by Simon Hughes
Houllier needed financial backing to reshape the Liverpool squad. These were nervous months at Anfield, with Sky willing to inject Manchester United with huge sums of cash if a proposed takeover proved to be successful. The move would have accelerated United’s sprint into a different financial league, leaving Liverpool behind.
‘How could you have the Premier League’s broadcaster owning the most successful and glamorous club?’ Parry asks. ‘It would have created a monopoly and, thankfully, the commission looking at the deal recognized it.’
Granada came to Liverpool with an offer.
‘In order to compete, we needed investment in the team. But we also realized the need to be smart. We didn’t want to go a long way down the line with Granada only for the deal to be thrown out by the authorities.’
Parry says Liverpool were not just behind United commercially but other clubs as well.
‘Granada had a lot of expertise in this field. So it wasn’t just a case of money being ploughed into the club. We wanted to harness their knowledge and make Liverpool stronger in the long term.
‘The board agreed to sell 9.9 per cent of the club to Granada and the following year a new £22 million deal was brokered for 50 per cent of the club’s media rights, which eventually led to the creation of an in-house TV station, LFC.TV. Immediately, all of that money went into strengthening the squad to give us the platform that we hoped would make us successful.’
In the meantime, media partners proposed a breakaway European Super League. Liverpool and Parry were ‘uncomfortable’ with the idea.
‘It was permanent membership. There was no promotion or relegation, which for me betrayed the ethics of football. I was never in favour of an exclusive club. Barcelona weren’t either. I was invited by UEFA, along with the president of Barcelona, to discuss what could be done with the Champions League – how could it become more attractive? In the end, UEFA decided to follow a similar constitution to the Premier League in terms of sharing the money between all the clubs who appear in the group stages. Getting into those group stages became very important indeed. We realized that a consequence eventually would probably be that around sixteen clubs would emerge from the pack and an elite group would form. Liverpool simply had to be in that group.’
It took Houllier two and a half seasons to propel Liverpool from the mid table of the Premier League to treble cup winners and Champions League participants. In that period, he signed twenty-two new first-team players and sold or released twenty-five. That four of the sales were earlier recruitments made by him reveals that he was able to admit he was wrong in the early days.
Parry enjoyed working with Houllier. Their understanding was at a friendship level.
‘Gérard had great qualities as a human being as well as a manager,’ Parry says. ‘He was a relentless modernizer, which we needed because there was a lot to do. He was decisive. Gérard had a passionate belief in preparation and attention to detail, giving the players the best conditions to succeed. He used to say, “You can’t plan success but you can programme for success.” If you give the very best training facilities, if you work hard and if you travel in the right manner, everything will be set up and there are no excuses. I mean, we didn’t even have a kit man when Gérard arrived. Previously, Ronnie [Moran] and Sammy [Lee] used to pack them on a Friday afternoon, then Roy and the others would carry the skips into the dressing room from the team bus.’
Of Houllier’s principal strengths as a manager, Parry believes there were two outstanding features.
‘The first was his strong commitment towards having an English – preferably a local – heartbeat to the team. Gérard’s idea was to use local talent when he could and supplement that by signing players with the right ability and attitude: professionals and good people. If you look at the bare facts and analyse what his 2001 squad was built on – Gerrard, Owen, Heskey, Fowler, Carragher, Murphy, [Nick] Barmby and Redknapp – you realize he achieved that. Even in Gérard’s final season, many of those players were still there. He didn’t shift his approach and stayed true to his convictions.
‘People ask me regularly which game I look back fondly on. Many are surprised when I tell them it is Liverpool 7, Southampton 1 in January 1999. Our scorers that day were Fowler [with a hat-trick], Owen, Thompson, Carragher and Matteo: five academy graduates. The great thing about our graduates was they were all local. They weren’t bought from elsewhere. Had it been possible, they’d have stayed at Liverpool for ever.
‘The second thing about Gérard was his core values and the way he lived them: to be a winner, think team first and to be a top professional. People talk a lot about the discipline that Gérard installed: the fines for using mobiles at Melwood, being regulated for poor timekeeping. The rules were not arbitrary. They related back to the core values, where the aim was to improve communication, modernize and bring fresh thinking.
‘He believed in respect and instilling that right across the club. It was the essence of the Liverpool way and he got it. When Liverpool won everything in sight in the decades before, it would be inaccurate to say the club was always loved by everybody. But it was always respected for the way it did business and treated people. I’ll always remember having a conversation with Frank Lowe, the advertising guru, who was a big Man United fan. He recognized that United were simultaneously the most loved and most hated club, which isn’t great from a brand point of view. He realized too that people never hated Liverpool but always respected them. That for me was the Liverpool way: to respect and to be respected.’
The League Cup, the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup were all lifted during the 2000–01 season, followed by the Charity Shield and the European Super Cup. Liverpool also qualified for the Champions League. The club was back in the business of winning trophies. And yet spells where the team played twelve games in thirty-six days took their toll. The search for success must surely have had an impact on Houllier’s health. For Parry, the good times did not last long.
