An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  Yet even for those of us who have placed our tribal affections into the public domain there come hard decisions. I’d reached one with the Spirit Of Shankly. Do I join, and if so, how active do I become?

  The first one, as a slappable young toad on The Apprentice might say, was a no-brainer. Not only did the union need and deserve all the support it could get, to not join would have made me feel like a Nottingham Forest fan. Sorry, a scab. But if you become part of the organising committee, a media spokesman or take a lead on the marches, you compromise yourself. I doubt I’d have been sacked by the Daily Mirror, but I would never have been able to write articles or go on radio and TV to praise their actions. So I took a backseat, armed with a laptop.

  ‘A fortnight ago something astonishing happened,’ I wrote in the Mirror in March 2008:

  More than 600 Liverpool fans met to form a supporters union called The Spirit of Shankly (SOS), aimed at forcing out the club’s owners. And on Wednesday representatives of Dubai Investment Capital held a meeting with them to discuss ways of grabbing power from George Bush’s side-kick, Tom Hicks (or as he used to be called in Hollywood – Tom Mix, King of Cowboys).

  Let me run that past you again. Representatives of Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, one of the world’s richest men, swopped thoughts with a three-week-old fans’ group on how to bring down a billionaire adviser to the most powerful man on earth.

  This remarkable scenario came about because these fans realised they’d been taken for patsies. That American speculators had spun bullshit to them about their passion for their club. That they planned to milk it for all they could without putting in a dime of their own. And the grass roots fury has spawned more Liverpudlian groups than Merseybeat.

  That mass meeting I referred to was held in the Olympia Theatre on West Derby Road, a huge Grade II listed ballroom which first entered Liverpool legend in 1905 as a purpose-built indoor circus.

  The ideal setting, therefore, to perform an act of escapology which would free us from the grip of clowns. The only warmth in the icy room came from wrapping ourselves in the nostalgic red-blooded banners which had been draped in stadiums around Europe on all those nights of glory, which now hung from the balcony. Below them, on the old Locarno dance floor where our mums once jitterbugged with GI Joes, hundreds of solemn-looking men mooched about in dark coats, certain about why they were here, but unsure of the path they were about to tread.

  We picked up leaflets laid out neatly on rows of seats, sat down and stared up at a stage where a dozen fans who made up the steering committee, some well-known others not so, nodded, shrugged, grimaced and finger-jabbed. They told us why they were here, and why they believed we should be here. They let anyone who wanted to have their say, have it – thanks to Peter Hooton doing something he never does as singer in The Farm: pass around the microphone – before unveiling the union’s list of aims and objectives:

  IMMEDIATE AIM: To rid the club of Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

  CONSTANT AIMS: To represent the best interests of our members and by extension the best interests of the supporters of Liverpool Football Club on both the local and international level. To hold whoever owns the football club to account.

  SHORT-TERM AIMS: To institute a functioning structure for the Spirit Of Shankly. To create long-lasting relationships with all aspects of Liverpool FC’s supporting community. To improve the quality of service for Liverpool FC’s supporters. To improve the standard and value of travel arrangements for Liverpool FC’s supporters.

  MEDIUM-TERM AIMS: To work with any relevant agencies to improve the area of Anfield. To build links with grass-roots supporter groups both home and abroad.

  LONG-TERM AIM: To bring about supporter representation at boardroom level.

  ULTIMATE AIM: Supporter ownership of Liverpool Football Club.

  The words ‘so, a piece of piss then,’ fluttered through my cynical head as I joined in with the rousing round of applause. And as we quickly voted unanimously to approve those aims (mainly so we could get a few pre-match pints in before that afternoon’s FA Cup fourth round game with Barnsley) I’m sure hundreds of my new fellow members were as sceptical as me.

  But you know what, it didn’t matter. Something important was being built that day. Something that needed to be built and something that may outlast most of us who were present. Nobody had seen the need to build it, not up to a month before, but the plans, the tools and the cement had been thrust at us by two cowboys who were still in bed 3,000 miles away.

