HOW to solve the continuing crisis at Anfield has long stopped being a $64,000 question – it’s now a £1billion conundrum.

That’s what it would cost to try and put things right.

It breaks down as £400m for new owners to acquire the club and another £400m building a new stadium, which Liverpool FC’s managing director Christian Purslow has said is “the key” to sustaining the club’s long-term competitiveness.

Then overhauling the team would cost, conservatively, £100m and replacing Rafa Benitez and his staff – assuming a new manager is required who would wish to bring in his own people – would cost around another £40m.

Add another £60m for contingencies and you are looking at the almost mind-bending figure of £1bn to improve a football club. And if you think that seems a large contingency fund, consider that Liverpool’s current debt is £237m, which costs around £30m per year just in interest payments.

The people who run the Premier League are fond of saying that modern football is a business – complex TV contracts, modern, state-of-the-art stadiums, massive, rolling 24-hour news coverage, iconic players who are international brands in their own right – and to a point they are right.

But businesses have to be sustainable and profitable. Football now has colossal levels of unsustainable debt that could eventually bring the edifice of the national game crashing down unless there is serious and immediate change in the management of its finances.

If Liverpool’s current levels of debt had brought success and cupboards full of trophies to the club, the advocates of crazy finance might have a point.

But the reality is that Anfield is going through one of its most unsatisfactory seasons in the history of the club while facing financial peril: that is quite a double.

Football is a business so it must be managed like a business. That means it must cut some costs, scale down projects which cannot be afforded, pay players what clubs can afford, reward managers on a success basis at more sensible rates of pay, and recognise that football is not an exception to the general laws of business.

Eventually clubs that rack up too much debt will go bust.

There has been too much acceptance of the very odd idea that businesses that get into serious financial trouble go to the wall – unless they happen to be a football club.

That period of insanity is about to come to an end. It is not just the travails of Portsmouth, or the vast, almost obscene, sums being talked about at Anfield, or the revelation of the scale of debt at Manchester United.

This is an industry in need of reform and the time for tinkering with the system is over.

There is, however, an alternative model which would work and which would permit clubs to continue to live in their Alice-in-Wonderland world of incessantly-upward, mad spending.

Every club will have to get a billionaire owner (or, more likely, a combination of billionaires) who will simply treat the club like a pet toy and spend because they are having fun and they can afford it.

It will make the distance between the fans and the clubs even greater than it is now and it will rob the game of its soul, but it is the only way of funding the grotesque self-indulgence of clubs who think that money grows on trees.