An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

The third cancellation, on the day after Atletico Madrid knocked Liverpool out of the Europa League semi-final, genuinely shocked Broughton. He could not understand how an employee had reached a position in a company where he could be allowed to treat board members in such a way. When he eventually ordered Benitez to a meeting in London there was only one intention on his mind and the fact that Rafa had alerted his employment lawyers meant he knew what it was.

  There was more than one meeting and there was more than one version of events.

  At the first one Benitez insisted Purslow leave the room before reading out a long list of notes containing every instance in which he believed the managing director had undermined him.

  At a second meeting he told Broughton he could turn things around in the summer, even if big names left, so long as they could assure him he would be allowed to reinvest all of the money. No such assurances were given. It was a cat-and-mouse operation, with hints being dropped about how attractive that Juventus job was, and Broughton diplomatically trying to make Rafa agree that both knew why they were having these talks, so let’s stop dancing around legal handbags and get to the point. We’re splitting up.

  In the end Benitez told Broughton and Purslow he was taking his family on a half-term break to Sardinia but he’d like to carry on talks when he got back. No sooner had he hit his sun lounger than he realised the unworkable situation was wreaking too much damage on the club, and instructed his agent to negotiate a pay-off.

  On 3 June his exit was officially announced with Benitez putting out a statement which read:

  It is very sad for me to announce that I will no longer be manager of Liverpool FC. I would like to thank all of the staff and players for their efforts.

  I’ll always keep in my heart the good times I’ve had here, the strong and loyal support of the fans in the tough times and the love from Liverpool. I have no words to thank you enough for all these years and I am very proud to say that I was your manager. Thank you so much once more and always remember: You’ll never walk alone.

  He made the right decision for himself, his family, the club and the many supporters who had stayed loyal to him but who were now happy to see him put out of his misery. His position had become untenable. Had he refused to go Benitez would have become increasingly paranoid and frustrated, and he never would have survived the medium-term. A clean break was best for all.

  His last email exchange with the Americans had come in the April when he emailed Hicks (cc-ing Gillett out of courtesy) enquiring about his summer budget. Hicks told him he couldn’t give him a figure because they were looking for new investors and he wouldn’t be able to tell him until new money came in. Gillett’s was characteristically quirky. A one-liner to the effect of: ‘As always we are fully supportive of every Liverpool employee and will continue to be so.’

  When his departure was announced, neither got in touch with the only Liverpool manager they’d ever had to thank him for his efforts and wish him well. It says a lot about them. As it does about Rick Parry, who sent his old enemy a text saying, ‘Thanks for all you did at Liverpool. Good luck for the future.’ Rafa texted back: ‘I fear for our club.’ Parry replied: ‘I fear you’re right.’

  Rafa’s parting memory of Purslow was being hastily pursued out of the final meeting by him, being looked in the eyes and told: ‘I would be so upset if you thought this were personal.’ Benitez laughed at that one, and realised that his constant battle to be rid of Parry was a classic case of being careful what you wish for.

  When he returned from holiday people were turning up at his Wirral home in tears, hugging him, Montse and the girls, thanking them and leaving gifts. When his pay-off was sorted he gave £96,000 to the Hillsborough Family Support Group, and hefty donations to other charities such as the Rhys Jones Memorial Fund and a Hoylake care home.

  Benitez would eventually hear his name mentioned by Hicks four months later when the club was sold and the Texan did his last Sky News propaganda film. The real people to blame for Liverpool’s fall from grace, said the Texan, were Benitez and the fans who became internet terrorists.

  ‘Rafa lost the club. We didn’t finish at the top – that’s not the fault of the owners, we spent good money. Rafa has to take accountability for his own results.’

  Since that Athens press conference in 2007 Hicks had never stopped detesting Benitez, even when he was pretending they were happy bedfellows. He hated him because he could never sack him due to the love fans felt for the Spaniard, and the loathing they felt for him. These were business currencies he had never before had to deal in, and it blew his very large cranium.

