An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  When Moores was asked when he was going to do the honourable thing he said he couldn’t do it that week because he’d invited Houllier and his wife to his Lake District home the following weekend for a get-together. So Houllier turned up and had a good time believing everything was right with the world. All because his chairman didn’t have the bottle to tell him the board had voted to dismiss him. On it went into a second week, and when the deed was eventually done it was Parry who did it. Was Moores a too-decent man, a too-weak man, or both? Opinion was divided.

  Behind this terminal indecision lay a sad myth you’re going to read a lot about in this book: The Liverpool Way. Or rather the phrase ‘It’s not The Liverpool Way’. That great smokescreen that has given every excuse-seeker shelter during the many barren title-less years. The Get Out Of Jail Free card for every director, manager, executive, player or ex-player who is too afraid to admit deficiencies in themselves and the system, and embrace change. It tells you more about why Liverpool didn’t move on while all the big teams around them did.

  Moores was reluctant to say to Houllier, ‘Thanks for six years’ service, we feel we need a new direction, so we’re letting you go,’ because Liverpool hadn’t sacked a manager for almost fifty years. So they couldn’t start now. It wasn’t The Liverpool Way. The same irrelevant, self-serving tripe that kept Moores’ first manager Graeme Souness in a job two years after he should have been sacked for a multitude of sins.

  Moores didn’t want it on his charge sheet that he’d sacked a manager. He was hoping that Houllier would feel the negative vibes and offer his resignation. He believed this offered him more dignity.

  During that period of indecision between deciding Houllier was history and actually telling him, the leak-fuelled rumour mill went into overdrive. Houllier was phoning up reporters and quizzing staff at Melwood about whether they’d heard he’d been sacked. Dignity The Liverpool Way. Benitez, on the other hand, had second thoughts about going to a club which couldn’t even dismiss a manager a week after the board had unanimously decided to do so. This is a manager who has three clubs, including Inter Milan, begging him to join on the back of his second La Liga title and a UEFA Cup triumph. Eventually Houllier agreed an over-generous payout, and with not a little personal vanity involved, went along with the parting-by-mutual-consent line.

  Was it The Liverpool Way that almost saw its finest home-grown son, Steven Gerrard, walk out on them weeks after captaining the club to its greatest hour of glory?

  After heavy interest from Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, the then 25-year-old had been thinking about his future going into the Champions League Final and the club braced itself for a huge bid. Immediately after Liverpool’s triumph Gerrard came out with the immortal line, ‘How can I leave after this?’ The obvious thing to do was to capitalise on the moment, get a contract drawn up and thrust it at him as he waited in Liverpool the next day for the open-top tour of the city.

  But clearly that was not The Liverpool Way. Too slick. Too modern. A week passed, and with no mention of a new contract and Chelsea cranking up the pressure Gerrard began to believe that maybe Liverpool didn’t want him. Maybe they wanted the money instead.

  So he did a piece with the Liverpool Echo saying he wanted to stay and get it all sorted as soon as possible. Meanwhile Rick Parry was on holiday in Barbados, telling inquiring journalists not to worry about Stevie because, as he said himself after Istanbul, how can he leave now? Translation: He’s given us his word. He understands The Liverpool Way.

  Gerrard, a hyper-critical, insecure self-analyst at the best of times, then believed they clearly didn’t want him. He only had two years left on his contract, a point where negotiations usually begin, and he’d gone public saying he wanted to stay but still they hadn’t rung. One of the most sought-after players in the world then went into pre-season training after a summer of mental turmoil, during which no one at the club had offered reassurance, expecting to be dragged into an office and handed a contract.

  Nothing. He was convinced they wanted him out and decided to jump before he was pushed by announcing his desire for a transfer. All hell broke loose, in which thousands of fingers were pointed at Gerrard as he was told that what he’d done was not The Liverpool Way. Go figure.