  The occasion could have had the feel of a 1980s Socialist Workers’ Party student union sit-in over South African wine being stocked in the campus Spar, or an anarchists’ Kill The Rich convention, but it didn’t. It felt real, grown-up and sincere. And what those fellow fans asked us to help them achieve seemed achievable. Not all of it, not this year, and maybe not in our lifetimes, but some of it and some time soon.

  Before we headed for a mile-long march on Anfield, a message was read out from Karen Gill, Bill Shankly’s granddaughter, who had been contacted at her home in Athens, told about the union and asked if she thought the family would approve of using the Shankly name. Her reply, as always, was to give unconditional support. Karen is a marvellous woman who has inherited many of her grandad’s traits, not least his fight and his passion, as witnessed in this truly inspirational message of support she gave the union:

  I would like to thank each and every one of you for honouring my grandfather’s name by calling this union Spirit Of Shankly. For me though it’s more than just honouring his name. In these times of corporate gluttony I am truly heartened to discover that there are still so many people who embody my grandad’s spirit. It’s an Olympic spirit – passionate, pure and true. It’s a dream of greatness and glory which comes from dedication, hard work and integrity. In this dream money is only a means to an end, it’s not the end itself. My grandad had a dream for Liverpool Football Club and you are all helping to keep that dream alive. It’s the people with dreams who achieve things in the end because they have a vision which drives them on. We know Bill Shankly ‘made the people happy’ but I know that you would have all made him happy were he alive to see this legendary support today. I speak on behalf of the Shankly family when I say that we are wholeheartedly behind The Spirit Of Shankly.

  Say it in an Ayrshire rasp and it could almost be a blessing from beyond the grave.

  Liverpool fans have taken a lot of stick over the years, and still do to this day, for a perceived mawkishness and an unearned sense of entitlement. Especially in the long years since we last won the league, because in certain eyes that should make us feel as mediocre about ourselves and our club as some of the football we’ve had to endure.

  ‘You think you’re special, you think you’re unique, you actually believe you are God’s Chosen Tribe’ are charges I’ve had hurled at me not just from Everton, United and Chelsea fans, but from one of those clubs’ chairmen. And in many ways they have a point. I’ve felt as embarrassed hearing some Liverpudlians spout over-sentimental guff as you may feel reading the next paragraph.

  Rightly or wrongly, Shankly made us this way. He instilled the idea that we were the most special part of the most special club in the world. Just as he did with his players he imbued in us a sense of superiority bordering on invincibility and a will to not suffer fools easily, especially if they interfered with the fortunes of our beloved team.

  I was probably one of the lucky few in the Olympia that day who had actually spent some time with Shankly and asked him about his philosophy, his beliefs and his motivation. I was a seventeen-year-old schoolkid in 1975, he had retired a year earlier as manager, but was still turning up at Melwood whenever the players weren’t there to breathe in the grass and the liniment, and do a little jogging around the kingdom he had built up from a patch of wasteland.

  He’d agreed to let me interview him for the school magazine but really I was there to gawp at the only god I believed in. He talked about many things, about the g
reat players and nights he’d had and the reasons he’d walked out on the club, but what left the most profound impression was when he spoke about his socialist beliefs. He told me with a glint in his piercing eyes and a jut of his Cagney chin, that if he was ever put in charge of Liverpool’s street-cleaning and refuse operation he’d make it the cleanest city in the world.

  He would achieve that status by insisting every worker in his department, including him, earned the same money, but he’d also demand big bonuses for all of his men if they achieved their aims. Which they would because he would motivate them to succeed by convincing them of the prize to be gained by having an unquenchable pride in your work, your city and your people.

  Sod studying A-Levels to get into university, I wanted to pick up a brush, join his army, get out on to the streets around Melwood and start straight away.

  Shankly’s socialism wasn’t party-political or driven by dogma, it was instinctive. It had seeped into his soul as part of a big family during a poor upbringing in a Scottish west-coast pit-town. It was of his essence. It defined how he treated everyone he came into contact with, especially the working-class fans who handed over what spare cash they had, every other Saturday on their half-day off, to the Anfield gatemen.

