wacko

Basically that it's 0% coincidence that everything started going down the pan when Purslow arrived.

As much as I think Hicks is a bit of a shyster, in his long interview on sky (utube), he comes across quite measured and balanced. Interesting to hear that he had plans and art ready for the new stadium (spent 30m with architects at the end of 2008) and was readying to build a 'world class stadium'. He notes that the world fiancial crisis robbed him of the funds and backing he had in place for the stadium, which had to be put on hold. He also points out that Rafa had the second biggest amount of money to spend only behind man city (SAF also points this out somewhere). I think he has a point in the sense that there was a ;conspiracy' by the board to keep him from getting back into the club even though as he maintains "we had the funds ready to pay the RBS loan off". if the last bit is true, there is a good chance that the 1Billion $ law suit for damages looks more promising than just vengence or payback. He's full of shit. He didn't have the money to repay the loan, he only "pledged" to repay. Of course the financial crisis made it impossible to build the new stadium. It also made it impossible for H&G to afford to own the club anymore, as they'd borrowed practically all of the money they paid for it. Hicks just wants someone to pay him to fuck off. Also, Rafa didn't spend (net) anywhere near £150m. Not even $150m. SAF may well point out that Rafa spent more than him, but Rafa didn't have a squad that had already won the league while Man Utd did.

The man's a class A cunt. He's off his fucking rocker if he thinks he deserves anything but a smack in the face. TBF, I think you are trading one problem for another. My personal opinion, I don't think American owners have a place in the Premier League. Us Americans do not have a full grasp of the passion you have for your clubs. We have choices to go from one team to another during the year with American Football, Soccer, Baseball, Basketball and Hockey. England pretty much has one sport all year long. For example, the Red Sox miss the playoffs (equalivant to Liverpool missing Europe,) have an aging squad, and their is no out cry from the fans. Why? The fans are now watching the New England Patriots and Boston Bruins. Our culture is different about how we follow sports. I believe Parky should get another point for Liverpool trading one American owner for another. This will not have a happy ending. Everyone's creaming their pants now that John Henry's arrived. It reminds me of Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize (wtf?) simply for not being George Bush. TBH, I'm entirely devoid of any expectation of the new owners one way or the other. We've avoided a 9-point deduction, but apart from that ... meh. I can see anything happening, from us building a new stadium, and winning the league thrice, but at the cost of ticket prices being bumped right up to what the market will bear (though I'm not sure they're too far from that now...) to things being much as now, or even worse. I know he masterminded the first World Series in an eternity for the Red Sox, but so what? This ain't MLB. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/oct/15/liverpool-nesv-takeover-complete-john-henry Is Hicks correct? Hicks is full of shit. What he calls the "British Establishment" is what we know as "British Law". He applied for an injunction, because the bank turned him down when he "pledged" to repay the debt. http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSEtrhc12lI-0Qhaah3HrLo9JdIty8Wk3tSTrrgxMcaes4QLOE&t=1&usg=__AgF42rJBfWYMfAkJgGHJu_WrNsc= His valuation of the club is based on something he read on Forbes.com website. Our own Johnny C did an exhaustive explanation why it's a load of nonsense, but the essence of it is they pulled the numbers out of their arses. A glance at the numbers is enough to see that. I reckon that, if a US court even accepts his case, jurisdiction will get booted back to the UK, where they'll tell him to get lost. Again. I've no idea what the exact financial details are (and I'd love to know). In particular, I'd really like to know how much H&G have lost Has anyone seen a proper financial breakdown of the figures?

The man's a class A cunt. He's off his fucking rocker if he thinks he deserves anything but a smack in the face.

I think it's mostly just Hicks (no surprise there). Gillett flogged his shares to Mill Financial.

Thank fuck for that. It's been bloody awful. Sodding liveblogs on the sale of the club, like it's on fucking eBay or something Anyone know where I can watch the news on the web?

Well spotted. I read that yesterday, as well Why in cock do they have so many holdings, and why do they all need to be plaintiffs?

I didn't just put 'KOP Holdings' into google you know Just got the impression from the stuff I've read that the holding company was based in America. Quite a few Liverpool fans saying it too. Sorry There are two companies, Kop Football Limited and Kop Football (Holdings) Ltd, registered in Liverpool. Exactly how they're owned I don't know.

So why did the judge give them the injunction? Should he not have ruled it outside his jurisdiction?

