An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  ‘He started swearing about the Yanks. I was thinking, “This is an act and I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

  ‘Every question we asked he’d say “fantastic question”. I was thinking, “Stop being condescending.” I got the impression he looked around the room and thought these are a bunch of fairly militant lads who haven’t got great jobs.’

  Fellow SOS committee member Paul Rice said: ‘When he was given that Liverpool job he was like the kid who got the keys to the sweet shop. He completely undermined the office of the manager, far more than Rick Parry did. He interfered in transfer policy, took part in the plot to unseat Benitez then landed us with a new manager.

  ‘If he’d have kept to the financial side, the role he was brought in for, there wouldn’t have been a problem but he overstepped the mark and started playing Football Manager with Liverpool FC.’

  An Anfield source who advised Purslow how to handle the SOS meeting said he warned him there would be no such thing as ‘off the record’ and he should choose his words carefully. But he proceeded to tell the fans what he thought: he hated Hicks and Gillett and it was his aim to get them out.

  ‘If you get it wrong first time with Scousers you’re knackered,’ said the source. ‘Christian didn’t get it wrong he actually said what he felt, that he agreed with the fans that the Yanks were bastards and he wanted them out. His crime was to ask if he could change the minutes, but was that really such a crime when he is on the board of directors, and the club’s MD, and can’t be seen to be slagging his bosses off to the fans?’

  Whatever the rights or wrongs, from then on the newly christened Sons Of Strikers viewed Purslow as the enemy. Or Cecil as he became known due to his middle name – there is still a Cecil Purslow twitter page out there with his head superimposed, Blackadder-style, on the body of a World War One general.

  ‘They undoubtedly hated him because he was posh,’ said the Anfield source close to Purslow, ‘but that whole Cecil thing summed up how much he was misunderstood. The implication was here was Cecil, a Little Lord Fauntleroy figure born with a canteen of silver cutlery in his mouth. The truth was he was named after his uncle Cecil, an electrician who worked on the docks and who died of cancer, aged twenty-three, the same year Christian was born.’

  The perception of many hard-core fans was that Purslow was a Hicks and Gillett stooge who would keep on propping them up in return for living his childhood dream by sitting in the dressing room alongside Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, even though events would prove the first part of that observation to be patently wrong. Tony Evans wrote that people at Anfield had nicknamed him ‘Forrest Gump’ due to his uncanny ability to put himself at the centre of every major event. You could see where he was coming from. At one point the players took bets with each other over who he would put his arm around first, after a game. Purslow had briefed ITV’s touchline reporter about a Steven Gerrard injury after his half-time visit to the dressing room, and Sky bagged an interview with him after a draw with Lyon put Liverpool out of the Champions League.

  ‘He came in to raise £100 million and he couldn’t do it,’ said Evans. ‘He thought he was cleverer than anyone else in football and he’d be able to run rings round them but it turned out he didn’t have a clue.

  ‘I found it unbelievable that a man who was brought in to raise capital could end up firing and hiring managers, selling and buying players. He thought he knew it all.

  ‘He thought he could pick players better than Rafa, he could manage better than Rafa. I told him it was wrong for a managing director to go into the dressing room and he answered, “No, it’s my job to pick the players up.” I said, “No it’s not, it’s the manager’s job.” Here was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time making big decisions.

  ‘The best I can say for him is when it came to the vote which sold the club to NESV he voted in the right direction.’

  One journalist who changed his mind about Purslow after taking an instant dislike to him was The Times’ Tony Barrett: ‘I once stormed out of a briefing he was giving because I thought he was contradicting himself with every sentence. To be fair to him he could have thought, “That’s an insult, sod you,” but he rang and told me I had to trust him. He said the Yanks didn’t know this but he was operating behind enemy lines. And to be fair, in the end, he was proved right. He delivered on that promise. If only he’d kept out of the football side of things that he was totally unqualified to dabble in, Purslow could have been a hero.’

  The criticism hurt Purslow, especially when a banner appeared at the front of the Kop bearing his face next to Hicks, Gillett and Martin Broughton, under the words: ‘Four riders of the apocalypse’.

  ‘That was outrageous and so, so wrong, as was proved at the end when the Americans tried to sack him from the board,’ said his Anfield ally. ‘He probably was a bit star-struck at first, which was why he got close to the players, but he felt after the Parry years they might be glad of some encouragement from above.

  ‘What clearly wound people up is that he’s an enormously intelligent, multilingual, multimillionaire, Cambridge scholar and Harvard graduate who has been hugely successful in business and was trying to save his football club, not for money but for love.’

  There is no doubt that many people at Anfield believed the managing director thought too highly of himself. At its heart Liverpool is still a modest, self-deprecating club. So anyone saying to a Scouse member of staff who queried one of his decisions, as Purslow did, ‘This is a world you don’t understand. This is business and in business I am Fernando Torres,’ is going to struggle on the popularity front.

