An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  Yours faithfully,

  David Moores

  Friends of his say it was an emotional but cathartic process for Moores which allowed him to say things that he couldn’t say before. Many fans refused to read it and plenty of those who did struggled to get all the way through it. Richie Pedder, the chairman of Liverpool’s supporters club, gave the press a comment which probably summed up the view of the vast majority: ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but Moores and Parry should have done their homework, and they didn’t.’

  The Guardian ran an opinion poll on its website asking if Liverpool fans now felt sympathy for Moores: 18 per cent said Yes; 82 per cent said No. Comments underneath ranged from ‘It’s time we gave him a break and moved on’ and ‘You can’t doubt his love for the club’ to ‘This bleeding heart letter is beyond Krusty The Klown’ and ‘You were a clueless owner. I just hope you enjoyed your £88 million.’

  To most Reds it didn’t change much. They were pleased he had finally broken his silence and begged the Americans to leave, and the greater insight into the reluctance of DIC to commit themselves earned him some sympathy. But the big, stupid mistake still stared them in the face. Moores had allowed Gillett to vouch for his business partner and they took his word. Moores looked into their eyes and asked them to promise they wouldn’t put the debt on the club and he fell for their act.

  So he may not have been greedy, but he was greener than a plastic Paddy with a leprechaun’s hat and a Guinness shillelagh in Flanagans’ Apple pub on St Patrick’s Day.

  The timing may have left Moores feeling better, in so far as no one could say he had wrecked the season, but that had been wrecked months before and Liverpudlians were heading for an all-time low. Rafa Benitez was on the brink of leaving, Jose Mourinho was making noises about finally landing Steven Gerrard, and Fernando Torres and Javier Mascherano headed off to a World Cup refusing to guarantee they would be around next season.

  As Liverpool had staggered over the Premier League finishing line in seventh place, missing out on Champions League football and its money, many fans said they couldn’t blame either for heading to Spain. Liverpool had just paid £40 million in interest loaded on by American owners who were in deep trouble back home with Hicks filing for bankruptcy protection and trying to sell his baseball team, the Texas Rangers. So maybe it wasn’t the best of moments for the man who helped put them in that dark place to paint himself as a victim.

  His sympathy-seeking line about how hard it had been sitting on the sidelines as the club he loved suffered one blow after another, did not go down well among the real victims who felt distraught and battered by the state of Liverpool. Victims who didn’t have an £88 million cheque to soften the blow. And the least he could have done in a 3,000-word attempt at self-justification was use the one word Liverpudlians wanted to hear above all: Sorry. He didn’t.

  Tony Evans though believed his sorrow and pain shone throughout the letter with his personal devastation plain for all to see. ‘I feel for him in many ways. The truth is Moores was no better or worse than most other chairmen or owners but at a time when he needed to be surrounded by dynamic people with intelligence and vision he wasn’t,’ said Evans.

  ‘The people around him told him the club had to be sold if it was going to move forward and he believed it. And it was crap. He listened so he’s got to take responsibility for it, but he’s not the only one. Had there been a chief executive with a bit of gumption none of this would have happened. That’s not to excuse Moores but it’s true. The sale was just a symptom of a bigger malaise at the club.’

  When David Moores stepped down from Liverpool’s board he barred himself from going to the place he loved more than any other on earth, staying at home to nurse a broken heart. In that respect he was similar to Bill Shankly, and like the great man, he knew there was no one to blame but himself. That broken heart eventually killed Shankly, and as much as I’ve had my run-ins and vented my fury at Moores, I don’t want history to repeat itself. Cut him to the core and he is a genuine Liverpool man. I hope one day he feels relaxed enough to return to Anfield. If he does it would be a potent symbol that the civil war is an historical footnote, hope has replaced despair and the good times are back.