  That was another reason, set alongside those many glorious European nights that restored Liverpool to its place as one of the most feared and respected teams in world football, for declaring that Rafael Benitez was a true Liverpudlian legend.

  And always will be.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘You do know that you crashed the entire Blackstone/GSO system don’t you?’

  – Wall Street Journal reporter David Enrich

  As sobering news bulletins go, this one came straight from the Head of Reformed Alcoholics at the Salvation Army’s top drying-out clinic.

  ‘Italian treble winners Inter Milan have just announced Rafa Benitez as their next manager,’ said the Sky News anchorette on Wednesday, 9 June. ‘Meanwhile Harry Redknapp has distanced himself from stories linking him to the vacant Liverpool job.’

  Now here was a reality check. The newly crowned European Champions were saying, ‘We’d like to take your manager off you, if you don’t want him, Liverpool’, while the London media’s favourite Cockney uncle who had won one major trophy in a twenty-seven-year managerial career (the FA Cup, against mighty Cardiff City) was saying, ‘What? Me go to Anfield? Leave it out, my son.’

  Not that Liverpool had a reality many felt like checking. The preferred fantasy manager option, Jose Mourinho, had gone to Real Madrid and the preferred fantasy but at least attainable option, Guus Hiddinck, swiftly let it be known he wasn’t interested. In fact the only man to openly tout for the job at this stage was Sven Goran Eriksson, who was so keen he broke a career-long silence on his tribal loyalty to say he had been a Liverpool fan all his life. Sadly, few people in Liverpool knew anyone who’d ever been a Sven fan.

  The Liverpool board (seeing itself as being back in old-fashioned Liverpool Way mode) made the expected diplomatic noises about taking its time to ensure it found the right man to take the club to the next level etc, etc. But in truth they had more or less decided that man was Roy Hodgson, and it wasn’t the next level they were after. More a decibel level in the manager’s office that was low enough to allow them to get on with the real job in hand: selling the club. Hodgson was safe, Establishment, League Managers’ Association aristocracy who would toe the party line and play the white man. He was also relatively cheap, would take a short contract and not demand to bring in a huge backroom staff. Plus Danny Murphy had told the players who matter that Roy had done a terrific job at Fulham, and was a gentleman to deal with, so he was a shoo-in. That wasn’t how Kenny Dalglish and many fans saw it though and with hindsight they were spot on.

  It was fitting that the lie about harmony breaking out all over Anfield once Benitez had left should be exposed so risibly and so quickly. Kenny Dalglish, the man Christian Purslow and Martin Broughton asked to help sift through the managerial shortlist (but really to give a selection panel containing non-football men some credibility) took one look at it and decided the most suitable candidate was not on that list. The candidate’s name? Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish.

  Even worse, he told a journalist of his feelings and thus the news that Liverpool had appointed a headhunter who effectively said, ‘None of these are worth hunting, so hunt me,’ wrote itself into the public domain. Dalglish was immediately slapped down by the board, being told to his face, ‘We can’t let you do this, Kenny, because we don’t want you to put in jeopardy your iconic status as the club’s number
one legend,’ and, ‘We envisage an Academy/ambassadorial role for you which will far outlast any manager.’

  But the briefings behind his back were more frank. How long had he been out of the game? Where was the evidence he could handle the pressure these days if he couldn’t handle it twenty years ago? We’re not sure what he’s supposed to be doing to earn his club salary now, so what confidence could we have in him earning it by doing twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks as manager?

  Seven months later, as Liverpool lurched from one miserable defeat to another, and the fans were chanting ‘Hodgson For England’ followed by Dalglish’s name, the club would be forced to send an embarrassing distress call to a cruise ship in the Persian Gulf begging the Prodigal Son to return and save their season.

  Liverpudlians let out a collective scream of relief and joy that January Saturday morning, on the eve of the FA Cup third round tie at Old Trafford. Not just because Roy Hodgson had gone but because it meant that the only major player left from the Hicks and Gillett era was Ian Ayre. Who was one of us. With Kenny back, it felt as though your dad, who had run away to sea many years before, allowing your mum to let a string of undesirables into her bed, had returned to tell every outsider to sling their hook.