  He would drum into every Liverpool player he signed, from Kevin Lewis to Kevin Keegan, that those fans weren’t the most important people at a football club, they were the only people. And while they are paying your wages never treat them with anything but the utmost respect and never, ever cheat them. Not an inch.

  I thought of those words as I stared at his image on the stage in that big, cold room. And I thought back to the words Tom Hicks had used before the Athens Champions League Final, to define his relationship with Liverpool fans: ‘I bought Weetabix and leveraged it up to make my return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same with Liverpool.’

  I realised in that moment why that meeting and that union were vital to the survival of the club that Shankly had built. In the years that followed I would come to realise that for all the pain, debt and disgrace Hicks and Gillett piled on Liverpool, one good thing came out of their time in charge. They reminded us of who we were and where we’d come from. They made us realise what was special about the club that Shankly built and why we needed to fight for it.

  So on we marched, this band of very unmerry men, down West Derby Road, holding up three buses and obstructing pram-pushing mums who were trying to get back home from Aldi before their baby’s next feed. Down through the side streets and into the sea of fans pouring down Walton Breck Road towards the ground, chanting ‘What do we want? Yanks Out. When do we want it? Now.’ Mainly at bemused out-of-town Weetabix-buyers in replica shirts, clutching bags heavy with official merchandise they’d just bought from the shop to help pay off Tom and George’s bank loans.

  One of them, a big blond man of Viking descent, photographed me on his phone and gave me the thumbs up. I probably appeared on some Norwegian Facebook page, chanting like a tragic, grey-haired old hippy at an anti-Vietnam rally, with curried chip paper glued to my knees. Not how I saw myself acting at fifty when, as a ten-year-old I marched down the same pavements with a wooden stool under my arm dreaming of nothing more than an Alun Evans hat-trick. Ain’t life full of surprises.

  Amanda Staveley is one of those women who ticks the fantasy boxes of every throbbing male. The former model has the sparkling, perfectly proportioned face of an all-American Miss Universe winner but with the elusive class of an English rose. She comes from land-owning Yorkshire stock and had a boarding school, then Cambridge, education, yet maintained the warmth of a down-to-earth Northerner who hugs strangers and calls them ‘love’.

  She’s tall and athletic, could run 100 metres in 12.6 seconds at fourteen, and would have been an Olympic sprinter if she hadn’t snapped her Achilles tendon. She has the charm and cunning of an old-colonial diplomat plus the brains of a double-first nuclear physicist. But best of all, when that jet-propelled golf trolley His Royal Randiness Prince Andrew became utterly smitten with her and proposed marriage, she said words to the effect ‘You’re all right, love. Rather than be Fergie the Second I’d prefer to be a successful private equity financier who makes millions off her own bat, and has a life.’

  And millions, many of them, was what she made. Partly through being a workaholic, but mostly through cultivating a twelve-year friendship with Middle East royal families during which time she soaked herself in their culture and won their trust. Staveley it was who earned £10 million from Sheikh Mansour for delivering him Manchester City, and Staveley it was who Sheikh Al Maktoum turned to when he became troubled and baffled as to why Liverpool had ditched DIC at the last minute in favour of the Americans. In the autumn of 2007 she set about finding the answers for him, which didn’t tax her brain too much. It’s simple, she told him. They had moved slower than a comatose slug on a duvet day.

  Two things then happened. Virtually every professional figure involved in the first bid found their position within DIC reassessed, and he told Staveley to buy him Liverpool. Even if it meant having to pay an extra couple of hundred million. This was a wrong that had to be righted.

  So into battle she went, charged with prising the jewel of Anfield out of American clutches, not for DIC this time but for an Al Maktoum-backed Middle Eastern fund, which was potentially better for Liverpool as it meant the club would be his own personal responsibility, and not answerable to some dithering investment committee.