  For all his faults and mistakes, Moores deserves to enjoy them as much as any other Liverpudlian.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘This is business and in business I am Fernando Torres’

  – Christian Purslow

  When Rafa Benitez was growing up in 1970s Madrid he would while away his spare time brooding over a military board game called Stratego. So often did he engage in this test of martial skills and battlefield leadership, and so obsessed did he become at improving his performance, by the time he reached adulthood he was convinced there was no better Stratego player in the world. An opinion he shared, unprompted, with baffled journalists at a press conference en route to winning the 2005 Champions League.

  The point he was making was that he may not have had the best team in Europe – he didn’t even have the best team in the Liverpool postcode of L4 that season – but he had the best strategies. A boast that was proved to be correct. How else do you explain winning a European Cup with djivin’ Djimi Traore, Igor Biscan, Milan Baros and the star of more Casualty episodes than Charlie Fairhead, Harry Kewell?

  However, in the summer of 2009 Benitez’s Stratego skills would be put to the test on several occasions, and through all of them he would be outmanoeuvred and left licking increasingly gaping wounds. After missing out on the Premier League by four points (or was it two deflections by Man United’s Federico Macheda), Benitez knew expectations of delivering the title the following season would be colossal. But still he felt relaxed about the task.

  His analysis was that Chelsea were on the wane because Roman Abramovich had turned off the rouble tap, United would lose Cristiano Ronaldo and become too reliant on ageing players like Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, and Arsenal were, as they always were, a work in progress. He was telling people that if he could keep what he had and bring in a couple of attacking players to turn the draws into wins, Liverpool were set fair for their best title-challenge in twenty years. All he would need, he said, was a perfect summer in the transfer market. Sadly, it ended up as far away from perfection as the results of the Bride of Wildenstein’s plastic surgery work.

  On the last game of the season Xabi Alonso, who had felt undermined by Benitez’s attempts the previous summer to sell him and bring in Gareth Barry, told him he was leaving. His agent followed that up by telling him he was off to Real Madrid.

  Javier Mascherano was pushing for a move too, and Benitez sensed one of them would get away. Alonso had only two years left on his contract, Madrid were once again awash with cash, so he calculated if he got £35 million from them he would take it, hold on to Mascherano, bring in Barry and have a tidy profit to add to the £15 million transfer kitty he’d been promised by the owners.

  In his head the Barry move would be a doddle. He was convinced after all the spadework he’d put in the previous summer that Barry’s heart was set on Anfield and Aston Villa were resigned to losing him, so he had plenty of scope to play hard-ball. When he lodged a £7 million bid they told him it was an insult, claiming he knew the asking price was £12 million. When he came back in again with an extra million he was informed (with much pleasure) that Manchester City had bid the full £12 million and Barry was holding talks with them. Actually City didn’t so much talk to him as lay an annual salary figure below his startled eyes and hand him a pen.

  Benitez was stunned. He had told Alonso’s agent he could move to Madrid if they came up with the right fee, so he was now potentially missing a key midfield player plus his replacement. His entire summer transfer strategy was in chaos.

  Having lost an English international to the up-and-coming, money-no-object, Abu Dhabi-run Manchester City, Benitez told the board that if they lost another one to them, the perception would be that Liverpool were no longer a top four team
with clout and may as well wrap up their Champions League spot with a light-blue bow and send it down the M62 to Eastlands.

  When both clubs made a move for Glen Johnson, Benitez was determined not to lose out again. The result was he paid £17.5 million, and wages of £100,000 a week, for a full-back who struggled as a defender. Meanwhile, Real Madrid snapped up Alvaro Arbeloa for a piddling £3.5 million.

  The perfect summer was shaping up to be a poor one until chief scout Eduardo suggested the ideal replacement for Xabi Alonso, and it became bleaker than a fortnight spent in an Anglesey caravan, with the rain continually dancing off the roof and the entire family struck down by swine flu. Alberto Aquilani was not only injured (and would stay so for the first two months of the season) but he was also totally unsuited to the rigours of the Premier League, and at £18 million became arguably Benitez’s worst piece of business.

