Rise of the Liverpool from the ashes – Part I

Until 2007, Liverpool was owned by the Moores family for half a century, but due to a dysfunctional financial condition, the club was sold to two American businessmen, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who also owned the Texas Rangers baseball club and a couple of NHL clubs – “Dallas Stars and Montreal Canadiens.”

 

2007 – Liverpool in need of a new start

In those years, Liverpool was associated more with port trade than with big football. There was no question of any competition with London and Manchester, either in investment or in football terms. The club’s debts were growing, and the Americans called in Martin Broughton to correct the situation. Sir Martin will be remembered by fans for a long time, because the nightmare that was happening at Liverpool could not be described in words. In an interview, Broughton was not shy about talking about being a Chelsea fan, and he didn’t seem to care about what was happening on the field at all. 

 

“Rafa [Benitez] is a good manager. For me it’s like this: if he wants to stay, let him stay, ”it was obvious that the American was only worried about the club’s finances, but even he couldn’t cope with them.

 

A few years later, Liverpool’s debts rose to hundreds of millions of dollars with mediocre results on the field, so in October 2010, Hicks and Gillett sold the club, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, losing 144 million pounds.

 

New billionaire brought Liverpool

Another person who bought Liverpool turned out to be, oddly enough, another American. From a young age, John Henry was fond of various games where you need to play the role of a manager from the first person. Buy players, sell them, sign contracts with them. John also loved math, which helped him make a fortune in investing. It is not surprising that earlier the American’s interest was completely captured by baseball, but over time, a new passion appeared – football. In 2002, Henry acquired the baseball Red Sox, which had long forgotten what trophies were, but with the arrival of Henry, two years later, the main baseball title of the planet returned to Boston. 

 

With Liverpool, everything was not at all as fabulous and bright. Fenway Sports Group, unlike others, did not have inexhaustible resources like sheikhs and oligarchs, so they had to take not quantity, but quality. FSG owner John Henry and its president, Mike Gordon, had a very difficult time in the new sport. The first results were not impressive. 

 

Neither Roy Hodgson nor Kenny Dalglish, who received an invitation to the post of head coach, could cope with a team drowning in trouble. The reason, as time has shown, was one – Henry lived in different worlds with Hodgson and Dalglish. The latter were stuck in the past, while the American tried to supply the club with innovations from all sides, believing that he would be able to transfer Moneyball’s ideas from one lawn to another. 

 

But world football developed more slowly. John Henry really seemed to come from another universe and tried his best to be ahead of his time at Liverpool, but the digitization of football was still in the very early stages. The invitation of the young and promising Brendan Rodgers as head coach was received positively by the fans, but there was no consensus within the club.