No better place to start than with a quote from Ray Osbourne (Shanklyboy.) It was 16th October 2010, the day after our club was finally wrestled from the rigor mortis-like grip of Hicks and Gillett, the horror flick extras who wanted to take us with them to the grave. “Think back to our delight at getting a SaveLFC banner shown for a millisecond at the World Cup,” Ray wrote in a pm, “Now think about us sitting drinking coffee with the new owner of Liverpool six months later.”
It all started so well. Here was an owner prepared to meet with the supporters as a priority and demonstrably listen. After their breakfast meeting, the pms from the three representatives of the RAWK-based protest movement SaveLFC who had met John Henry were overwhelmingly favourable. The impression conveyed was of an engaging man who asked relevant questions. He seemed surprised and gratified when the lads talked enthusiastically about the academy set-up, remarking it was the only good news he’d received about the club. SaveLFC was placed in abeyance. Prepare to talk about the football, chaps.
Martin Broughton had made clear the criteria governing the sale at the start of the process: "What's best for the club is somebody build the new stadium, make sure that the club is properly financed and that there is enough money available to take the club forward.” On the issue of a new stadium, he added, “There is an overwhelming financial logic to any buyer to proceed. They wouldn't get to be the winning bid without that commitment."
The deal valued the club at £300m and removed the outgoing owners’ leveraged buy-out debt. “They had thought about using some debt to purchase the club [presumably for tax reasons],” SaveLFC’s SmithdownAndy reported after meeting John Henry. “This had been decided against by FSG.” This was sensible. FSG needed to differentiate themselves from Hicks and Gillett quickly and decisively. A club free of ‘a mortgage’ is the minimum we should expect from them. As MD Christian Purslow wearily pointed out, that financial model simply did not work. “I cannot stress enough: the burden of running a football business with acquisition debt on it is extraordinarily difficult.” So they deserve no excessive gratitude for not being Hicks and Gillett. But by the same token, FSG deserve no special ire for happening to be American capitalists.
FSG’s first official statement was full of jargon-rich waffle but little detail. The mantra Henry and Werner repeated was “to under-promise and over-deliver.” But there was a promise made, even if it was largely lost in the avalanche of carefully-phrased rhetoric, and it is one against which to measure them. Werner stated unequivocally: “In five years we want to be able to show you a consistent, successful, winning club.’ And John Henry told the official TV channel, “We will provide [LFC] with the resources and the commitment to win in the near future.”
One of the key strategies was clear. “It is a global football club and with the financial fair play rules it is going to be revenue that drives how good your club can be in the future.” The window for buying success through over-spending was closing year by year. Henry and his co-directors bought Liverpool because they thought they had the perfect skill set to exploit the opportunities afforded by change. They thought they were smarter than the average football club owner.
Their history with the Red Sox, of course, displayed the expertise they were confident of employing. John Henry told the Boston Globe that same history won FSG preferred status in the bid process. “There were other higher dollar figures. But...they felt we were the best buyer because of our track record.’’
“We don’t rest,” John Henry explained in another interview. “We’ll look at stats no-one else will look at, employ scouting in a way that has a compelling organisational context, question everything and everyone and ensure we have the best player development curriculum and protocols. Everyone is fixated on [us relying on] sabermetrics but football is too dynamic to focus on that. Ultimately you have to rely on your scouting.”
Henry talked about “care” and “focus.” Werner promised FSG would “find the very best people in football.” Henry gave us the vision he’d sold Martin Broughton, how he’d gone toe to toe with the big spenders when outwitting the New York Yankees in the MBL, how they’d identified “the right manager, the right general manager, the right CEO.” It sounded good.
Two and a half weeks later, they inflicted Damien Comolli upon us. The Frenchman was appointed Director of Football Strategy on the recommendation of FSG’s baseball-mate Billy Beane and promoted to Director of Football in March 2011. Comolli certainly began an ongoing process to extract better value from the wage bill and it is one positive of his tenure. But was this really the man to mastermind the Anfield revolution? The first problem was the manager in situ: that Werther-chewing advocate of the 4-4-2, while the Academy and Reserves were learning 4-2-3-1. In Hodgson we had a disciple of caution even as FSG spoke fervently of the relentless attack of the Liverpool teams of the 80s. What was required was the necessary impetus to remove the man who so clearly deviated from the vision. Neither FSG nor Comolli provided it. Indeed, Comolli became so friendly with Hodgson that he argued for patience. Two and half months were lost to Roy’s sideline face-rubs.