  Actually Aquilani wasn’t his worst piece of business, Eduardo was; the scout he brought in from Spain in 2006 who failed to unearth any unknown gems from his homeland, and whose knowledge of Italian football can be summed up with the words Andrea Dossena. Or Alberto Aquilani.

  There then followed a defining moment which would cast doubt not only on Liverpool’s ability to challenge for next season’s title, but possibly for years to come. Benitez, through his contacts in Madrid, believed Real were prepared to pay up to £35 million for Alonso, because they had earmarked him as a vital cog in their new Galactico set-up. When the price reached £30 million and Benitez refused to budge he was told that the club was accepting it because the money was needed to meet the crippling interest payments.

  There was now no pretence. The Royal Bank of Scotland was effectively in charge at Anfield and looking for its money back. It felt like the club was in a form of unofficial administration, its professional negotiators being told how far they could go by bankers.

  Former player John Aldridge, who has supported the Reds since he was a kid growing up in Garston in the 1960s, views this moment as the lowest in Hicks’s and Gillett’s reign: ‘That was when the shit really hit the fan. I knew when players were going out and the money wasn’t getting spent that the game was up, because something similar happened to me when I was managing Tranmere.

  ‘Suddenly the owners were robbing Peter to pay Paul. When Real Madrid buy a player off you they give you the cheque in full. So that summer £30 million came in for Alonso and £3.5 million for Arbeloa. That’s the best part of £35 million going straight from Real Madrid to the bank. Yet when they bought Aquilani it was on the never-never, meaning the money from player sales was servicing the debt.’

  If being outflanked by the banks was bad enough for Benitez, things were about to get markedly worse. With fringe players, and a legend in Sami Hyypia, being sold, he believed he had more or less balanced the books, with still enough left to bring in a striker (especially as the money he received back from selling Robbie Keane had not been invested) and a centre-half. His targets were Fiorentina’s Stevan Jovetic and West Ham’s Matthew Upson.

  As a bid was prepared for Jovetic, Benitez was told he didn’t have the money. The rules had changed without his knowledge. The cost of all the new contracts awarded to Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres, Dirk Kuyt and Daniel Agger now formed part of his budget, as did the payments which were still being made for players signed in previous windows. The bottom line was all he had left in his kitty was £1.5 million – the price of a Sotirios Kyrgiakos.

  The king of Stratego had been outmanoeuvred to a monumentally embarrassing and barely credible degree. When asked a year later why Liverpool slipped from second in the Premier League to seventh, Benitez would reply, ‘Christian Purslow’. The troubled Spaniard had found his new nemesis.

  Purslow appeared to meet every criteria as a replacement for Rick Parry – the yin to Parry’s yang. Here was an extremely successful businessman (his MidOcean Partners private equity firm had made him millions through buying and selling companies like Center Parks), a lifelong Red and season-ticket holder who spoke fluent Spanish and had already been involved with the club as an adviser to Steve Morgan’s buyout team back in 2004. The 46-year-old was a Cambridge and Harvard Business School graduate, was passionate and energetic and had a brain the size of Jan Molby’s arse. He was also friendly with Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester.

  By the summer of 2009 RBS was running out of patience with Hicks and Gillett. Although they were still making a tidy profit out of the interest repayments they wanted their money back, preferably with the Americans gone, as the loathing the nation felt for these bailed-out bankers had shifted up a few notches on Merseyside. PR-wise, Hicks and Gillett stank.

  Hester more or less told the Americans they had to take Purslow on and allow him to sell the club or bring in new equity to pay down the loan. So although Hicks and Gillett didn’t make Purslow their new managing director, they were forced to rubber-stamp his appointment.

  His remit was to sort out the ownership problem in whatever way he could. With a global credit crunch, owners who loathed the sight of each other and were suspicious of Purslow, and half the Middle East refusing to deal with them, that was never going to be easy.

