Saw this in the SOS thread posted by Tilly. Hadn't seen it, thought it was a good read and deserved it's own thread..... From CaughtOffside Dear Tom and George, I write to you as a lifelong red concerned at the precarious position we find ourselves in, not just in the Premier League but also in the grand scheme of things. Three long, arduous years ago the Dubai International Capital takeover of Liverpool FC hit the rocks. Everyone was crestfallen after dreams of mega money were shattered and we were left right back where we started. However, just ask it looked as though all hope was lost, up stepped two rosy-cheeked, twinkle-toothed knights in shining armour to offer us the money and the know-how to make the step up amongst the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester Utd at the summit of the game. Those men were you. Those men were liars. Three years on from your takeover of the club and there is a strong case to argue that we have actually gone backwards; we certainly don’t seem to have progressed. Of course, I am sure that you would immediately point me in the direction of the managers office if I wanted someone to blame for all this but the fact of the matter is you are at the top of the tree here and therefore everything that happens at the club happens as an extension of your control. Former U.S President Harry S. Truman always kept a sign on his desk reading “The Buck Stops Hereâ€, I think you could learn something from your compatriot by way of taking responsibility for things that occur under your ownership. Please don’t think that I am placing all of the blame at your door here because I do realise that a number of factors have contributed to our decline; poor performances, bad management, injuries and plain misfortune have all knocked us down a peg at one point or another but the real issue here, the one that keeps many a Liverpool fan awake at night, is the very real possibility that we could be witnessing an historic moment in the life of this club. This generation of Liverpool fans may very well be the last to see the club rubbing shoulders with Europe’s elite. Call me pessimistic if you will but the worst case scenario is one that you ignore at your own peril in this industry. Our illustrious past has bread ignorance amongst a generation of fans who believe our history will provide the coat tails on which we will hitch a free ride to an equally glorious future. The reality is, though, that only a serious injection of cash can take us where we want to go. If there is anything that we can learn from the likes of Leeds Utd it is that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. If we were to slip into a decline even half as severe as that of our one time rivals, you would simply never be forgiven for allowing it to happen. This brings me onto the real purpose of this letter; to question your motifs, credentials and even financial status. Firstly, I would like to say that I am hugely disappointed at your failure to live up to the promises that you made upon sealing the takeover. I suppose the fact that I bought into it in the first place is a testament to your ability to sell. However, the lack of movement thereafter has come to show that your words were just a smokescreen behind which there is very little substance. You arrived with the promise of world class players to assist the likes of Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard in driving the club to glory yet on only one occasion have you afforded Rafa Benitez the luxury of spending over £20m on a transfer, and that just so happens to have resulted in the acquisition of Fernando Torres, who exploded onto the scene and quickly established himself as the worlds best striker, tripling in value along the way. In the price bracket below that we have welcomed Javier Mascherano, Alberto Aquilani and Robbie Keane to the club all for between £15 and £20m pounds. Mascherano is another player who is arguably the best at his job in world football, while Alberto Aquilani is yet to have had enough time to establish himself but I believe him to be a fine player. Robbie Keane is a tough one to call because nobody really knows the manner in which he was signed but the fact that Rafa shipped him out so quickly shows that he does not dwell on his decisions before cutting his losses. So tell me, given the managers superb record with larger sums of money in the transfer market, why is it that you do not supply him with such funds on a more regular basis? Instead, he has been forced to operate on a relative shoestring, spending less than not only our direct rivals but also some of the clubs below us in the pecking order. Even with the managerial talents that Rafa possesses it is almost impossible to acquire top class players with the kind of money that you have provided in a market that is always inflating. There are, of course a few exceptions; Daniel Agger, Yossi Benayoun, Peter Crouch, Craig Bellamy and Alvaro Arbeloa to name but a few. However, the majority of these budget signings have been moved on in the name of funding bigger, better signings. The issue here is that when you sacrifice three quality players to sign one world class name you lose your strength in depth which results in the kind of thin squad that has seen us drop way off