  The 2009–10 season started badly, with two defeats by Spurs and Aston Villa in the first three games, and never recovered. With five league losses before the clocks went back, Kopites knew in October that the push-on from second to first was never going to happen. In fact the way they were playing and the way their luck was panning out (you only have to think of that superb match-winner by the Sunderland beach ball) it was clear they faced a major battle for Champions League qualification. And so it proved. They were only in the top four places for one week out of the final twenty and ended up limping in in seventh, their worst finish for eleven years.

  For once there was no Champions League progress to mask Benitez’s domestic failure as his side never looked like making it out of a relatively straightforward group containing Debrecen, Lyon and Fiorentina. The lack of depth in the squad was the most worrying aspect of the decline. Aquilani got close to fitness by the end of October but it was clear he was too lightweight for English football and when Torres was injured all goal threat disappeared because the only back-up strikers available were young David N’Gog, porn-star lookalike Andriy Voronin, and the perennially under-achieving Ryan Babel. It was as though without Xabi Alonso, the purring Ferrari of the previous season had lost its engine and become a spluttering old Lada.

  The media smelt blood and intensified the attacks on Benitez, pulling apart his transfer dealings and questioning his mental health. When he offered a ‘guarantee’ of a top four finish, obituaries were being written and filed away for the following May.

  Rafa didn’t look great. He was white and gaunt through too much worry and too little sleep, he picked up infections and coughs and kept coming out in cold sweats. When friends told him how awful he looked, he’d invent stories about his daughters waking him up. The truth was Liverpool’s decline was eating him up and as a result he would stay up all night devising ways of outflanking his growing army of enemies. He was playing Stratego again, but with far more at stake.

  The pressure affected his wife Montse too. She loved living in their Caldy home on Wirral, and had no desire to move back to Spain, or anywhere else for that matter. She would break down in tears at parties when asked about her future. She would sit in the directors’ box at games rubbing rosary beads between her fingers, praying throughout the final half-hour of a game for victory. All so the pressure would be eased on h
er husband.

  Apart from hard-core fans who still idolised him for the European glory he had brought to the club, and who saw him as the most potent anti-Hicks and Gillett symbol, Benitez was now dangerously short of allies.

  As the Americans fought to stop their empires crumbling back home they were more and more distant from the club, meaning Hicks was never there to offer his hypocritical support. Members of the League Managers Association hated Benitez for not crawling up Alex Ferguson’s backside with them and former players openly questioned his managerial ability (my favourite being Graeme Souness, whose thirty-six wins in eighty-three at Newcastle set him on course for the JobCentre and the Toon on course for the Championship). The national press was slaughtering him and an increasing number of fans decided they could no longer stay loyal. Worst of all, he had alienated key sections of his playing squad.

  Footballers can change loyalties from team-sheet to team-sheet and many switched allegiances for or against Benitez on a regular basis, but throughout his final season the dressing room was nearly always split between those who had no time at all for him, and those who did. This breakdown in respect boiled down to the fact that he was having too many fights on too many fronts. He was too distracted with what was happening off the pitch. He became too obsessed with the politics of the club, which was understandable when virtually every match day he would be wheeled out before different prospective owners, the vast majority of whom were simply there on non-serious ego-trips. He took his eye off the ball, forgot what he did so brilliantly, and the players could smell it.

  Meanwhile, he and Purslow were at war, briefing and leaking against each other and cooperating as little as possible. Whenever Benitez tried to take the fight to him by demanding clear-the-air meetings, he would be told, ‘We’ve got investors coming in and we can’t afford to be seen to be fighting. RBS needs stability.’ So he would bite his tongue and help sell the cunning masterplan for world domination to another group of sheikhs.

  The problem was most of the sheikhs, American, and Far East groups were fake, and those who weren’t baulked at the unrealistic asking price. The only genuinely serious offer to materialise came in April 2010 from New York-based private equity firm the Rhone Group. They offered £118 million for 40 per cent of the club, meaning they would take control and Hicks and Gillett would become sleeping partners with 30 per cent equity each. Rhone also pledged to put an extra £25 million on top of the annual budget for transfers that summer. Purslow had brought his £100 million to the table, and sold it to the owners on the grounds that when Rhone paid down the debt and financed the new stadium, the club’s stock – and thus their 30 per cent stake – would soar, meaning they would finally make the profit they so coveted.

  Within hours of the offer being made, Hicks’s favourite TV reporter Alan Myers was on Sky Sports News saying the owners would be turning it down. It was to be a fatal mistake. An incandescent Royal Bank of Scotland decided the days of bluff and counter-bluff were over and they were calling in their loan. They had always worried about the backlash from allowing a national sporting institution like Liverpool to go to the wall (although not that much that they stopped bleeding the institution dry with interest payments) and now feared that was where the Americans were taking it.

  So they told Hicks and Gillett that they’d had enough. They agreed to give them one last six-month extension of the loan (with severe financial penalties imposed) in return for them appointing an independent chairman to sell the club and reconstitute the board so it was made up of Hicks, Gillett, Purslow and Ayre, with the chairman having the casting vote. It meant if the new chairman sided with Purslow and Ayre on a sale of the club, the Americans, despite being the owners, were effectively passive shareholders.

  Former Citibank big cheese Michael Klein, a friend of Tom Hicks’s, suggested British Airways chairman Martin Broughton, and RBS approved it. Hicks believed he had pulled off another coup by keeping the banks from his door in return for approving some stuffy, old school London toff he would be able to manipulate with ease. So buoyed was Hicks by the situation he predicted he would sell the club for £800 million, making ‘three or four times our money’.

  The 64-year-old Texan was losing his touch and showing his age. Beneath the gentlemanly manners, public school charm and floppy hair, Broughton was a hard-nosed operator. Inside the silk glove, the former CBI president packed a steel knuckleduster. He was well up for earning a £500,000 cheque for selling Liverpool, and having such a prestigious addition to his CV, but he was never going to be anyone’s patsy. The stark reality was that when Hicks signed up to the new board arrangements, he signed away all of his power.

  The day after the twenty-first Hillsborough anniversary, Broughton was officially appointed as the new independent chairman, with Barclays Capital replacing Rothschild and Merrill Lynch (Hicks and Gillett’s previous choice of bankers) to conduct the search for new investment. RBS shot down fans’ criticism of the refinancing by saying it was the only way forward for the club, as it gave them stability while trying to find a new buyer. The alternative would have been a summer fire-sale of key assets such as Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard, because their previous arrangement with Hicks and Gillett meant they had to reduce the club’s £237 million debt by £100 million before July.

  Naturally, there were some choice comedy quotes from Waldorf and Statler, as they let it be known they wouldn’t be setting foot in Anfield again. In a joint statement (a joke in itself) they said:

  Owning Liverpool Football Club over these past three years has been a rewarding and exciting experience for us and our families, [making them the only families in the world who actually enjoy being escorted by police outriders away from Anfield in blacked-out cars as a raging mob tries to get at them.]

  Having grown the Club this far we have now decided together to look to sell the Club to owners committed to take the Club through its next level of growth and development. We are delighted that Martin Broughton has agreed to take the position of Chairman, working alongside the club’s excellent senior management team. Martin is a distinguished business leader of excellent judgment and with a great reputation. He is a genuine football supporter and will seek to oversee the sales process in the best interests of the Club and its supporters.

  Within six months they would be asking a Dallas court to jail Broughton on the grounds that he had stolen the club from them.

  Initially there was suspicion about Broughton at Anfield, even among fellow board members Purslow and Ayre. With his Sir Humphrey Bufton-Tufton persona he seemed about as at home around the fields of Anfield Road as an Eskimo would at the equator; he was a committed Chelsea fan and he’d been recommended by one of Hicks’s business buddies. But they knew, once he grasped the truth of the Liverpool horror show, that if he had any decency about him, he would feel compelled to do the right thing, if only for the sake of his own reputation.

  And what a horror show it was as the season staggered towards its death. The fourth Champions League spot had been lost, Fernando Torres had done his knee in after setting up a Europa League semi-final showdown with his old club Atletico Madrid, and stories about Benitez’s agent holding talks with Juventus were all over the back pages.

  Fans looking for a chink of light to brighten these darkest of days could only find it in the season’s final game, as Chelsea won 2–0 at Anfield to stop Manchester United taking their nineteenth title. It said it all. Liverpudlians were quite happy to surrender to the detested Cockney Rent Boys, and take their nineteenth defeat in a season they hoped would bring them their nineteenth title, so long as it denied United.

  ‘You’re ancient history … you’re ancient history,’ taunted the triumphant Chelsea fans, with Kopites lacking either the will or the evidence to disagree.

  The end-of-season lap of honour was surely the most excruciating any set of Liverpool players had had to endure. It was difficult to work out who was the more embarrassed, the players or the fans who’d stayed behind.
It had been a devastatingly disappointing season, with anyone emotionally tied to the club left feeling battered and drained. All you wanted to do was forget about the whole horrible mess for a few months, but the chances of that happening were zero. The future of the club’s ownership, star players and manager would dominate the summer. Starting with the manager.

  Benitez’s body language as he acknowledged the Kop chanting his name during the lap of honour, was similar to Xabi Alonso’s a year before. He knew and we knew this was goodbye. In fact he’d suspected as early as January when he was told he couldn’t spend the money he was bringing in for selling Andriy Voronin and Andrea Dossena, that his time was up.

  The distance his new chairman was keeping from him only confirmed those suspicions. Broughton didn’t introduce himself by phone or email when he was appointed, and made a tentative agreement through a third party to meet Benitez after his first home game in charge, but headed straight back to London.

  Liverpool’s senior management were now convinced that Benitez’s outspoken nature could lose them prospective buyers if he was still at Anfield during any delicate future sale. Within days of taking over, the new chairman realised his first job would be easing out his manager as cheaply and cleanly as possible.

  It was made easier by the fact that Benitez had no allies left on the board, and by his own erratic behaviour. Three meetings were eventually set up between him, Purslow and Broughton, and three times Benitez cancelled at the last minute. Rafa claimed they were scheduled at ridiculous times, almost inviting him to cancel, Purslow claimed vindication for all he’d told Broughton.