s gin and burning hubby’s Ford Mondeo for leaving a deposit in his secretary’s drawers).

  Horner paced around, thinking what to do next. Did he really have dynamite here? Could he prove it was Hicks? What should he do with it? He needed to speak with someone, but was home alone, so he decided to share the email exchange with fellow fans by posting on the Liverpool Way forum.

  ‘I have just received the following response from Tom Hicks Junior when I emailed him the link to Dominic King’s piece in the Liverpool Echo this morning. What a charming individual he is. I think it touched a nerve,’ Steve wrote in a commendably understated style.

  The story now assumed an unstoppable momentum. He phoned Paul Rice at the Spirit Of Shankly who alerted his media contacts. He emailed sympathetic journalists like Chris Bascombe, who assured him the Hicks address was genuine and that the News of the World would be running the story the next day.

  ‘I sensed blood and felt that this could be a small but significant breakthrough in our attempts to oust Hicks and Gillett,’ said Horner.

  ‘I was dying to put a nail in their coffin because I hated them with a passion for the damage that they were causing to my football club. They had eroded away my passion for football and for Liverpool FC and I was desperate for them to sell up and never darken our door again.’

  Shortly before nine p.m. Texas time, with the Sunday newspapers out on the streets and, more importantly, the worldwide web screaming headlines such as ‘Blow me **** face. Go to Hell. I’m sick of you’ (News of the World) and ‘Hicks jnr in email war with furious Reds fans’ (Mail on Sunday), Tom Jr. crawled back to his computer and hit the grovel key:

  Stephen,

  I apologize for losing my temper and using bad language with you. It was a kneejerk reaction.

  Tommy.

  Freuds, the expensive PR agency charged with the impossible task of improving Hicks’s and Gillett’s image, was now on the case. And they needed to go into overdrive on the Monday after the Sunday papers carried the line that Liverpool FC were declining to comment on the matter.

  During that Sunday, The Times’ football editor, Tony Evans, had tried to contact the club’s managing director Christian Purslow for a statement, only to be told he wouldn’t be saying anything because he was ‘having a Me Day’. Evans was so infuriated he wanted to run the ‘Me Day’ response in the paper but was talked out of it.

  The Spirit Of Shankly condemned what they called a ‘conspiracy of silence’ and released a statement demanding the immediate resignation of Hicks Jr.

  ‘It is a great surprise and an even greater disappointment that Liverpool FC have thus far failed to make any comment on what we feel is a very serious matter,’ said SOS spokesman James McKenna.

  ‘Is this what the club has come to, that a board member can speak in such derogatory terms to a supporter but can go without censure or any public criticism? The conspiracy of silence which has followed this unsavoury incident is totally unbecoming of a club which has always prided itself on its relationship with the fans.

  ‘Are we to presume that the Liverpool hierarchy condones the comments made by Tom Hicks Jr. or is it simply a case that the deeply flawed regime of Hicks and Gillett has left the entire club in a state of paralysis? Surely the very least the Liverpool supporters deserve is an open and honest explanation from the club, an indication on their feelings about the objectionable behaviour of such a senior member of the board and a commitment that such an incident will not happen again.’

  Within hours the club responded by removing Hicks Jr. from the board and replacing him with Casey Coffman, the executive VP of Hicks Holdings, who had recently revealed to an interviewer that her favourite book was A Confederacy of Dunces. Meaning she was perfectly qualified to fly into the Anfield loony bin.

  That wasn’t the end of it for Poor (non) Scouser Tommy, though, who was forced into a second grovel, this time to the entire Liverpool fan-base.

  ‘I have great respect for Liverpool Football Club, especially the club’s supporters,’ he said in a statement which had clearly been written for him by one of the various PR firms working for his father.

  ‘I apologise for my mistake and I am very sorry for my harmful words. I do not want my actions to take away from the club’s future; therefore I am resigning from the board. To the fans and to the club, please accept my sincerest apologies.’

  Unsurprisingly, the Spirit Of Shankly snubbed his act of contrition, calling instead on his father and his co-owner to resign: ‘Tom Hicks and George Gillett bought the club and talked of respecting the legacy and tradition, as well as family values by passing the club on to their children. If these are the kind of values they see fit for Liverpool Football Club, and this is how they respect our legacies and traditions, it underlines the need to remove them from the club.’

  The impact of Blow Me Fuckface-gate (as it should have been christened) cannot be underestimated. To most outsiders, and some Liverpool fans, all Hicks Jr. had done was give an honest (if utterly naive and suicidal) reaction to receiving grief from a faceless enemy. Even Jamie Carragher, who over the years, like all footballers, has had to bite his tongue when fans have got on his case, saw the funny side. ‘I laughed my head off when I heard about it. I know it upset the fan but we’ve probably all come in after a row with our missus at three in the morning, read someone slagging you off on an email and thought of doing that.’