  She threw herself at the task in a typically driven manner. Anyone who could be worked on was worked on, day and night – and as some journalists can testify by producing their phone bill, halfway through the night if she felt she hadn’t quite hammered home her point. She told reporters with Liverpool connections that Al Maktoum was set on buying the club. He knew it was in the wrong hands and unless it was taken out of those hands it would only be damaged further. One Echo man said: ‘She identified early on the need to get the local paper on board and pulled it off brilliantly. But to be honest, none of us fell for the line that she, or Al Maktoum, genuinely had the club’s interests at heart. Staveley was very impressive but she reeked of money. Like the Yanks, that was her only reason for being in Liverpool.’

  No sooner had the Spirit Of Shankly been formed than they appeared on her radar. Her people spoke to their people and their people met her people, and it was quickly decided they should get together to work out how best to end the American occupation. Bar-owner, restaurateur and Liverpool fan Rob Guttman laid on a private room and set up a table for dinner in his Albert Dock Circo restaurant. Meeting and greeting Spirit Of Shankly members Paul Rice, Andy Heaton and Neil Atkinson, on their arrival, was Staveley.

  After the niceties and the starters they got down to business. Staveley told them that powerful people right at the top of Dubai had seen the mess the Americans were making at Anfield and noted the pleas from fans to be rescued. They also realised the mistakes DIC had made first time around. But this isn’t DIC who have come back in for Liverpool, she said, this is the Sovereign Fund and Sheikh Al Maktoum is very serious about doing business. Indeed he feels, as a matter of honour because he allowed Hicks and Gillett in, that he has a certain responsibility to Liverpool fans.

  He knows how important the fans are going to be if he takes over the club and he wants you to be involved, Staveley told the SOS lads before playing her ace: the new structure would have an operating board below an executive board and the sheikh would like a fan on that board.

  She looked round for nods of approval, the banging of glasses on the tablecloth, maybe the odd chorus of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, but instead got a slap around her finely chiselled chops. Blank looks. Welcome to Liverpool, love.

  ‘I think at this point we were supposed to roll over and get our tummies tickled,’ said Paul Rice.

  ‘But we went, woh, hang one a minute. We’re not having a token person o
n any board. If the Spirit Of Shankly is going to be on your board we’re going to want to have some clout. We’d want something that would lead to moving beyond the sheikh’s involvement so that we could build up our own position to the point where, hopefully, we could buy the club ourselves. So anyone on that board would have to have full voting rights. You’re not going to get away with sticking a fan on there who would be getting turfed out every time there was a financial decision to be made.’

  Staveley and her Dubai team looked on slack-jawed. ‘I think she was partly taken aback and partly quite in admiration of the fact that we didn’t just roll over,’ said Rice.

  Let me run that past you again. Representatives of Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, one of the world’s richest men, sought approval from representatives of 350 fans who’d met in the back room of the Sandon a few weeks earlier, for their plan to bring down a billionaire adviser to the most powerful man on earth. All for their benefit.

  And they were told to do one.

  Shankly would indeed have been proud of the Spirit he’d left behind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘If you look at what has happened under Rick’s leadership it’s been a disaster’

  – Tom Hicks

  As the chants from the main stand car park grew more raucous an agitated Tom Hicks paced around the crammed boardroom. Spotting a senior club figure whom he considered an ally, he sidled up and said, ‘What the hell’s going on out there? What are these marches all about?’ The figure replied that it was an alien sight to him because in the forty years he’d been coming to Anfield and the sixty years his father had been, there had never been any protests or marches.

  ‘So why now?’ said Hicks.

  ‘You know why,’ he was told.

  ‘No I don’t,’ he answered. ‘Tell me.’

  So he did.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Tom. When I asked you why you bought Liverpool and not some cheaper club you said one of the reasons you wanted it was the fans. Because they’re so engaging and so loyal. You can’t expect them to be those things then sit back and take it up the arse when you’re giving it to them with both barrels. That’s why they’re out there and they’ve got every right to be.’