  As the son of Cecil Moores and nephew of Sir John Moores, Littlewoods heir David Moores inherited a lot of money, a love of football and a dutiful compulsion to put something back into the community. The Moores family had been ingrained into the fabric of Liverpool life since before the Second World War. Retail giants, pools millionaires, football club owners and cultural benefactors, the dynasty established by the autocratic Sir John stayed true to its roots and received the ultimate loyalty repayment by having the city’s second university named after its patriarch.

  John and Cecil believed passionately that what was good for Liverpool and Everton was also of huge benefit to the community on which all their business success was based. And they poured their money into both clubs.

  Sir John, the son of a Mancunian bricklayer, started in business in the 1920s outside Old Trafford, selling pools coupons. After a shaky start, his pools scheme caught on. He and his brother Cecil added a mail order business in 1932 and chain stores five years later, and thus was born the Littlewoods Organisation – the largest privately owned company in Britain at the time. In 1961 the family took control of Everton. Sir John became chairman and made it his first task to sack the then manager, John Carey, and replace him with Harry Catterick, during a ten-minute taxi ride to the Football League’s AGM.

  In business circles he was perceived as a hard, some would say brutal, operator, but across Merseyside the family were revered for their financial support of both clubs and their backing for arts and charities. While other members of the Moores family followed their elders into commerce, David, the only clan member who spoke with a Scouse accent, was drawn to football. Here was a rich man who had worked for a while in minor roles for Littlewoods, but who spent most of his life indulging two passions forged in Sixties Liverpool – music and the Reds. Indeed, according to Companies House, in the early 1990s he tried his hand at moving into the music industry, though he hardly emerged as the next Brian Epstein.

  Goalaction was a recording studios venture, which he formed in September 1990. The company was dissolved and struck off in June 1993. And Dry Communications was formed in March 1991 to promote the singer Thomas Lang. In its first seventeen months of business, the company lost £50,000, then ceased trading before being dissolved and struck off the company register in July 1994. Maybe that’s why Moores stuck to Liverpool FC. It was a 1991 share issue aimed at raising money to redevelop the Kop after the Taylor Report that allowed him to buy a 51 per cent controlling interest and realise a lifelong dream of becoming the club’s largest shareholder and chairman.

  As he took up the post, one of his predecessors, John Smith, paid a warm, if somewhat ironic, tribute: ‘The Moores family have been great benefactors to Merseyside football. David’s appointment will keep the predators at bay.’ And the predators were certainly circling, smelling the carcass of one of the world’s biggest football clubs which had failed to move into the new money-fuelled Premier League era.

  In 1999, the year Manchester United did their famous treble of League, FA Cup and Champions League sending their ‘brand recognition’ moonwards, Moores realised he had to bring in outside capital to keep the club hanging on to their rivals’ coattails. A lack of trophies, worsening performances on the pitch, boardroom rows and shareholder revolts forced him to bring in investment bankers Schroders to examine the club’s future. This was a tough decision for a man who not only felt he would be letting the Moores family down by selling off part of the city’s cultural heritage but someone who disliked bankers intensely.

  A year before bringing in Schroders, Moores had said: ‘I don’t see why we should have people in the City who have no love for Liverpool telling us what to do with our club. You only have to look at other football clubs
who have got City people on board telling them what they can and can’t do. If you’re interested in a player, you’ve got to go to them and it will take days, weeks even, before someone can be signed.’

  His reservations were made increasingly irrelevant by the changing face of football. In 1999, Granada snapped up 9.9 per cent of the club’s shares for £22 million, taking over media and corporate catering responsibilities but it was clear that would never be enough if Liverpool wanted to get back on an equal financial footing with the best in Europe.

  A new ground was needed, not just to boost capacity but also to take advantage of the boom in corporate entertaining which was transforming match-day revenue. At a minimum cost back then of £150 million, David Moores was never going to be able to fund a new ground. The club needed men at the top with clout and cash. Men like billionaire Roman Abramovich, who in 2003 bought Chelsea and changed the role of football club owner for ever.