  But it gave the Spirit Of Shankly and other protesting fans hope, during a lull in hostilities, that if they could force a Hicks to resign from the board over his thuggish behaviour, then wider change could be effected. It reminded the more gullible Liverpool fans who saw the likes of the SOS as reckless militants, and still gave the Americans the benefit of the doubt, exactly what the club’s owners thought of them. And it made members of the wider footballing community, some of whom were beginning to pigeonhole protesting Kopites as whingeing Scousers who had been fooled by Benitez into demonising his paymasters, rethink their opinion.

  Certain London-based commentators, who resented Liverpool fans for believing they were part of a unique and special tribe, were sceptical. They claimed there must have been more to the email exchange than was being offered up. This Spirit Of Shankly man was obviously a bolshie crypto-communist who had been bombarding this poor stressed-out American with a blizzard of vile abuse and the guy snapped. But the email exchange (which was never contested by the owners or the club) disproved such a theory. Horner had simply exposed Hicks Jr. as the arrogant, moronic charlatan he was.

  Tony Evans sees it as the defining phrase of their tenure: ‘It summed up to perfection their attitude to Liverpool fans. They completely saw us as commodities. If someone drops off so what, someone else will come in and take their place. They didn’t realise that football is about more than that. OK, the lad was probably being a bit of a pest but there you had the moment that told you what it was all about.’

  Hours after Tom Jr.�
��s resignation was announced, his father responded to another supporter who had emailed him with concerns about Benitez’s lack of spending power: ‘Our debt is very manageable (see Man U) and we never use player sales for debt service. Our interest on £200m is about £16m. The new stadium will be the game changer. Christian Purslow is working very hard on it. January is a poor-quality market. The summer window will be big.’

  It wasn’t. But that wasn’t the point. After Blow Me Fuckface-gate the fans stopped listening. That one outburst had stripped away any pretence of decency or any doubts about their attitude to the fans. No Tom Hicks–Alan Myers cosy fireside chat espousing his family’s love of the city and its people, no slick PR statement, no folksy email exchange with a fan could disguise their utter derision and contempt for Liverpool and everyone connected with it.

  It cut through the pretence and said it like it was. We are the Masters of The Universe, you are the plankton which feeds our pool of wealth and elevates us even further from your scummy existence.

  Like many other Liverpool fans, by early 2010, with no sign of the Americans leaving and the team looking increasingly likely to fall out of the Champions League places with frightening consequences, Horner was suffering from a genuine depression. The emails and the change they forced on the Hicks family gave him a huge lift.

  ‘I was getting seriously depressed about the situation because I really love the club, I hated what was being done to it and I couldn’t see a way out,’ said Steve. ‘To think one harmless email from me had resulted in one of the Americans being thrown off the board really picked me up. More than that it whetted my appetite to do more to get the rest of them out.’

  However, there was a downside to Steve’s new-found fame. He was hit with a barrage of emails, phone calls, messages and interview requests from the world’s media and struggled to cope with the intrusion.

  That was when a fellow SOS member and Liverpool Way poster Mick Carroll got in touch and advised him on what to expect and how to handle it. Mick had achieved notoriety four months earlier, under his forum pseudonym Dougie Do’ins, by confronting George Gillett at the Academy, taping an interview with him on his mobile phone and posting the transcript on the Liverpool Way site. To say Gillett emerged from it as a slippery buffoon would be a severe understatement.

  It was the morning of the 6–1 home rout of Hull at the end of September 2009 when the boy from Wisconsin was showing his latest non-buyer, Saudi prince Faisal al-Fahad bin Abdullah bin Saud, and his entourage, around his Merseyside empire. The Spirit Of Shankly had got word that the party were at Mel-wood and fifteen members drove there in the hope of putting some questions to him and letting him know that cowboys, their debts and their evasions, weren’t welcome here.

  When Gillett and his party emerged from the training ground the protestors unleashed some verbal volleys. ‘Gillett’s face was a picture which I’ll never, ever forget,’ said Mick Carroll. ‘It was one of total shock. He just never saw it coming and you could see he was embarrassed.’

  The party sped off to the Academy with the SOS in pursuit, but when they arrived at Kirkby the fans were barred from entering. So they stood outside staring in, waiting to catch a glimpse of the enemy. When Gillett appeared on a balcony Carroll shouted: ‘George would you mind answering a few questions about the club’s finances?’ and to his great surprise he said: ‘I’ll speak to you but I’m not speaking to any of your friends.’ He recognised a few of the faces, like Jay McKenna’s, from past confrontations and he didn’t fancy going head to head with them again.

  This was Gillett doing his Man of The People act, no doubt attempting to put flesh on the statements he’d just fed to his Arab guests about having an open and honest rapport with his punters. He asked Carroll his name and two minutes later he was at the door, shaking his hand and inviting him inside. Obviously the first thing that caught Mick’s eye was the owner’s alternative footwear.

  ‘He had these massive boots on,’ said Carroll. ‘I think he had them on to give himself a bit of height or something but he shook my hand and then stood on my foot. I’m not sure whether it was deliberate or not.’