the pace this season. Many people are quick to slate Rafa Benitez for his ventures in the transfer market; figures like £200m are banded around freely as the amount of money that he has poured into his signings without any return. This is both ignorant and incorrect. If you completely analyse Rafa’s transfer history then you will see, as I have briefly explained, that his record with big money is fantastic. The thing that tarnishes his name is that he has repeatedly had to gamble on plucking players from obscurity and placing them in front of the expecting eyes of the Anfield faithful. I don’t know a manager in the world that can take a team to the top in this fashion. You wouldn’t buy a Hyundai and enter it into the Nascar Sprint Cup, so how do you expect us so compete at this highest level with second rate players? It seems to me that when you purchased this club you bit off more than you could chew. I am not for one second going to pretend that I possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of American sports but I think I’m probably right in saying that the passion and personal involvement of a Liverpool FC fan with their club is unrivalled worldwide and far exceeds anything that you expected when you arrived. I also think that you entered this venture as businessmen first, and sports fans second. In this sense it is clear that you could never be as emotionally affected by the demise of this club as the loyal supporters that have dedicated their lives to it. Perhaps all you are sensitive to is the weight of your wallet. If you were around ten years ago I think you may well have been in a position to really drive this club forward. However, such is the amount of money involved in today’s game it seems that, as wealthy as you may be, you are small fries in comparison with fat cats such as Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Chelsea and Manchester City respectively. Even the likes of Lakshmi Mittal and family, the owners of Championship club QPR, have a more significant fortune than both of you put together. The modern game, then, seems to be a playground exclusive to the super rich; I can almost picture Mr Abramovich and co. sitting at the top of the climbing frame while you struggle to reach the first wrung. As much as it may sadden me I have to admit that passion and desire count for very little in the quest for silverware these days. The game has changed and it seems that the only way to compete with the best on the field, is to compete with them off of it. Whoever has the biggest financial muscle will, more often than not, come out on top and so reap the rewards of their investment, if you can even call it that. We may now have reached the point where the owners of a football club are not just looking for a return on their investment, but more so the pure thrill of owning their own club and being able to say that they are the best in the world. Top flight clubs are now becoming pawns on the rich man’s chess board and in 20 years time I expect most Premier League clubs to be under the ownership of people for whom money is no object. Given a choice everyone would rather see honours earned than honours bought. However, if it means a long awaited trophy taking pride of place in the cabinet then the fans won’t care how it gets there, just so long as it does. The insatiable hunger for success far outweighs pride and morals here and I think this club is now ready to accept the new money route to glory. At the last count your combined wealth amounted to about £1bn, around 12th place in the British football rich list. In terms of Premier League clubs there seems to be a direct correlation between your place in the rich list, and your place in the table. For this reason I do not see us ever breaking the super-rich stranglehold under your ownership. Your relatively meagre net worth coupled with the debts you have put the club under mean that while other teams progress we will continue to stagnate and even decline. In fact, going by rich list itself, we would be placed behind Manchester City, QPR, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Everton, Celtic, Watford and Manchester Utd in terms of the respective wealth of British football club owners. Even Cheltenham town owner Simon Keswick has a £966m fortune to rival that of yours combined. I can do little more to get my point across here than to publish a table of the 30 richest people in British football. So I shall. 1. Shekh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nayan Manchester City £15bn 2. Lakshmi Mittal and family QPR £12.5bn 3. Roman Abramovich Chelsea £7bn 4. Joe Lewis Tottenham Hotspur £2.5bn 5. Bernie and Slavica Ecclestone QPR £2.4bn 6. Stanley Kroenke Arsenal £2.245bn 7. Alisher Usmanov Arsenal £1.5bn 8 = Lord Grantchester & The Moores Family Everton £1.2bn 8 = Dermot Desmond Celtic £1.2bn 10= Lord Ashcroft Watford £1.1bn 10= Malcolm Glazer and family Manchester United £1.1bn 12. Simon Keswick Cheltenham Town £966m 13. Trevor Hemmings Preston North End £900m 14. Mike Ashley Newcastle United £800m 15. Randy Lerner Aston Villa £750m 16. Tom Hicks Liverpool £700m 17. The Walker family Blackburn Rovers £660m 18. Mohammed Al Fayed Fulham £650m 19. Sir David Murray Glasgow Rangers £600m 20. David Sullivan Birmingham City £450m 