  Moores, petrified of being slaughtered by Liverpool fans for not keeping up with the Chelseas, decided he could go no further. In 2004 he told Rick Parry he was selling up, and nothing would change his mind.

  Cue the battle for hearts, minds and Amnesty International approval, between Garston builder Steve Morgan and the Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. And the beginning of embarrassment and disillusion among fans as they saw, for the first time, boardroom warfare made public.

  Shinawatra had a charge sheet to make Al Capone envious. Back then he faced allegations of electoral fraud, corruption, authoritarianism, treason, press censorship, tax evasion, selling national assets to international investors and human rights abuses. Far worse than all that in Liverpudlian eyes, he was a Manchester United fan who’d once held up a Red Devils shirt bearing his name next to Satan himself, Alex Ferguson.

  Rick Parry flew out to Bangkok to meet him, and realised pretty quickly due to the massive media coverage of their talks that he was being exploited by Shinawatra’s electioneering PR machine.

  When fans’ opposition grew to his human rights record and it surfaced that his investment would come from the Thai people paying into a public lottery, he was quickly dropped. Parry now refers to the cringeful saga as ‘a lot of froth’.

  The Steve Morgan tussle was nothing of the sort though. Here was a lifelong Liverpudlian, former building-site worker, club shareholder and self-made multimillionaire who had built a personal fortune through Redrow Homes and the De Vere Hotel group, who wanted to put down the cash, and utilise his own expertise to get the new stadium built, while strengthening the first-team squad. Here was the chief rebel at the stormy AGMs who had taken the battle to Moores.

  But from the word go he met stiff opposition from the chairman, who believed he was being ousted from his Anfield fiefdom on the cheap. It was personal between Morgan and Moores. The builder had been hugely critical in public of Liverpool’s inability to exploit its commercial opportunities. He ridiculed Moores’ lack of business experience and demanded to know why so much of the £73 million offer he had tabled had to go into shareholder’s pockets, when every Liverpudlian knew they needed every spare million they could get to rebuild.

  Not surprisingly, he received massive support from fans who identified with both him and his criticisms. The Liverpool Echo ran a poll which claimed 87 per cent of Liverpool supporters wanted the Redrow man to run the club, and before the final game of the 2004 season against Newcastle, pro-Morgan banners were unveiled and the odd chant was audible. Small wonder Moores was loath to sell to a fellow Scouser who had so quickly won a place in fans’ affections by claiming to be everything Moores was not. Especially when it would almost certainly signal his exit from the club with a drastically reduced windfall.

  After six month’s negotiations, with the cost of the planned stadium rising, Morgan wanted to give the shareholders £20 million instead of a proposed £35 million, with the rest going to the club. It would have meant Moores picking up a mere £10 million.

  The deal was dead and Morgan walked away in the autumn of 2004. When he eventually took a seat in the Anfield directors’ box, as Wolves chairman, on Boxing Day 2009, he pointed the finger of blame for Liverpool’s money troubles at Moores: ‘The fact is David Moores wanted what was best for David Moores, not the club. He was entitled to do that but it’s his decision that has led to the situation Liverpool are in now.’ Moores, though, with some justification, could ask why Morgan so readily sold his shares to Hicks and Gillett.

  Over the next couple of years other suitors would knock on Moores’ door, notably Northern Irish property developer John Miskelly and US tycoon Robert Kraft, but no one seriously got their feet under the table. That is, until Parry got tickets to the 2005 Champions League Final for Dubai International Capital’s chief executive and long-time Liverpool fan, Sameer Al Ansari.

  Within a fortnight of Istanbul the Arabs were asking to see Liverpool’s books, which led Moores and Parry to believe that in Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the absolute monarch of Dubai, they’d found their own Abramovich.

  By the autumn, however, the Arabs appeared to have got cold feet. Maybe it was the price. Moores valued the club at £200 million, with another £200 million needed for the new stadium and £50 million for new players. With costs and debt-servicing any prospective buyer was looking at £500 million. Maybe it was a glimpse at the books which showed those sums didn’t add up. Or maybe Dubai’s appetite to move into English football wasn’t shared by the man at the top.