  Gillett ushered him upstairs into an office and with the pleasantries out of the way, Carroll demanded to know where all the money that should be going to the manager for his transfer budget had disappeared to. Gillett came back with, ‘Let’s try and have you take your attitude out of these questions’ before blitzing his interrogator with a string of facts and figures most of which had no bearing on reality.

  ‘When we bought the club it was with our own money. Cash. A year and a half later, when the credit crisis hit we each put our portion of the club up as collateral for a loan to go into the club and refinance the business. Today, the club has the lowest to each dollar of profit of any of the major clubs in this sport.

  ‘We have all the debt documents. The club is in an extraordinarily good financial condition. Far better than United, Chelsea or Arsenal.

  ‘The club had £40–80 million debt when we bought it, but no earnings. We have invested massively. We have put more money in than anyone, than Man City with the craziness they have got.

  ‘The vast majority came from Tom and me and our personal cash, not the club, not from borrowings.

  ‘The question is how is the debt relative to the earnings. If you have a mortgage on your house and you don’t have a job, that mortgage is in jeopardy. If you have a mortgage on your house and a very good job, that mortgage is very sound. The debt on this club is very sound.’

  Carroll was recording him on his mobile phone, which Gillett hadn’t spotted. Until it rang out and he fumbled to switch it off.

  ‘Hey! That’s not switched on, is it?’ asked Gillett.

  ‘No, it’s a mobile phone. I’m just rejecting a call,’ replied a red-faced Carroll.

  The then 41-year-old fan didn’t feel it was going well. For years he had dreamt of getting one of the owners in the room and grilling them (sometimes literally). Now he had Gillett alone, but felt he was being blinded by science. He told him he didn’t recognise his figures and that the fans and the media saw the funding of the club in a completely different light.

  ‘That’s bullshit. The media don’t understand how to write about cash flow and profit and loss. Good idea to come and say where the club is at. Not being drip-fed anything by me. I tried to support our manager and let him have freedom of rule to spend the money in his way, as wisely as he can, to do the proper scouting and get us the best young men he can. That’s what we try to do. I don’t get into strategy or individual players.

  ‘I’ve tried to keep to The Liverpool Way, being silent in the background and providing funds for the manager. The status of the club, the general financial condition, the debt versus earnings is the only thing that matters.

  ‘Our budgets are taken over the last six years of the club, we’re not planning on getting to Champions League finals or anything like that. The budgets are done conservatively. It is based upon a relatively limited run in the Champions League. The debt wouldn’t go up without Champions League football. We have enough cash flow to pay the minimum interest we have, which is not very high, to give Rafa the capital he needs.

  ‘If I told you that Arsenal by law cannot spend as much as we do, United cannot spend any more than we can, would you say we are underspending?’

  Carroll pushed him on the previous summer’s lack of transfer activity, claiming all the money that was spent had been recouped in sales. Gillett replied:

  ‘The £30 million went straight back in from Alonso. We didn’t do what Man Utd did. They took all of their money from the player sale and owed so much money they had to use it to pay down the debt.

  ‘We have invested in keeping with the history of the club more money than our competitors, which means it should be getting better. Now if it’s not getting better, it’s not Gillett and Hicks, it’s the manager, it’s the scouting. So make sure you balance out your analysis.

  ‘It is
the case that the money went back in. Rafa had the money from Xabi plus another £22–23 million this close season in addition to the money that came from selling to buy players. There is no leakage in the system – whatever came in plus whatever we had given him as part of our budgets he had available.

  ‘We have spent net between £20 and 25 million. I had probably the best writer in the country call me this last week asking why people are trying to demean the true level of spending. The £20 million-plus is not a cap, it’s an estimate. When you put a budget together on your house and you decide you’re going to spend a little more here and a little less there, it’s not a cap, it’s a goal, a programme for spending.

  ‘A budget is what it is, and it’s the same in a business. We spent more than the £20 million cap in our budget, plus all the money from sales, so there was plenty of money, so any complaints you have you should take a look at the ins and outs. Hicks and I did not take any money out to pay down debt, there was no money taken out. It’s all been spent on players.’

  Carroll attempted to cut through this lengthy spiel by asking if he had invested any of his own money in the club, and he replied by saying he refused to go there. He then told him Liverpool was falling behind the other big clubs, which Gillett utterly refuted.

  ‘What are you talking about? We have more cash flow than they do. You want a bigger stadium and if we could figure how to do it I would have done it yesterday. Not going to use our own capital because that is not the way a smart investment occurs for this club.

  ‘Look at Roman Abramovich; he is massively wealthy. He didn’t put his own money in. He used loans to borrow the money from Russian banks, and that’s why he’s in so much trouble.

  ‘We have put £128 million in to buy players on top of what’s come in in the last eighteen months. The media write about it, they criticise us relative to United and Arsenal, but we’re putting more money in than they are. Let’s focus on one set of challenges. When I was in Spain trying to understand the economics of those clubs I realised that they spend crazily every five years and get bailed out. It’s now in its third cycle and it’s not going to happen here to have the government step in. That’s a model that’s difficult to compete with on a short-term basis. That money is all borrowed from the government. We will give Rafa enough that through his genius we hope to be competitive.’