Comolli’s fatal and incomprehensible misunderstanding of his role was on display from the first interview, when he talked about the fundamentals of his job. “What does the manager want? What sort of player does he like? What type of organisation has he got on the pitch? Does he play 4-3-3, does he play 4-4-2?...Obviously the manager's opinion, coaching philosophy and playing philosophy is what we need to look at and it's up to me to say 'Roy, the way you like to play is that way, your philosophy is this one, we think this player fits perfectly into your philosophy.’” Had a tail ever wagged a dog so vigorously?
FSG’s “clarity of thought has been obscured by poor choices in employing the men to implement it,” The Times’s Football Editor, Tony Evans, wrote recently. “But FSG believes it was the person [Comolli] rather than the policy that was flawed.” True. But questions remain: why did it take them so long to realise? Last summer, why did no one in either Boston or Liverpool challenge our DoF”s bountiful philanthropy towards the rest of the Premier League?
Blithely ignoring his function to impose an identity on Liverpool, before his April 2012 dismissal Comolli bought a squad crafted to implement the style of a manager FSG had never wanted to appoint in the first place. Inevitably, when FSG sacked Dalglish and finally imposed an on-pitch vision from the boardroom, the squad was not fit for a new man’s purpose. As Brendan Rodgers pointedly observed, “There’s no point paying millions if they can’t play football.”
“I wasn’t convinced when we arrived that Kenny should be back managing,” Henry said a year ago. “I wanted things to work with the manager we inherited.” It’s hard to believe Henry saw Roy Hodgson as a long-term solution. FSG simply wanted Roy to soldier towards mid-table and the summer of 2011 when they would replace him with the young dynamic manager of their dreams. Dalglish’s relative success in the Spring of 2011 and his hold on the supporters’ affections caused a deviation from the script. Again, it was a display of weakness – though understandable - when ruthless strength was required.
Henry, soon after the takeover, had given us a vow, an identity statement: “We would like to say to our fans that we are honest.” Yet how did that accord with their actions in sacking Dalglish? After Comolli’s April departure, Werner immediately declared: “We've got great confidence in Kenny...he enjoys our full support.” A month later he was gone. The “very poor second half” to the PL season lost Dalglish his job, his dream. At roughly the time Werner was formulating his statement, Liverpool had gained only eight points from 12 games. Are we to believe they were not discussing this form and its implications at that stage? And as we later learned, an FA Cup Final win would have changed nothing, except that the principal owner might not have snubbed his manager’s hand so publicly during the presentations. This was not John Henry’s finest hour. Did Werner have an alternative to the dreaded vote of confidence? Arguable. But it damaged trust nevertheless. Werner is the main culprit in deviating from the “under-promise” axiom, especially in his hyperbolic, “We certainly have the resources to compete with anybody in football.” As a result, even before the shambles of August 31 this year, the warm trust established initially was chipped and peeling.
19 months after the takeover, they hired Brendan Rodgers, another risky appointment but an imaginative and coherent one. Before that, they appointed a global executive search firm to find us a new CEO but ended up promoting the under-educated Ian Ayre to Managing Director. The DoF model was bigged up last Spring and binned a few months later at the request not just of Rodgers but other managerial candidates. Rodgers also refused to work with a technical director, leading to the club losing Pep Segura.
In place, though, we will have a promising new technical committee which is expected to finally deliver the FSG vision. Rodgers will chair the group, which consists of Michael Edwards, Head of Analytics (a man who had a key role in Spurs’ successful transfer policy and is highly valued by FSG); the Head of Development (academy); the Head of the Medical Department; a negotiator of transfers/contracts (still to be appointed); and Dave Fallows as Head of Scouting and Recruitment. Fallows joins in October from Manchester City - via his garden - bringing with him Barry Hunter, who covered Italy and Russia for the blues. Another of the new recruits specialises in Portuguese and South American football. All the recruits are well-versed in the use of statistics, analytics and technology. The challenge set them by FSG - that excites them - is to get Liverpool to the pinnacle of English and European football by outsmarting the opposition rather than outspending them. The idea is the expected one: to find youthful value in the market, to buy Suarez at the age of 20 from Groningen rather than four years later from Ajax. Rodger’s “death by football” is the blueprint for the whole club (and dovetails pretty neatly with the born-in-Spain philosophy in our nurseries.) Going forward, Rodgers is expected to pick his preferences from a list provided to him by the four new scouts. FSG have also told the new scouting team they will top up the squad with occasional ‘marquee’ signings (providing they still provide value to the club) as a fillip to the brand, fans and team.