That would be KOP Holdings, LLC, operator of oil wells in Kansas, not Kop Football (Holdings) Ltd, the actual UK-registered company that owns LFC.

They're completely out of their minds. "Liverpool FC had various valuations and potential sales that valued the club in excess of $600 million and as much as $1.03 billion." Whose arse were those figures pulled out of? There is no way on earth, in the middle of a recession, that LFC could fetch even close to $600m, let alone $1bn. The way I see it, the only effect the suit could possibly have is that the bank indeed forecloses on Kop Holdings, they lose the club and their money anyway, and the club is then sold, possibly at an even lower price. Half the complaints in the suit are based on the LFC directors having been removed by H&G and thus not having the authority to agree to the sale. Since this has already been found to be false by a British court ruling on British law, I have no idea where this leaves the validity of the injunction under US law.

Aw man, these guys are on crack.

They haven't got a leg to stand on, esp. accusing others of irresponsibility. They're just being Americans clinging on for dear life to an investment that they're going to lose their shirts on big time. Most of the stuff these guys own was bought with borrowed money, and I reckon they'll lose 65%+ of their purported net worth before the dust of the financial crisis settles. If England win the 2018 bid then you can bank on the government of the the FA coughing up for it, don't worry about that. Will Liverpool fans give NESV that long? We find out in December who wins the bid, the new anfield is one of the stadiums hoping to host it. If we are chosen and Anfield is chosen as a venue then expect them to break ground on the site within 6 months of the decision. Hope not, still a bit annoyed West Ham get a new stadium for 'free'. It maybe Spurs' yet, also remember Man City didn't pay (atleast all the money) for their stadium aswell that was used for the Manchester Commonwealth games. Guess it depends on how much of their gate is returned to the government each game, if its OK or not. Governments are always retarded about this one way or another. In Germany, the city will often build the club a stadium if the city's prestige demands it, and the government will splurge on stadia if there's a World Cup to be had. Even in the UK, where specifically building a stadium for a privately-owned club (clubs are majority fan-owned in Germany) wouldn't fly, a stadium constructed for a specific international event typically has a negative value to the local government. From their point of view, the cost of building the stadium was taken care of up front before the XYZ Games took place (i.e. somebody else's problem), but they have to worry about pesky maintenance costs. Usually, they couldn't even drive a hard bargain if they wanted to, because there aren't usually a lot of prospective tenants for a fucking huge stadium.

Read the details, dude. H&G were basically lying their arses off. In fact, the repayments on someone else's debt aside, we made a £30m profit the other year *lose*

I've not been following it too closely but I think H and G were trying to buy some time to find a buyer that would not leave them with a loss. They probably thought that RBS would bottle it due to concern about the negative publicity that calling in the debt and triggering of administration would bring to the bank. It was effectively brinkmanship by H and G, despicable creeps that they are. That's the way I understood it, too. The NESV offer will leave them heavily out of pocket.

Judge finds in favour of RBS.

Interesting angle they've taken here, a lot more 'believable', considering the other bid that came in. Except the first solid alternative came up today. Lim already walked away once when he heard what H&G were asking.

The only sane, not purely vindictive reason I can imagine for them behaving like this is that a bankruptcy might allow them to line up as Kop Holding creditors alongside RBS and recoup some of their loan.

The following is a distant third behind the money and the players. Just getting to the CL group stage is worth a very pretty penny. Being a CL regular is essential for holding on to the very best players. Even if we did scrape into the CL, we can kiss goodbye the massive receipts from having been regulars in the late stages. On a man-to-man basis, Liverpool punched well above its weight in Europe under Benitez, and that was entirely down to him. Those days are over for now, whether we qualify for the CL or not. It's not too hard to imagine a few of our better players buggering off without regular CL footie. In terms of spending power, we're probably at about Spurs' level, behind Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City, so without a new stadium, we're going to find it very hard to become a CL regular again, depending on what the UEFA rules do to Chelsea and Man City. I'd say, if all goes as well as possible (new stadium, top manager, no fuckholes in the boardroom etc.), we're 5-10 years off being where we were 2-3 seasons ago under Rafa. Alonso leaving was the beginning of the end for that side, because he was the heart of it, and the best player in it.