  From early days Purslow was telling people that Hicks and Gillett were the worst type of leverage buyout merchants imaginable, because they refused to put their own money in. Virtually all of it was borrowed. He also believed their £800 million valuation of the club was so ridiculously high that no one would come in for it. Which was what he felt Hicks in particular wanted. He believed the Texan’s plan was to keep refinancing the loan until, at some magical future point, a mug would give them £800 million, they could pay off the banks and pocket £300 million each.

  Purslow’s appointment in June 2009 was warmly welcomed even among people who would go on to be his most savage critics. At least with his enemy Parry out of the way, went the thinking, Benitez would stop all the politicking and concentrate on that final push to a nineteenth League title.

  At first things went well. Purslow was far more communicative than Parry had been with Benitez, and was instrumental in giving him his new contract, but the honeymoon didn’t even survive the summer. When Benitez was told he had spent all of his transfer kitty, had to keep schtum and get on with it, the battle-lines were drawn. The dynamics of the Anfield civil war were shifting yet again. Purslow had merely replaced Parry as the man who was killing Rafa.

  Months after Benitez left Liverpool, during a press conference before his Inter Milan side played Tottenham, he was asked to explain why Liverpool ended up falling out of the Champions League places in 2010, and he gave an answer which made Eric Cantona’s seagulls and trawlers speech seem perfectly sane:

  ‘We have a saying in Spanish, which is “white liquid in a bottle has to be milk”. What does this mean? It means that after eighty-six points and finishing second in the League, what changed?

  ‘The Americans, they chose a new managing director and everything changed. The managing director is involved in all the decisions: new lawyer, new chief of press, new manager, nine new players, new medical staff, and new fitness coaches – they changed everything. They changed the managing director who was talking with some players, and they changed everything that we were doing in the past.

  ‘So, if you want to ask again what was going on, it’s simple: they changed something and, at the end, they changed everything. So, white liquid in a bottle: milk. You will know who is to blame.’

  Reporters looked even more baffled than they had been at his Stratego press conference five years earlier, and one asked him if he could explain the milk analogy. He replied: ‘White liquid in a bottle. If I see John the milkman in the Wirral, where I was living, with this bottle, I’d say, “It’s milk, sure.” John the milkman’s priceless response to the bizarre outburst was, ‘Rafa was a very good customer. Just three bottles of semi-skimmed. They didn’t have to be placed on his step zonally or anything.’

  Journalists who fronted Purslow a
bout the changing of the transfer rules that summer were told there had been no change, just a long overdue ordering of affairs. He had simply introduced something called a Players’ Account, which incorporated agents’ fees and improved contracts. But the club’s former CEO was telling any journalist who would listen that this was something new. Even Rick Parry believed Rafa had been shafted.

  An ally of Purslow’s at the club said there were two reasons why his relationship with Benitez began to unravel: ‘For the first time Rafa was being held to account financially over the players’ budget and for the first time someone was chipping away at his omnipotence.

  ‘One of the criticisms of Christian was that he had only been brought in to drum up finance, not make wider decisions, but that’s nonsense. He was the managing director, or the CEO, and therefore he ran the club, especially with Hicks and Gillett hardly ever there. He made a mistake when he joined by saying he had been brought in to sell the club because he was actually brought in to run it. That was slightly naive and it came back to haunt him.’

  There were other moments of naivety too. Notably his meeting with the Spirit Of Shankly when they taped the conversation and asked for his approval of the minutes so they could release it to their members. Purslow had been far more frank about the owners than he intended, and asked if they could agree an edited version of the minutes. The SOS refused and printed them anyway. He instantly cut off all dealings with them and began referring to them as Sons Of Strikers.

  Peter Hooton went to the meeting with an open mind, especially after Ian Ayre had told the group that it would be in their interests to give Purslow a chance. ‘His whole demeanour was patronising from the start. His persona was all about “I don’t need to be doing this job. I’m only here for the benefit of Liverpool.” It seemed like he was thinking “I’ll try to get down to their level.”