Rodgers agreed to all this before joining. FSG believed their man would be at ease working via consensus although there were suggestions in early August that Rodgers was resistant to the scouts’ suggestions. Then, on August 31, our hierarchy provided a masterclass in ruining an otherwise excellent transfer window. Rodgers (I am told) surprised everyone by dismissing all candidates suggested to him for our vacant front line. FSG surprised him by stubbornly refusing to wreck their blueprint for the 29-year-old Dempsey. Miscommunication or power play? With Rodgers’ comments about the ‘honesty’ of the owners at his recent press conference, we hear the slurp of a hearty kiss and make-up. But has the structural fault line been repaired?
‘We will be visible at Anfield,’ Werner proclaimed on October 15 2010. Certainly, there has been dialogue. FSG gave us the supporters’ committee and their appointee Jen Chang introduced ground-breaking access for fan sites such as ours to the manager. Ginsberg, the money man of the set-up, has been over here frequently. Yet our Chairman has been so noticeably absent Spirit of Shankly publicly called for a Chief Executive in situ. Tony Evans points his finger at a plaid-shirted culprit: ‘Ian Ayre is a pygmy even in an area that has few giants.’ This is before we even touch on the giant botch job known as the Suarez affair. (We all know the depressing catalogue of errors.)
So – by Broughton’s sale criteria: how have FSG measured up? They have “properly financed” the club in the sense of removing extraneous debt. They have provided funds to move the club forward only in the form of a £30m interest-free loan last summer. On this, Henry has always been consistent, his buzz words here being “Arsenal model,” and “sustainable.” In a nutshell: “We intend to strengthen this club annually but that doesn’t mean we will deficit spend. It’s up to us to strengthen revenues.” But at the commercial department we have seen a familiar FSG pattern: a fan-fared appointment (Graham Bartlett) who has fallen by the wayside. The replacement Commercial Director (Billy Hogan) is another internal promotion and yet another based in Boston. And how can our own department compete with Manchester United’s 70-strong force, split between London and Manchester? The delay on a stadium decision rankles with many supporters yet FSG were upfront on the timescales required. In November 2010 they briefed the Echo that they might take two years to weigh the options. The informed opinion is that Broughton was wrong about the watertight case for a new stadium and that an expansion of Anfield makes better financial sense. (The stadium board on RAWK provides a meaty analysis of the hows and whys, thanks to the contributions of Peter McGurk and AlanX.) On the other hand, we believe the enviable agreement that trades a part-sale of Inter Milan with a new stadium construction was sitting invitingly on a table in L4 earlier this year.
Two years ago, Henry and Werner presented themselves to Broughton and to us, the supporters, as savvy sports operators. They pointed to their record - since gone moobs up - with the Red Sox. In the last week, stories in America (denied by Henry) suggest FSG are mulling the sale of the Red Sox ten years ahead of their 20-year plan (‘we do everything long-term’) to concentrate on LFC. Back in 2010, we were too relieved to be rid of Hicks and Gillett to pay attention to the small print: something about past performance not being an indication of future results. We always knew we would need patience to recover from a convergence of oafish double-acts: Parry and Moores, Hicks and Gillett. But FSG need to learn lessons more swiftly and acknowledge they are over-stretched, especially if they do not bale out of Boston. Next April will mark the halfway point in FSG’s self-declared five-year plan for consistent success at LFC. We cannot afford more mistakes. We cannot afford a return to internal politics. They told us Dalglish went because they wanted to see annual progress. We yearn for it, John and Tom - we yearn.
*I would like to thank to Royhendo for ‘doing n’owt’
and Zeb for advice in compiling this and a number of RAWK sources who wish to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.
*This article refers to FSG throughout for clarity, although they were known as NESV until March 2011.
*The £30m loan mentioned in the copy relies on the last accounts. Since filing it may have been converted into equity or even been paid back. The next accounts will reveal this.
*For more detail on the value in the wage bill as at last March, have a look at:
http://www.theanfieldwrap.com/2012/03/fsg-how-are-they-living-up-to-their-own-billing/For more info on the Red Sox mooted sale see:
http://mobile.boston.com/art/22/sports/columnists/massarotti/2012/09/questions_abound_following_red?p=1*This article has largely avoided analysis of the financial aspect because a further article will attempt to explain these in a simple and accessible fashion. - Or so I hope.