21. Steve Morgan Wolves £400m 22= Sir Martyn Arbib & family Swindon Town £350m 22= David Gold & family Birmingham City £350m 22= John Madejski Reading £350m 25. George Gillett Liverpool £300m 26. Stephen Lansdown Bristol City £280m 27. Peter & Denise Coates Stoke City £275m 28. Sir Elton John Watford £235m 29. Danny Fiszman Arsenal £220m 30= Marcus Evans Ipswich Town £200m The above data was collected in January last year and I appreciate that you have since, or are about to boost your net worth with the sales of the Texas rangers (£310m) and the Montreal Canadians (£330m). This would take your combined fortune up to around the £1.6bn mark. Although this wouldn’t get you a table with a Sheikh, it is certainly a significant amount of money which begs another question altogether; why aren’t you using it to invest in Liverpool FC? Here we have two men who arrived at Anfield with promises of big names and a big stadium without the big debt that we so feared. Unfortunately, you have failed to live up to all of those promises and worse still you have dragged the good name of this club through the mud along the way by repeatedly washing your dirty laundry in public and embarrassing us with stunts like Klinsmann-gate. If Bill Shankly were around today he’d be utterly appalled at what has happened to “the Liverpool way.†Surely, with the sale of your aforementioned assets as well as some others (property etc.), there is no better time to be focussing the majority of your resources and attention on Liverpool FC. You have done so much damage since arriving and here you have a chance to make amends, so what’s stopping you? You came to the club promising that top class players would follow you through the door yet looking at today’s squad and comparing it with the one that Rafa inherited, there seems to be little difference in terms of quality. We still have a few great players who are dragged down by the incompetence they are surrounded with. You have had the opportunity to do something about this but every time the transfer window opens there seems to be another excuse; the latest being that January was a poor market and offered little quality. It certainly offered more quality than we currently possess. You have just handed the manager a lengthy contract yet you aren’t providing him with the resources he needs to do his job properly. In this business you get out what you put in yet you seem reluctant to put enough in. Some people believe that your lack of activity is an attempt to starve Rafa of funds so to force him out without actually firing him. This would mean that you could avoid paying off his remaining contract and put any money that you saved into a kitty for a new managerial appointment to utilise. I realise that you have publicly stated that you are fully committed to Rafa and his new contract but you’ll have to forgive me if I am a little reluctant to accept your word as gospel. It was just yesterday that I listened to a radio interview with West Ham co-owner David Gold who clearly and honestly outlined all of the club’s weaknesses and how they planned to address them. This kind of approach is so refreshing in an industry where secrets and lies are rife. I do not expect you to emulate this kind of openness but I would certainly appreciate it if you would refrain from deflecting the questions put to you and respond with honesty and realism. What I would really like to know is what your future plans are for the club. So far the new stadium takes the form of a small mound in the middle of Stanley Park and the massive debts continue to anchor our progress. Given the pace at which the game is evolving there is no time to dwell on decisions and I see only two possible outcomes for the future of this club. The first outcome is that you follow up on your way overdue promises of taking this club to the next level and heavily invest in our future. The second, god forbid, is that you continue to starve the club of the nutrients it needs to grow and Sir Alex Ferguson finally succeeds in knocking Liverpool “off their f*****g perchâ€. There is simply no middle ground here and we have reached a point where it is glaringly obvious that you need to make a big decision; either you are with us for the long run and you are prepared to invest, or you are willing to cut your losses and leave. I have to add a third outcome at this point as I think it is most likely that you will, in fact, continue to operate as you are in the hope that someone comes along with a big enough offer to send you packing with a nice profit because as I stated before, you are businessmen first and sports fans second. To you, profit is everything and it doesn’t matter how many people you hurt along the way. This brings me nicely onto my next question; why won’t you sell? I appreciate that you entered this venture with a vision of increasing the value of the club and then at some point in the future passing it on for a significant profit. However, for whatever reason you have failed to achieve your goals and have alienated the almost everyone involved with the club along the way. It has now reached the point where you have become figures of hate in your own organisation so I have to ask, why is it that you refuse to just up and leave? I’m sure you haven’t been short of offers