‘They were over almost instantly,’ he says. ‘When I left the Premier League and first moved to Liverpool, one of my good friends in the game, David Dein, told me that I should really savour the good times because the bad are always just around the corner. I thought he was exaggerating. But he was dead right. The good times in football are like your wedding day – you should never let it pass you in a blur, because it is over so quickly.’
With Liverpool slipping further and further away from the Premier League title, by 2004 it was time for Houllier to leave.
‘The day I took over from Peter Robinson [in 2000], I went to Gérard’s apartment and we started planning the future straight away. The first thing he said was, “You and I are friends. There will come a day in football where we’ll have to part. When that happens, we have to make sure we part as friends.” I thought that was a really nice thing to say. And he’s been true to his word. Gérard’s a sensible man. He knows tough decisions are made in football. The wisest people know where the pressures lie and what needs to happen when things aren’t working. It’s the nature of the beast.
‘Yet I think Gérard harboured a belief that he could turn it around. It certainly wasn’t a knee-jerk decision to let him go. In 2002, we were seven points off the title. In 2003 we were nineteen points away and in 2004, although we came fourth and got into the Champions League, we were thirty points behind. There were more than ten defeats in each of those seasons and we had won less than half of the games. Bearing in mind it was our aspiration to be winning, or at the very least be contenders, to be in a position where by Christmas we were out of the running for the title was unacceptable. There was nothing to suggest that trend was going to turn.’
Rafael Benítez, a two-time La Liga-winning manager with Valencia, was appointed as Houllier’s replacement. He was walking into a club where not everything was as it seemed. Privately, David Moores had decided to sell Liverpool, fearing the takeover of Chelsea by Roman Abramovich would heap even more financial pressure on himself.
Moores did not want Liverpool to fall behind and so admitted to Parry that if the right buyer could be found, he would step aside. At the same time, Moores also realized the capacity of Anfield desperately needed to be increased. Alternatively, Liverpool could move to a new stadium.
The Taylor Report’s dictate that football grounds in the English top flight must be all-seated arenas led to major changes at Anfield. In the space of a few years, the Kop was razed and replaced, the Kemlyn Road became the Centenary Stand and the old Anfield Road stand developed a second tier. The only terrace that wasn’t altered considerably was the main stand.
‘It was perfectly understandable that something major needed to be done in terms of safety,’ Parry says. ‘But one of the weaknesses of the rush towards building new stadiums within the old was that many, like Anfield, were too small and were in areas of the city with little room for future expansion. Had we been able to spend time thinking it through, analysing the revenues that could have been made from the Premier League, the clubs could have built bigger. Liverpool – understandably, and I must stress that – had to move quicker than most to get it done. The money had to be invested quickly. In the nineties, there was no alternative option.’
The possibility of exploring a new site closer to Liverpool’s waterfront on the Dock Road was there towards the end of the nineties but Parry advised there would not be much room to go beyond a fifty-thousand-seater stadium. He preferred the idea of staying put.
‘I genuinely wanted to see Anfield as a catalyst for the regeneration of north Liverpool. But we also saw the need to become better neighbours and build better relationships. The mistrust with the residents was enormous. When you don’t have communication, people leapt to assumptions about what the club was going to do behind everybody’s backs, none of which was true. When you spend time talking with residents, you realize their needs are not overcomplicated and their demands are not unrealistic. They expect the neighbourhood to be clean and tidy and don’t want people peeing in the garden. It’s all perfectly reasonable. When you talk to them about enhancements and regenerations, they don’t want the Sydney Opera House. They want a post office and a launderette: perfectly sensible and pragmatic demands.
‘We worked with a group called Keep Britain Tidy and got involved in other initiatives to try to build the relationship. We invested a lot of money in rebuilding houses on the road behind the Centenary Stand and tried to set an example. But then nothing happened to the stadium itself and that created suspicion.
‘The finances for the stadium were tight. It’s not the borrowing of the money that is difficult; it’s the repaying. There was a fine line because obviously you’re generating a lot of additional revenue [by increasing Anfield’s capacity] but a lot of that is dependent on how the team performs. The assumptions for the financial model were that we’d be in the Champions League for three seasons out of five, the UEFA Cup one year out of five and out of Europe for one year, which back then looked fairly conservative. David, of course, asks, “What happens if we have a blip? Where does the money then come from to rebuild the team? That’s the most important thing.” He’d seen what had happened at Leeds United, where they’d qualified for the Champions League and done really well before the whole thing imploded.
‘Sure, we could have borrowed,’ Parry continues. ‘We had the same consortium of banks that backed Arsenal [in building the Emirates Stadium] lined up. We could have done it in-house without selling the club. But David had decided to sell. His mind was made up in early 2004. It wasn’t just the concern about the stadium. We were not having a terribly good season and he was worried that he would be criticized by fans. David certainly wasn’t arrogant like other chairmen. He wasn’t thick-skinned either. He really cared and it hurt him if even two letters appeared in the Liverpool Echo criticizing him. He’d be genuinely upset. He wanted the very best for the club. He was really concerned by Abramovich coming in and all the money Chelsea were spending. David didn’t want to hold Liverpool back. So in 2004, he decided it was necessary to make a change.’