  But back in June there had been no mass campaign to reinstate Dalglish following Benitez’s exit. There was no huge appetite among fans to see the 59-year-old legend step back into the dugout for the long haul. Most wanted a young but experienced European coach like Didier Deschamps to come to Anfield and establish himself as the next Jose Mourinho. However, when it came to choosing between a safe Roy Hodgson and a king called Kenny, the majority instinctively sided with the monarch. It partly explains why, with Dalglish employed at the club and hovering around in the background, Hodgson was doomed from the outset.

  As often happens to club legends, they are useful to those who will never attain a fraction of their status. Cynics suggested that Purslow was happy to keep Dalglish close by to protect him from growing anger that a City figure who had been brought in to raise £100 million investment was now sacking and appointing managers.

  To be fair to Purslow, he hadn’t been the only Anfield Civil War general to involve King Kenny in the hostilities. When Rafa Benitez brought Dalglish back to the club it wasn’t just to help develop the young talent. It was in the hope he would persuade some of the ranting ex-players to get off his back, and that he might become a big hitter in Premier League and FA circles, taking on the many vested interests which had coasted past Liverpool. Neither happened.

  It also has to be pointed out that there are few men in the football or business worlds cannier than Dalglish, who knew exactly what he was letting himself in for by taking a job in the Hicks and Gillett snake-pit. Besides, there was an endgame being played out at Liverpool in the summer of 2010 that was much bigger than any individual, including Kenny. In fact, for a few weeks it appeared the game could end with a glorious conclusion, thanks to a second King Kenny.

  On the night of 25 June, Tony Evans was sitting in his Times office with his feet on his desk, watching Spain play Chile in the World Cup, when a highly respected contact rang and said they needed to meet. Evans pointed out how decent this game was shaping up to be, and was told it really would be in his interest to meet, as Liverpool were on the brink of being bought by Chinese investors.

  It was a representative of Hong Kong-based investment banker Kenny Huang, who was fronting a wealthy Far East consortium, telling Evans the takeover was becoming unstoppable. Huang had bought out Gillett’s debt and his group were in a position to call in his shares, he said. Evans was told that Huang had very serious big hitters behind him and had been in dialogue with RBS for weeks, but progress was slow, so he was asked to sit on the story until a deal was imminent.

  By August Huang’s people were becoming restless with Liverpool’s unwillingness to dance to their tune, and went public with their own story. Cue a week of utter midsummer madness in the papers. ‘You’ll Never Wok Alone’ and ‘Chinese Takeaway’ were to be expected splashes in the tabloids, but it was in the traditional quality papers where Huang-mania really took hold.

  On 5 August The Times led its front page with a picture of the Kop in full flow and a headline ‘China set to buy Liverpool’, claiming the mystery backer behind Huang was China Investment Corporation (CIC), who were prepared to pump millions into the club to make it the number one team in Asia. Other broadsheets then went out of their way to rubbish the story, mainly on the grounds that no one at CIC was admitting a link with Huang.

  Broughton, in particular, was far from impressed with the hysteria surrounding Liverpool being under direct rule from Beijing, when he had yet to see an offer. Meanwhile, journalists couldn’t track Huang down or establish if the Chinese government was on board.

  All the time the vultures were circling. Yahya Kirdi’s exotic name kept appearing, billed as some wealthy Syrian businessman, but all anyone could establish about him was a chain of Canadian pizza stores, and a tenuous link with George Gillett. The Rhone Group were still in the picture apparently, as were the al-Kharafi family from Kuwait, and Keith Harris kept ringing up every couple of weeks to say he had a big player on board who was about to declare his hand. He never did. The reality was, for all the talk and promises, hype and self-publicity; by the start of the new football season, Broughton had no firm offers on the table to buy the club.

