Bill Gleeson: Toffees’ fans get sweet offer, so why argue?

Jul 25 2007 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

WHY do some Everton fans want to contest the club’s move to Kirkby? To quibble about moving a few miles down the road when Tesco is offering to pay for a big new stadium is a bad case of looking a gifthorse in the mouth.

Tesco’s agreement to meet the £50m cost of constructing the stadium is an act of charity: it is certainly hard to justify the business case for a supermarket paying so much in return for the right to build a single supermarket nearby.

At the very least, the traditional investment measures, such as payback period and return on investment, will be more challenged than is usually the case for new supermarkets. There is a chance that some Tesco shareholders will query its wisdom.

It’s not that Everton have any alternatives available to them. Goodison Park is full of memories for fans, but the club has no chance of ever being a great team again while constrained by their current home.

The people who should be complaining are Liverpool Football Club. They are going to be stuck with hundreds of millions of pounds of debt to pay for their new ground, while their nearest neighbours can save tens of millions on interest payments that can now be spent on building the squad.

And look at the time it has taken to put the Everton deal together. It’s been just a year since we first heard about the plans. Liverpool’s scheme, in contrast, was first aired six years ago.

One of the prime reasons for the speed of the Everton deal has to be the work of Knowsley Borough Council, which has completely outmanoeuvred Liverpool City Council, who were very slow indeed to get off the starting blocks. It makes no practical difference to club or fans that the new stadium is over the local authority boundary. It is part of the same conurbation. Manchester United fans, for example, don’t complain that their club is in Trafford, not Manchester.

Let’s hope the new ground doesn’t come with one of those mock belfries that are the hallmark of Tesco supermarkets!

FIRST it was our car companies, now it’s our banks. As a nation, we had pretty much accepted the idea that our car factories would close and the associated work would migrate east. But nobody has given up yet on the country’s banking industry. Financial services is, after all, the industry that Britain is best at.

China Development Bank has this week spent £6.6bn acquiring a stake in Barclays bank. It’s the biggest single investment in a foreign business by China and is a sign of things to come. China has huge trade surpluses and it is busy looking for safe places to invest its spare cash.

While many see China as a commercial threat, the increasing engagement of the Chinese in the global economy is a good thing. It entwines what was once an isolated nation into the world’s trading system and gives it strong cause to seek to keep relations with the West steady.

And on the economic level, the more Chinese investment there is British businesses, the better. Between them, American private equity funds and Chinese state banks could keep us going for some time to come.

China is unlikely to become the dominant economic power in the lifetime of anybody currently alive. While there has been very strong economic growth in the past 20 years, there is only so far China can go. While some parts of southern China have achieved first world conditions, other more rural provinces, representing the majority of the country, will remain economically underdeveloped for many generations to come.

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