Sean McGuire: Will airing Liverpool FC's dirty linen in public wash at Anfield?

Apr 17 2008 by Sean McGuire, Liverpool Daily Post

IT isn’t clear whether one of Liverpool’s owners has made a right Hicks of the situation or is executing a carefully-devised plan.

Mr Hicks’ surprisingly-public call for the club’s chief executive Rick Parry to stand down could yet fall into either category.

The usual procedure on these matters is for some kind of boardroom conflab, a decision emerges and the CEO either stays or goes.

It is a very odd thing, for a businessman of Tom Hicks’ experience, to bypass the first part of the procedure and then to do the second bit in public!

This is either the sports row to end sports rows or part of a much more carefully planned strategy by Hicks to either get total control of the club or compel his estranged partner to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

When Liverpool dominated English football there were many armchair pundits who believed they knew the real secret of their success, the theories were as varied as the people who suggested them.

However, one thing always seemed to stand out and it was, put simply, that Liverpool had a method, it was the Liverpool method and it worked.

It was about a concentration on the absolutely essential things which created a great club with good players, talented coaches (who, more often than not, came through the ranks and understood the method), a strong sense of tradition, a massive sense of purpose and self belief and an irreducible core of stability.

From the perspective of 20 years ago, today’s shenanigans would have been utterly unthinkable.

The change of course that has helped to create the circumstances where boardroom battles seem more newsworthy than triumphs on the field, is the profound commercialisation of the Premier League itself.

The sums involved in the game at all levels are vast.

It is inevitable that a new breed of sports entrepreneur – many of them from the place which led the way in professional sport in the full sense, America – would find the rich potential revenues worthy of serious attention.

And frankly, why not?

Football cannot isolate itself from some of the less desirable consequences of its own success, any more than any other line of business could.

Once there is value there will be investors and they will seek first to control those assets and then to exploit them to their true value.

Perhaps it is in the very nature of the owners themselves which is the real difference between a successful takeover and a less successful takeover – contrast what has happened at Anfield with what has happened at Old Trafford.

That is one lesson Liverpool could learn from their old foes.