  Those close to the Huang deal said he was about to be given preferred bidder status, but that Broughton had wanted to put a rider into the agreement stipulating that if another party came in with a better bid he could withdraw that status. That’s when he walked away and waited in the wings, calculating no one else would come in with the money, and as it neared the October sale deadline, Hicks would flog his shares to his group, who would then get Liverpool off RBS for a song.

  The club’s take on Huang was that despite being suspicious of his publicity machine they took him seriously. Until he was asked to show them the money, at which point he demanded a month’s exclusivity to check out the books and put his financing in place. This was the month in which RBS were piling penalties on Hicks and Gillett, and thus the club was technically falling deeper and deeper into debt. They couldn’t afford to jump into bed with one unknown quantity, no matter how sexy his PR machine.

  Tony Evans, who was close to the Huang bid throughout, said: ‘They tried to be too clever. They were convinced that Broughton had no one lined up and they thought if they left it to the last minute and went to RBS they could go, “Look, here’s Gillett’s shares, give us the rest cheap.” They were too complacent and Huang screwed it up.

  ‘To be honest I was sick of them at the end because I thought this has rumbled on long enough. I told them, “If you really want this club you’re still getting it cheap at £300 million, so put your money down on the table.”

  ‘They said to me: “No, we’d rather put that money into players and the stadium,” and I told them, “But if you don’t get the club you’re not going to put that money anywhere.”

  ‘I have no doubt the Huang bid was a genuine attempt to take over the club, and that CIC were backing them, because there were too many serious people involved for it not to be. But too many people involved were trying to be too clever for their own good.’

  What was interesting was how little opposition there was among Liverpudlians to the prospect of their club being run by the Chinese government, which had a very dubious human rights record. Before the arrival of Hicks and Gillett serious questions were asked by fans about whether they should be entertaining an offer from the much-maligned Thaksin Shinawatra. After three and a half years of the Americans, Kopites would have flown ‘Fuck Tibet’ banners and turned a blind eye to dead babies in gutters, if it meant losing the cowboys.

  Since the meeting with Moores and Parry in January, Kop Faithful had been building up a healthy internet following, honing their techniques and focusing their campaign solely on the Royal Bank of Scotland. It
was their continued funding which allowed Hicks and Gillett to survive and it would be their refusal to refinance which could kill the Americans. It was RBS, therefore, who bore the brunt of the first wave of Kop Faithful cyber-terrorism.

  An RBS senior executive, Rebecca Oliphant, had replied sympathetically to a Steve Horner email, leaving her email address (obviously) and her phone number (ill-advisedly). Within hours her inbox was bombarded by hundreds of mails from Liverpool fans urging RBS not to refinance Hicks and Gillett, and when Mick Carroll phoned her in Edinburgh for her response, she went ballistic. ‘I’m so glad we were 200 miles away because I fear if we’d been in the same room she’d have ripped my head off,’ said Mick. ‘For the first and only time in my life I realised what that phrase meant about hell having no fury like a woman scorned.’

  Far from scaring off Kop Faithful, the eruption of Mount Oliphant was an inspirational turning point as it made them realise how effective their campaign could become if they really applied themselves. If that was the response of just one RBS executive to a small-scale email drop, imagine the effect a much bigger assault would have on every key executive in the company.

  The process was simple. An email would be put together by one of Kop Faithful’s handful of writers, it would be posted on the website with a list of recipients and instructions to copy, paste, send and distribute among friends, fans, other websites and Facebook accounts. A young generation of techno-savvy fans were surmounting all obstacles placed in front of them by anti-spamming agencies. Members were encouraged to use different email accounts to beat filters, advised on which key words to exclude and ordered not to write anything abusive.

  So the bombardments were stepped up and the executive base continually upgraded, meaning every Monday morning every senior employee of RBS would turn up for work, switch on their computer only to be faced with several thousand anti-Hicks and Gillett emails clogging up their inbox. Then, as the October refinancing deadline approached and Tom Hicks began looking elsewhere for backers, the game changed. Whenever a bank, hedge fund or equity house was linked to Hicks, the addresses of all key personnel would be unearthed, an email would be posted and they would all be made aware of who they were dealing with.