We're not in a "financial predicament". Our dear American owners are. The club itself is a viable business, and usually made a profit before the Yanks tried to make it pay their loan interest. Actually this kind of leveraged buyout whre the club basically pays for it's own sale should be outlawed. I agree. We were lucky to the extent that our board blocked the Yanks from putting the debt on the club, like Glazer has done at Man Utd. Personally, I despise this private equity make-the-company-buy-itself-for-you model in any form. That's probably because nobody will lent me half a billion quid to buy a company that can then pay for its own purchase, leaving me sitting on a huge pile of cash I did nothing to deserve. Agreed. It's exactly the same as buy-to-rent. I'm not sure that what is happening at LFC will deter anyone, though. They all think they're smarter than the last guy who tried it. You would hope that UEFA's new rules on club finances will deter such "locusts", but I think you could easily circumvent them by using a holding company to carry the debt. The rules will mostly affect clubs like Chelsea, Man City and Real Madrid that spend far more than they make. There are ways round that, too: where the club has an owner, like at CFC and Man City, he or she can simply give the club some revenue-generating asset (e.g. a CDO) to fund their titillating exploits.

We're not in a "financial predicament". Our dear American owners are. The club itself is a viable business, and usually made a profit before the Yanks tried to make it pay their loan interest.

i wish he'd just fuck off like Just read that - if I was Hicks & Gillette I'd be on the phone to 'Arry asking him if he wanted to take over from Woy, since he thinks they are doing such a bang up job It's interesting to hear another point of view though. They ought to have bailed out earlier, when the price would have been higher. I don't know if it was just greed, or whether they simply hadn't understood the situation. Now that the club is deep in debt, it's a buyer's market. It sounds that they were stuck in the model that if you 'invest' in the team, that will eventually increase the value of the club and you will then be able to sell at a profit - the normal pattern of 'investment' in other areas of life. When it comes to players, I think the word 'invest' should be banned. You don't invest, you spend. In the current climate, there's no way you can get a financial return from success on the field, because you have to compete with clubs like Chelsea who are being subsidised. That's aside from the difficulty of guaranteeing success from any group of 11 players. I think their plan was to borrow the money to buy the club, have the club pay the interest and perhaps some of the debt, and then sell the club on at a big profit. At about a third of the price of Man Utd, they probably thought they were getting a bargain. Then the financial crisis hit, and there was no more cheap credit. The parallels to Man Utd are pretty strong (pre-takeover profits were about one third that of Man Utd's, the debt is about a third of theirs, too), so I can see the same thing happening to Glazer, but three times bigger.

"H&G stand to lose £140m" Best thing I've read in a long, long time

Walking away with no profit, i doubt either will do it. They'd rather let the club sink. They really, really don't want to walk away with no profit, but they sure as fuck wouldn't let the club sink, because the selling price has to cover their debts, otherwise it will cost them (and they're not doing well financially). It would be fucked up if they owned the club, but the strings are currently being pulled by the bank with whose money they bought the club. The only reason the Yanks are still in the picture is that the bank really, really doesn't want to own a football club. Of course, no-one is likely to buy the club before deadline day, because the Yanks are after a profit, and are asking far more for the club than the bank will be in a couple of weeks. IMO, our main hope is that the FA/EPL see the case differently to the Southampton one. The key difference is that LFC is solvent and profitable as an entity (separate from the holding company, which holds massive debts from buying the club), whereas Southampton + holding were one big sack of red numbers. Beyond that, the hope is that on-the-pitch form will pick up once all the corporate-level crap is sorted out. Of course it's all up in the air regarding our future owners. The bank will not be choosy. We could end up with even bigger cunts. How long as Hodg got? I want to declare an early victory for Parky Enterprises. Depends on what happens in the boardroom. The way I see it is, it all boils down to the uncertainty upstairs. An argument can be made that Rafa had his chance, blew it and lost the plot; but he denied it, the players denied it, and the fans denied it. This season, we start off with a very good manager, with a great track record (though, arguably not at the expected level), and it's still a big pile of shit. The whole no-strikers/holes-in-the-squad argument is a red herring. Alonso is the only (enormous) loss from a side that was hot shit in the CL, more so before Torres arrived. This certainly hints at problems that aren't directly attributable to the manager and squad. If we get in decent, non-egomaniac, new owners who are prepared to invest in the club over the next 10 years for longer-term profit, we'll do well. If we get another bunch of cumrags who hope the club can cover their costs and keep itself turning over till the next boom arrives, we're fucked.