and although they probably don’t meet your ambitious requirements you probably wouldn’t be out of pocket. Are you trying to protect your reputation as businessmen, or do you actually still believe you can compete with the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester Utd, Manchester City, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Inter Milan etc? If so, how do you intend to do that without putting your hands in your pockets and providing the necessary funds? To go full circle, I would again like to remind you that the possibility of a serious decline in the fortunes of this football club is currently playing on everyone’s minds. I’m sure I don’t need to give you a lecture on the basics of business but the fact of the matter is that an organisation with debts like ours has to meet its repayment demands. If the organisation starts to fail in the industry it operates in then the money it relies on to finance the repayments of just isn’t there and this can result in the forced sale of assets. In this particular set of circumstances those assets are the likes of Pepe Reina, Daniel Agger, Javier Mascherano, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres amongst others. There is also the possibility that some of these superstars could be driven away by their hunger to succeed and that too would be as a direct result of your actions. Should you allow this kind of deterioration to happen you will forever be associated with the death of the most successful British football club in history. That, surely, will be more damaging to your reputation than simply cutting your losses and leaving. As I stated before you will also never, ever be forgiven for allowing this occur when you have had every opportunity to prevent it. Don’t think of this as a threat but more so a warning. I would greatly value your honest and sincere response to this letter. Please don’t treat me like a member of the media circus and try to fob me off by spouting figures and pointing the finger at the credit crisis or the manager. I may not be a business guru but I am also no mug and I know more about the football industry and Liverpool FC than you could ever dream of. I have not dedicated my life to the game and to this club to be mugged off by two fabricators who believe that their position allows them to get away with doing or saying anything they like. I therefore don’t want to hear about the credit crisis, if it affected you so badly that it halted our progress then perhaps you aren’t wealthy enough to be in the game at all. It didn’t seem to affect other clubs around us who continued to grow. I also don’t want to be sold the promise of a £100m investment in the near future; I have already heard about this possibility and exciting though it may be for a quick fix, it is a minuscule sum to be discussing when talking about the long term future of the club. All that is left, then, is the truth. The truth that most of us already know but are yet to hear from the horse’s mouth. I implore you, not only for my benefit but for the benefit of everyone who loves this club so dearly, to reply with honesty, sincerity and realism. Just as it is a players duty to sign autographs outside the stadium for a paying fan who has waited for hours in the rain, it is your duty to take the time to respond to letters like mine, from a paying fan who has spent hours trying to express my concerns about your involvement with the club. Lastly, I would just like to remind you of the value, and indeed power, of the fans of Liverpool Football Club. You may be the people who have the final say on internal matters, who sign the cheques and who balance the books but we, the fans, are the real owners of this club. Without its supporters a football club is nothing and we just so happen to be a very special set of supporters. We can move mountains with our voices, make or break a player with our support, keep a manager in his seat or if we so wished, even topple him. Do not think that just because you are the owners of this club that you have all the power. You are very fortunate that you have a good manager in place who has managed to milk every last drop of ability out of his team and have them overachieve in the form of a Champions League title, an FA Cup, a European Super Cup and an impressive title challenge. However, our deficiencies are now starting to show, as are the reasons for them and to quote one of my favourite films, we’re very, pissed off about it. We, as a collective of fans, are the most powerful entity involved at Liverpool FC and should we so wish we could make your day to day job almost impossible. Should the unthinkable happen and this club continues to slide then you will no doubt incur the wrath of an army of hurting, smarting Liverpool supporters. You will have no choice then but to pack up and leave with your tail between your legs because we would rather take matters into our own hands and run the club honestly than see it ravaged by the greed and mistakes of two men who bit off more than they could chew. I hope I have made my points clear and I look forward to receiving your response. I appreciate that you are busy and that I may be waiting a while but I expect a response nonetheless. Please bare in mind that your answers are not just for me, but for the millions of Liverpool fans who are desperate for the smoke to clear so they can finally see what the future holds for the club they so dearly love. Yours truly, Liam Tomkin