  Over the next year DIC would come back in, drift out, then come back in again, before telling Parry in August 2006 that they were ready to do business. But by now George Gillett had come on the scene and was turning the charm-setting up to max.

  In November he invited Moores and Parry to see his Montreal set-up. Moores didn’t want to go because he hates flying more than a few hours as it means he can’t have a smoke. So Gillett sent his private jet to pick him up, scoring quite a few Brownie points in the process.

  He scored plenty more in Montreal by wheeling out his executives, players, stadium developers and commercial team who all, naturally, spoke highly of him. When Moores and Parry talked to fans in and around his arena they discovered genuine affection for the owner. When they talked to Gillett they found an Oscar winner. The opening shot in a masterly performance being the revelation of his bankruptcy. He told of the pain he suffered as bailiffs took his dogs, of the shame he felt having to buy back his clothes, and all the time tears rolled down his cheeks.

  Moores became very uncomfortable with the Gwyneth Paltrow act but Gillett used it to show he’d been at rock bottom and he wasn’t going back any time soon. He now had the money again, he told them, because he had learnt his lessons and rebuilt his empire on sound principles. He told them to check out his business portfolio, and as he threw them the books and grabbed the Andrex, Moores and Parry believed they’d got a man of honesty and substance who wanted to buy Liverpool and hand it down through generations.

  But they still wanted to go with Dubai, a wealthy sovereign fund backed by a rich country, whose reputation would be on the line. So Parry told DIC about Gillett, in the hope that competition would kick them up the backside and make them seal the deal. He suggested that a trip to Dubai, based on the recent impressive Canada model, where Moores would get to meet all the top people, would impress the Liverpool chairman, and they agreed.

  Except they couldn’t organise a private jet to combat the chairman’s nicotine-withdrawal problems and when he landed there, they failed to set up a meeting with the sheikh. One was planned but he went horse-riding that morning instead.

  Moores wasn’t impressed, believing rightly that if such a powerful man was behind this bid it could be done in a day. So far DIC had had eighteen months and there was still no concrete proposal on the table.

  And then a breakthrough. DIC came up with an offer of £4,500 per share, and Moores had to make a decision. He was personally far more impressed with Gillett than the Arabs, but believed Sheikh Al
Maktoum could be the sugar-daddy of his dreams. He had a gut feeling that if DIC bought Liverpool and the sheikh took his seat in the directors’ box for a big European night he would be smitten by Anfield and driven to succeed.

  On 4 December, the club announced they were in an exclusivity agreement with DIC to buy the club for £450 million. Amid a mountain of headlines about Sheikh-ups and Ever-tonian texts about DIC-heads, Liverpudlians were dreaming about blowing Jose Mourinho and Chelsea out of the water.

  DIC officials, led by Sameer Al Ansari, met Rafa Benitez and Steven Gerrard who both gave them the thumbs up. Rick Parry said the takeover was ‘about taking Liverpool FC to the next level and securing the future of the club for the next 100 years’.

  Two days after the announcement there was a meeting between both sides’ officials and lawyers where DIC were told they had exclusivity until the middle of the following month, but the deal really needed to be signed and sealed by the end of December. Not only did the manager need investment for the transfer window, but the club needed to place a £12 million steel order to ensure the new stadium stayed on schedule.

  DIC were told they’d effectively had a year and a half’s due diligence so there really was no excuse for not moving ahead swiftly. When that didn’t happen and they were asked why, the answer was, ‘It’s OK, we’re just having a dialogue with the banks.’

  Which wasn’t what Moores expected to hear from a sovereign investment fund with billions of dollars behind it. If that left him feeling jittery, what he read in the Daily Telegraph on 27 December under the headline ‘Buyers plan to sell Liverpool in seven years’, left him scouring his medical cabinet for tranquillisers. Respected sports journalist Mihir Bose wrote: