How did Liverpool Football Club end up in this sorry mess? They may never walk alone but some of the individuals that they are choosing to currently walk alongside are distinctly out of step with the history of this once great club.
We warned last year, on this site, of the issues relating to being bought out by private equity heads, Tom Hicks and George Gillett - Texan friends and associates of George W. Bush were always in this project to create profits for their coterie of good ol' southern boys while saddling Liverpool FC with potentially crippling debt. Although the new owners have always insisted that they were not the equivalent of the Glazers, the only difference that we are able to perceive is that, at least, the owners of Manchester United were able to correctly learn the club's name. The holding company (branded Kop Football Holdings) is licensed in the capitalist cowboy state of Delaware and the offshore financial centre which is the Cayman Islands. This is indicative of the secrecy of the business structure. Hicks has now come as clean as he is able or willing to wash and announced that, despite his earlier protestations, the owners have indeed landed approximately £250 million worth of debt at the Shankley Gates. The parallels with Manchester United, where 70% of the latest annual profits are set aside to cover the interest payments on the money that the Glazer's borrowed to buy the club in the first place, are all too evident. With liquidity in the banking sector having dried up, the refinancing of the Liverpool deal was problematic although the Royal Bank of Scotland and southern USA masonic Wachovia Bank came to the rescue. Liverpool fans should be wary of Wachovia. Their slogan "Are you with Wachovia?" is seen more as a threat than a marketing tool in the USA and the bank - check out the New York Times article on May 20th 2007 entitled: "Corporate Profits, From Data Sold To Thieves" - allegedly shows greater loyalty to psychopathic capitalists in the black market than to its own customers.
The new stadium ruse is a part of this strategy. Hicks and Gillett like to keep their business affairs on the square, so to speak. To achieve the best value for Liverpool FC with respect to the new ground, a closed auction would have been the preferable choice, as indicated by Game Theory. Value for Liverpool FC is, by no means, the first thing on Hicks' and Gillett's collective agendas however and the stadium will be designed by HKS Architects based in, you guessed it, Dallas, Texas. Rumours that the new Stanley Park Stadium is to be renamed the Texan Masonic Hall are probably wide of the mark.
Planning permission was first granted for the new stadium five years ago and, yet, Liverpool FC are still at the planning stage and such sloth-like movement is impacting upon the club's performances on the pitch and, more importantly in these days of football as a financial product, on the bottom line. They should hurry up. The playing surface is projected to be 8 metres below sea level and, at the current rate of climate change, an Olympic super-sized swimming pool is a more likely outcome.
Hearing The Kop (the fans here as opposed to the Texans) chant for Dubai International Capital (DIC) to come a-camel-riding to the rescue further emphasises the lack of grasp of reality of the supporters. These fans initially embraced the American private equity people as a potential route to be able to compete once again with the Manchester Reds. When it turned out that the gap between the two Reds was wider than ever, other fabulously rich sources became the chant of choice. DIC are also big on private equity and, for readers unaware of the private equity business model, we will offer a brief overview. Using debt, private equity companies takeover an existing business; they strip out as many costs as possible ie wages; the financial markets reward the private equity firm for creating a leaner shareholder capitalist instrument; the share price rises as morale within the company falls; the private equity owners then sell up making a huge profit for themselves and their bankers while leaving a shell-like essence which slowly but surely falters and fails. Its just creative temporal asset stripping really. Interestingly, within mainstream shareholder capitalist structures, private equity is now seen as "last year's thing" due to the liquidity crisis and sovereign-wealth funds are the new psycho-structure of choice. Anyway... The Mr Big, and we mean Big, behind DIC is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum who is well known to all in the horseracing world through is ownership of the powerful Godolphin stables. He is also quite keen on using kidnapped four year old boys as camel jockeys and oversees an economy built on slave and bonded labour - check out any Dubai building site if you don't believe us! Now, it is one thing to be pissed off with American private equity but is this version any better? And, even if there are arguments that Dubai dollars are marginally preferable to Dubya's mates, is it really something that one should be singing about at a football match?
Fortunately, not all Liverpool fans are myopic idiots. A group of Liverpool supporters are trying to succeed where the financial might of DIC has so far failed and buy their club from its American owners. Called Share Liverpool FC (note the clever play on words indicating both capitalism and community), the group suggest selling shares at £5,000 apiece to 100,000 Scousers and sympathisers. The £500 million pounds would be used to buyout Texas and return the club to a more enlightened form of social ownership. Similar structures exist elsewhere and are successful - check out Barcelona, for example. The shareholders will be able to vote for the key positions at the top of the club hierarchy which will make the owners accountable. Surely this is a far better business model than one in which inappropriate individuals palm of illicit profits both directly via the private equity structure and indirectly by their involvement in the global betting markets - destabilising your club and short-selling them on the markets is not really football, is it? Of course, Share Liverpool FC could be even more creative in their redistributive actions by significantly extending the range of burglaries of players and others associated with the club during the matches!
The destabilisation perpetrated by the Texans began just prior to the Marseille home match in the Champions League and their machinations have continued ever since. Intriguingly, the global betting turnover on Liverpool matches increased markedly at the same time. Not content with undermining the manager and the team with transfer market restrictions and by betting against a team that you own, Hicks and Gillett interviewed Jurgen Klinsmann about the vacant manager's post. Except, it wasn't vacant - Rafa Benitez was still in charge of team matters, at least in theory. Benitez is the second reason that Liverpool find themselves in their current state. Vastly overrated from his time at Valencia when he was fortunate enough to inherit a squad of burgeoning talent, Benitez is several rungs below the first tier managers like Wenger, Capello and Mourinho. Benitez got lucky in Istanbul after his ridiculous team selection allowed Kaká to demolish his team in the first half and he has been living on that fluke moment ever since. By focusing solely on the Champions League while professing the familiar refrain that Liverpool are still in the title race - exactly where are the 17 points going to be made up, sir? - Benitez attempts to keep the ground full for largely meaningless games where the prize, in that it exists at all, is a Champions League place for next season. Then he can repeat the process all over again. Looking a little closer, the 17 points need to be made up in just 15 games and Liverpool have already played the three really big clubs at home. Oh, and they have to get past Internazionale in the Champions League in the midst of this "campaign". Get real, hombre! Additionally, the man cannot judge a goalkeeper. Reina is not up to the task but he is Spanish so, I guess, that's alright then. Much, much worse than this and his inability to understand constructive squad rotation is his racism, whether deliberate or subconscious. Buying Latino players and plonking them in the Wirral is all well and good but Spanish, Brazilian and Argentinian players come at a price premium further denting the financial profile of the club. Some of the best value for equivalent and often, superior, talent is Africa and Black players from France for example, and, yet, Benitez ignores this pool of ability. During his time at Valencia, there was only one Black player at the club and he has just sold the massively underemployed and shoddily treated Sissoko (the token Black at Valencia) to Juventus for £8.2 million (at least the Italians rate him) - Pennant and Itandje should belooking nervously over their shoulders! The nadir of Rafa's season came in last night's capitulation to West Ham United but it is certainly not only Benitez who exhibits a racist bias in the English game as the sickly cheering by the West Ham fans at the substitution of Luis Boa Morte all too clearly demonstrated.
Last summer, we posted that several of the teams who were embracing hyper-owners would be in the territory of regret before the season was out. We highlighted Manchester City, Newcastle, Portsmouth and Birmingham City - we even suggested that readers short-sell the former two teams on the Premiership indices. As we stated earlier on in the week, Manchester City are in selective freefall as last night's provision to Derby of their third "real" point of the season indicated while the situation at Newcastle makes Don Quixote seem a strategist.
Keegan is out of his depth; Dennis Wise is not an executive director although he successfully presided over taking Leeds United to their lowest ever league position which obviously impresses Mike Ashley who is performing similar contortions with his company, Sports Direct; the appointment of Tony Jimenez as vice-president (player recruitment) will allow him to bring all his skills from property development into the sphere of the transfer market; their reliance on Michael Owen, who has scored one goal in 14 games and that with his shoulder, is shortsighted etc etc. The last trick left in Ashley's locker is to take off his striped shirt and stand alongside the other blubber bellies as they approach the relegation they so richly deserve. If not this season, then next...
Yesterday, it was announced that the the son of the Russian/Israeli arms dealer who is unable to visit France due to an arrest warrant on his head is looking to sell Portsmouth. Although the club denies the speculation, it would be a foolish mind that believed the utterances that emanate from this particular part of the south coast. Anyway, our contact says its for real and that's good enough for us. With the Pompey Five's impending court case, these are self-destructive fractious times at Fratton.
Our final angle came to pass when the billionaire barber packed up his clippers and comb and returned to the more familiar territory of the gambling sector in Asia having helped to suck Birmingham into the relegation zone and lose them their manager.
When looking at the likes of Abramovich, Gaydamak and Shinawatra, we are reminded of the statement early last century by Ida Tarbell about American company Standard Oil: "Their empire was built on fraud, deceit, special privilege, gross illegality, bribery, coercion, corruption, intimidation, espionage and outright terror". Such "talents" have become the core competencies of modern day shareholder capitalism...
And the conclusion to this post? Oh my gosh, where would the English game be without Arsenal, Everton and Blackburn Rovers? No sell outs here just professional performance which, despite the machinations of the global criminals, still sees them occupying 2nd, 4th and 8th places respectively. Proper football lives on. Just...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