I have put in italics my thoughts on this: Dear Tom and George, Of course, I am sure that you would immediately point me in the direction of the managers office if I wanted someone to blame for all this but the fact of the matter is you are at the top of the tree here and therefore everything that happens at the club happens as an extension of your control. Former U.S President Harry S. Truman always kept a sign on his desk reading “The Buck Stops Hereâ€, I think you could learn something from your compatriot by way of taking responsibility for things that occur under your ownership. It is not a job of an owner or chairman about what happens on the pitch so the buck does not stop with them. If they were involved in everything going on on the pitch, people be giving out saying, thats not your job thats the managers. Leave on pitch matters to him. No winning here for the two of them. As for pointing in the direction of the manager all blame, surely if they thought that they’d of sacked him – OBVIOUSLY! Our illustrious past has bread ignorance amongst a generation of fans who believe our history will provide the coat tails on which we will hitch a free ride to an equally glorious future. I don’t know anybody who thinks this. The reality is, though, that only a serious injection of cash can take us where we want to go. I would agree with this Firstly, I would like to say that I am hugely disappointed at your failure to live up to the promises that you made upon sealing the takeover. Yes i agree false promises where made and it is deeply disappointing on only one occasion have you afforded Rafa Benitez the luxury of spending over £20m on a transfer, Eh robbie Keane cost over 20m..... In the price bracket below that we have welcomed Javier Mascherano, Alberto Aquilani and Robbie Keane to the club all for between £15 and £20m pounds. Seems to have forgotten about a ridiculous fee of 17m for a right back but however Alberto Aquilani is yet to have had enough time to establish himself but I believe him to be a fine player. Cannot see where that believe comes from and lets be honest, so far he has been a waste of money. He was bought for this season for a title push and has barely played, so far a failure! Robbie Keane is a tough one to call because nobody really knows the manner in which he was signed Yes we do, Rafa wanted and signed him So tell me, given the managers superb record with larger sums of money in the transfer market, what is superb about it??? Torres and Masch have been good yes but money has been wasted or over spent on Aqua, Keane and the for some reason not mentioned Johnson and thats only talking in this price bracket. why is it that you do not supply him with such funds on a more regular basis? Instead, he has been forced to operate on a relative shoestring, spending less than not only our direct rivals but also some of the clubs below us in the pecking order. Even with the managerial talents that Rafa possesses it is almost impossible to acquire top class players with the kind of money that you have provided in a market that is always inflating. There are, of course a few exceptions; Daniel Agger, Yossi Benayoun, Peter Crouch, Craig Bellamy and Alvaro Arbeloa to name but a few. However, the majority of these budget signings have been moved on in the name of funding bigger, better signings. The issue here is that when you sacrifice three quality players to sign one world class name you lose your strength in depth which results in the kind of thin squad that has seen us drop way off the pace this season. I believe them not to have the money-thats the reason Rafa’s transfer history then you will see, as I have briefly explained, that his record with big money is fantastic. You have not explained and have left out certain things to paint your picture better I don’t know a manager in the world that can take a team to the top in this fashion. You wouldn’t buy a Hyundai and enter it into the Nascar Sprint Cup, so how do you expect us so compete at this highest level with second rate players? Ah give over, he has guys he has splashed 20m on sitting on the bench while he continues to play these “hyundai’s†you talk of. Lucas on before Aqua and last season in games before Xabi until Xabi made it impossible to drop him. Also he brings on Ngog for torres when we chase a goal in a must win game. Last season he was brining on Ngog before Keane in games yet he spent 20m on him! Come off it, this is absolute rubbish im reading here! It seems to me that when you purchased this club you bit off more than you could chew. I agreee with this probably right in saying that the passion and personal involvement of a Liverpool FC fan with their club is unrivalled worldwide and far exceeds anything that you expected when you arrived. Very vain and narrow minded to say this I also think that you entered this venture as businessmen first, and sports fans second. 