On the night of Rafael Benítez’s first game in charge of Liverpool against Grazer AK in Austria, Parry says Steve Morgan – the owner of Redrow Homes, and a major shareholder – ‘came within a whisker of acquiring the club’. Morgan even met Benítez after the game to discuss his plans.
‘David was worn down to the position where he decided it was right to sell to Steve, because they did not get on very well,’ Parry explains. ‘David agreed a price with him, which was way less than we eventually sold the club for, but when Steve went to complete due diligence he sent his accountants in only to change his mind about the price. I’m not sure whether it was a negotiation tactic or whether he had reservations about the cost of the proposed stadium redevelopment. With David, when you shake hands on a deal with him, you’ve done a deal. Having been beaten into submission to accept Morgan’s offer by other board members, he wasn’t in the mood to start another round of negotiations. So David called the whole thing off.’
While Morgan later bought Wolverhampton Wanderers, it is fair to say that Benítez achieved what appeared to be the impossible during his first season in charge: Liverpool, despite finishing fifth in the Premier League, won the Champions League for the first time since it ceased to be the European Cup, a trophy last collected twenty-one years before. Yet largely due to Liverpool’s poor league performance, critics of Benítez cited the role of captain Steven Gerrard as being more significant.
‘There’s an extraordinary desire in football to narrow success down to a binary decision,’ Parry says. ‘Steven’s contribution was immense in certain games. But so was Xabi Alonso’s, so was Luis García’s, so was Didi’s, so was Carra’s, and so, indeed, was Rafa’s. It’s all of those things coming together. It’s wrong to say one is more important than the other.
‘Rafa, to be fair, what he definitely brought to the club was not an arrogance but an inner belief. His attitude was, “You know, why can’t we win it?” He got the players to believe that as the rounds went on. Suddenly when you beat Juventus, you think, Blimey, I wonder . . .
‘The atmosphere inside Anfield in the semi-final against Chelsea surpassed anything I have witnessed before, even Saint-Étienne [before Liverpool won its first European Cup in 1977]. The following day, I could still hear the crowd ringing in my ears. I think it was Anfield’s best night. What made it even better was the Eidur Gudjohnsen miss really late in the game, which was kind of a repayment for all of Chelsea’s evil over the years. You just thought, Great!’
Under Benítez, Liverpool qualified for the Champions League five seasons in a row, winning the competition once, reaching another final, a semi-final and a quarter-final. There was also an FA Cup victory in 2006 and a second-placed Premier League finish three years later. The club reclaimed its status amongst Europe’s elite and in doing so it became more attractive to a larger range of potential buyers.
Parry recognizes that Moores’ decision to move aside slowed progress on the new stadium. Conversely, Moores did not want to sell simply to the highest bidder. He realized the stadium was key to Liverpool’s future and that any new owner must be capable of solving that issue.
‘Yes, we wanted to sell but it had to be to the right person or people,’ Parry says. ‘So we looked for someone with a track record in dealing with stadiums.’
Parry was keenest on discussions with interested parties from Dubai.
‘Not that I had particularly close contacts with Dubai but I’d visited on quite a few occasions and had seen the
way the city was developing. I knew people who’d worked for the Jumeirah Group and had seen the way they’d sprung remarkable hotels up from the ground, which were the best in the world, in a very short space of time. Dubai did things unbelievably quickly.’
Parry and Moores regretted a deal with Robert Kraft falling through. Kraft was the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots. He began negotiations a few weeks after Liverpool lifted the Champions League in 2005, gripped by the romance of the win in Istanbul.
‘David and Robert really hit it off. Robert had developed a beautiful stadium in Boston and had a great record with the Patriots as well as New England Revolution in the MLS [Major League Soccer]. There were all sorts of good reasons to go with him but most of all David really liked him. He trusted him. It was a family thing. The Krafts were decent, proper people. David was devastated when Robert woke up one morning and thought, No, I can’t do this. I think he pulled out for two reasons. The reason we were given was that a reality dawned on him that he’s from Boston and already had his hands full with two institutions there. He questioned what his affinity with Liverpool actually was. The other factor was the lack of cost control and financial fair play. As an NFL owner, he was conditioned to revenue sharing. The idea of free-for-all expenditure in the Premier League was ludicrous to him. And I can understand why.’
Kraft pulled out while Parry was with the Liverpool squad in Tokyo as they competed in the Club World Championship.
‘It wasn’t months wasted but several months that had expired working with a party to no positive end. A takeover is another job in itself aside from the other stuff you’re supposed to be doing. Throughout the process, we were still itching to win the league and get everything right on the pitch. Yet there was this prolonged uncertainty over investment. Are we going to get more? I was constantly telling Rafa, “Yes, we are still talking to new investors.” When we brought Rafa in, it seemed the right thing to tell him that David was trying to sell the club. We warned him that there might be some uncertainty.’