100% agree, as do all business men and 90% of chairmen worldwide id imagine. Naive to think they were sports fans and life long followers of the club. Perhaps all you are sensitive to is the weight of your wallet. Well Liverpool has cost em nothing but money so if this is the case, they’d be silly to be holding on to it. I can almost picture Mr Abramovich and co. sitting at the top of the climbing frame while you struggle to reach the first wrung. They never claimed to be an abramovich and I for one certainly wouldn’t like someone like that in over us and us buy a league like Chelsea with ridiculous spending. However, they did say they had funds and if we needed someone they’d have no problem giving the money to rafa to buy that someone, I do not think they have lived up to this and it was a complete lie. Given a choice everyone would rather see honours earned than honours bought. However, if it means a long awaited trophy taking pride of place in the cabinet then the fans won’t care how it gets there, just so long as it does. The insatiable hunger for success far outweighs pride and morals here and I think this club is now ready to accept the new money route to glory. We are damning these guys for not being this and yet saying its a disgrace to be like this but only now we are ready to accept this. I agree about the state of football and that this money business is ruining it and mega rich people etc but to use that against the two yanks as some sort of go at them is crazy – they never claimed to provide endless money so why beat them with a stick about it. They did however as i said, claim to be well able to provide amounts for any key players and that was a downright lie. Although this wouldn’t get you a table with a Sheikh, it is certainly a significant amount of money which begs another question altogether; why aren’t you using it to invest in Liverpool FC? If they have this money, I agree, fair enough, why aren’t they using it to even pay off the loans they have taken to buy us? I mean why would they take these loans if they had all this money – it makes no sense. Unfortunately, you have failed to live up to all of those promises and worse still you have dragged the good name of this club through the mud along the way by repeatedly washing your dirty laundry in public and embarrassing us with stunts like Klinsmann-gate. If Bill Shankly were around today he’d be utterly appalled at what has happened to “the Liverpool way.†If shankly were around today u should ask him how the club treated him when he left and see what he thinks of the “Liverpool Wayâ€. And I agree this rubbish with Kilnsman was a disgrace and the yanks have a lot to answer for about this. However, it has been rafa many times who has aired stuff in public and brought affairs out through the media. The yanks ahve also done it and its sickening, things should be kept in house but you writing this are very much defending rafa is a lot of things, he was the one who brought things out in public many times, yet where is the criticism of him, this whole letter is judgemental from one side of things and not subjective, you’re looking at it with one eye closed. You have done so much damage since arriving and here you have a chance to make amends, so what’s stopping you? I would agree they have not lived up to promises, have done damage and should be making amends especially if they have the funds to do so – if they do though is what im not sure about You came to the club promising that top class players would follow you through the door They did do this and its an outright lie on their part, no doubting that yet looking at today’s squad and comparing it with the one that Rafa inherited, there seems to be little difference in terms of quality. We still have a few great players who are dragged down by the incompetence they are surrounded with. You have had the opportunity to do something about this but every time the transfer window opens there seems to be another excuse; the latest being that January was a poor market and offered little quality. It certainly offered more quality than we currently possess. Rafa still picks and plays shit players ahead of good players - this is not the Yanks fault You have just handed the manager a lengthy contract yet you aren’t providing him with the resources he needs to do his job properly. In this business you get out what you put in yet you seem reluctant to put enough in. Fully agree Some people believe that your lack of activity is an attempt to starve Rafa of funds so to force him out without actually firing him. This would mean that you could avoid paying off his remaining contract and put any money that you saved into a kitty for a new managerial appointment to utilise. This is all guess work and hearsay not saying it isn’t true but would seem a bizarre tactic Sir Alex Ferguson finally succeeds in knocking Liverpool “off their f*****g perchâ€. Think thqat was achieved a long time ago unfortunately There is simply no middle ground here and we have reached a point where it is glaringly obvious that you need to make a big decision; either you are with us for the long run and you are prepared to invest, or you are willing to cut your losses and leave. Most sensible thing in this letter and it has to be one of these options they take. And I wish they ****ing would cause we’re going nowhere fast in the current situation and their lies have been allowed pass for long enough. Either put up or shut up as it where. I have to add a third outcome at this point as I think it is most likely that you will, in fact, continue to operate as you are in the hope that someone comes along with a big enough offer to send you packing with a nice profit because as I stated before, you are businessmen first and sports fans second. To you, profit is everything and it doesn’t matter how many people you hurt along the way. I hope this is not what they are doing but at the same time I don’t mind if it is as long as someone does come along SOON with an offer and get rid of them and they then manage the club correctly I would greatly value your honest and sincere response to this letter. Please don’t treat me like a member of the media circus and try to fob me off by spouting figures and pointing the finger at the credit crisis or the manager. I may not be a business guru but I am also no mug and I know more about the football industry and Liverpool FC than you could ever dream of. I have not dedicated my life to the game and to this club to be mugged off by two fabricators who believe that their position allows them to get away with doing or saying anything they like. I therefore don’t want to hear about the credit crisis, if it affected you so badly that it halted our progress then perhaps you aren’t wealthy enough to be in the game at all. It didn’t seem to affect other clubs around us who continued to grow. I also don’t want to be sold the promise of a £100m investment in the near future; I have already heard about this possibility and exciting though it may be for a quick fix, it is a minuscule sum to be discussing when talking about the long term future of the club. How on Earth can you just write off the GLOBAL credit crisis and say that’s no reason for anything when clearly a crises of money worldwide impacts on, eh duh, money!!! We, as a collective of fans, are the most powerful entity involved at Liverpool FC and should we so wish we could make your day to day job almost impossible. Ah God, this and hte paragraphs before it - give me a break will ya!!! Should the unthinkable happen and this club continues to slide then you will no doubt incur the wrath of an army of hurting, smarting Liverpool supporters. This is a direct threat and quite frankly thuggery and considering the hatred for the owners already, whatever could be done by fans would already have been done. Liam Tomkin No offence but this letter is a load of bullshit. Ok i agree the yanks have lied through their teeth about certain things and not done what they said and also treated the club and fans terribly. They have been nothing but bad for hthe club and i totally agree, either they invest and make up for their mistakes or they **** off. But some of the stuff in here is absolute nonsense. How on earth can one totally disregard the worst credit crunch of a generation – I mean its ridiculous. Full blown organisation like Banks have blown up and not anglo and the like, im talking Lehmann brothers here – one of the worlds largest and most successful investment banks and this guy is saying the credit crunch counts for nothing – get real will ya? The two lads have been a disgrace, no doubt but this is rubbish – some of the questions in it need answering but the rest of it is horse shite and the defence of Rafa while ignoring the shite he has done with things in his control is ludicrous
@GDLUCKXABI Read through a bit of that and you lost me at one of your first comments. Nonsense. It really is a sad day, and an indictment of some of the support we have, when a supposed Liverpool supporter will actually take time to critique the writings of a Liverpool supporter who has taken a lot of time to put his ownership worries to the club, in an attempt to try and help it. You're on a Rafa out mission - we all know that. But to judge this letter to the club as a "load of bullshit" is quite simply disgraceful. Get this into your head - the owners are killing Liverpool FC. Is that clear enough for you? This trancends any pro or anti managerial bullsh*t. You are quite simply so blinded by your stance you will actually criticise something that is attempting to do good. Which is a bloody hell of a lot more than you do.
Im not a supposed Liverpool supporter, im a complete one. I dont like the owners one bit. They have been nothing but bad for the club and some of the things in the letter i agree with - if you read all I wrote and comments I madew you would see that but major parts of that letter are quite frankly stupid IMO. To write off a credit crunch as having no impact on credit........the meaning is in the phrase for fook sake! Anyway, I do think the owners have been pricks and need to go or else invest, agree fully with that. They clearly dont have the money to do so. The letter also praises lots of things about rafa and i have criticised them. You would do well tor ead my comments before calling me a supposed Liverpool fan! Also this guys ownership worries to try help the club - he is threatening the owners and talking like a child for many parts of it - if thats helping I am the Pope. Anyway, i dont mean the letter is a load of bullshit but much of it is, some decent points are raised, others are silly and one sided.
So it's a load of bullsh1t but you don't mean it's a load of bullsh1t So what is it just so we can clear it up