When I finished the last blog I had expected, or at least hoped, that by the time I got around to posting this one, we would have secured at least one of our main summer transfer targets by now. Despite yet another week of the usual headlines such “Liverpool close on Keane/Barry signing” it’s just been a case of same shit, different day and by the end of the week the only signing we had managed to secure was David Egg-Nog.
I don’t mean any disrespect to the lad, he’s 19, 6ft 3inches tall, apparently lightening quick and with a very good goal-scoring record at youth level for France. So he sounds like a very decent prospect for the future and I obviously hope he develops into a star player for us. But to be honest I think we already have a youth squad full of very promising prospects for the future and until some of these lads start to break into our first team, I find it hard to get too excited about us adding another one. My main concern at the moment is with the present and I was expecting that during the past week we would have secured a signing with a bit more significance then Noggin the Nog!
Our potential signing of Gareth Barry looks further away than ever, in fact it’s beginning to look extremely doubtful at this stage but it does look like the signing of Robbie Keane is very much on the cards. I happen to work a short distance away from Keane’s family home and a couple of the locals I work with, who are near neighbours of the family, have told me quite definitely that this deal was done by the middle of last week and that only the medical remains to be done.
That said, I’m still not going to count my chickens until I see Rafa holding a press conference to unveil him as a Liverpool player because with Rick Parry in charge of our transfer dealings, anything can happen and usually does! As a Chief Executive this guy is about as useful as a hedgehog in a condom factory and I wouldn’t trust him to go down to the local shop to buy a pint of milk, much less have him in charge of multi-million pound player transfers.
I covered this ground in a recent blog when I questioned the sanity of the people in charge at Liverpool University who awarded this moron an honorary degree so I won’t go over it again. However, as they are practically joined at the hip, a number of people asked me why I hadn’t given any mention of the incompetence of David Moores during that blog. My explanation for that was that firstly I focused totally on Parry in that blog because he was the one receiving the degree and secondly is the fact that I have had plenty to say about Moores in previous blogs.
Again, I won’t recover old ground at this stage but I can sum up my thoughts on our former chairman quite briefly. Basically the man sickens me. I think his sense of decency was far-outweighed by his sense of greed and he sold us out. So as far as the role he played in creating the current mess at our club, I think he is as guilty as a nun doing press-ups in a cucumber field.
And clearly I am not the only one who feels that way. Another who shares this opinion is a great friend of ours here at Kopblog known to us by his username of AnimalCol. Col sent me an e-mail a couple of weeks back outlining his own thoughts on David Moores and as you will see, he goes in to great detail and as usual makes some excellent points. I think you guys will find his opinion interesting, so I’ve copied it below.
My opinion, for what it is worth is that both Parry and Moores are to blame for our current situation, but Moores a lot more than Parry.
My reasons for this are as follows. Moores was appointed on the 18th September 1991. He sold the club in Feb 2007 to the Muppets after 16 years in charge. While he was the main man we won the following:
? No division 1 / Premier League Titles
? Charity Shield = 2
? League Cup = 3
? FA Cup = 3
? Champions League = 1
? UEFA Cup = 1
? Super Cup = 1
This sounds great (apart from the League performances) until you compare it with the previous 16 years when we won the following:
? 10 Division 1 titles
? 2 Fa Cups
? 9 Charity Shield (3 shared)
? 4 League Cups
? 4 European Cups
? 1 UFEA Cup
? 1 European Super Cup
Now I know which 16 years I’d prefer to have as my record. As far as I’m concerned Liverpool Football Club started on a slow decline since Moores took the top job and the facts show this.
He, along with the board, made the decisions which resulted in the appointment of our managers since that time. Under Moores we have had:
? Graham Souness from 1991 to 1994
? Roy Evans 1994 to 1998
? Gerard Houllier in 1998 to 2004
And Rafa from this time onwards.
Souness was a great servant of the club when he was a player, but he ripped the heart out of it when he was a manager. Evans was a good man, who liked to play attacking football and was well versed in the LFC ways but he was too nice, and allowed the club to become too influenced by the players. However, he was shat on when GH was brought in as joint no 1. And that was a very relevant mistake – you can’t have two bosses (and you think he would have learned from this in the negotiations with the yanks). I thought that GH wasn’t a great signing when we got him, but I held up my hands the following year when he did the treble. But that was an Indian summer, and not representative of how good bad or indifferent GH was as a manager. He was brought in because it was recognised that Evan’s had been too easy on the players, but GH and Thommo went to the opposite extreme. An example was their treatment of Robbie Fowler which was a disgrace. If you know the story here you’ll see that there was a lot of backhanded stuff going on with GH trying to get articles written in the press about Fowler to ease his passage out of the club. The Liverpool Way?????.
The one good managerial decision made under his tenure was to appoint Rafa. But this was done after the players were canvassed about the most impressive team that they had faced during a European campaign. Based on this they appointed Rafa. So the only credit that Parry and Moores can take from this is that they asked players opinions. As usual, the players did the work for them. And in Rafa we finally have a decent manager of the Shankly / Paisley / Fagan / Daglish mode. But the club are failing him by not providing cash and a stable platform for him to do his job.
With all of the money coming into the club why couldn’t we make a better effort to keep up with Arsenals and Man Utds? You can say that we spent our money on players, but I think this is a total cop out and short sighted. Managers are paid to manage. They should plan for the future and ensure that they have a vision. Moores (and latterly Parry) didn’t do this. Unless Moore’s vision was to sell the club and make a shit load of money from it. And I think that that was the case. My reason for thinking this is the way the whole sale to the yanks was handled (with Moore’s benefiting from an extra 8 million by selling to the yanks).
Now, I have absolutely no problem with someone trying to get as much money for their assets as they can. If someone offered me 10% extra for my house when I was selling it I don’t think I’d think too hard about selling to the highest bidder. But what has sickened me, and I mean totally sickened me, is the “poor me” shite that was spouted by Moores (who remains a paid member of the LFC board of directors). In an article in the echo he is distraught at how the yanks are handling themselves and is soooo sad for the club. HE IS THE MAN SOLD THE CLUB TO THEM!! For an extra 8 million over what DIC were going to pay. And now he wants sympathy? I felt that the article was incredible, that a man wants to whinge about how sad he is over a totally crap business decision that he made. Seriously!
Can you imagine the chief executive of any company saying what he said? He didn’t do a due diligence on the two guys, didn’t know Tom Hicks, took their word that they had the best interests of the club at heart. This article makes him out to be either an incredibly stupid man or a total liar. Or maybe both. (click here)
If he was prepared to consider two owners of the club buying it from him why didn’t he consider the same solution. Why did he continue to deal with Gillett who told him he wanted to buy the club but then had to bring Tom Hicks on board because he couldn’t afford the club (just like himself). Did he not remember the lesson of having two bosses when GH and RE were in charge – or did he have a memory lapse and was this real or just convenient?
By way of a bit of background, he had plenty of offers on the purchase of the club, from Steve Morgan and others. But he wouldn’t have made much money from those deals. He was prepared to sell a % of the club to the notable Thaksin Shinawatra, a man who hasn’t exactly got the best human rights record and Man City’s current owner. Would this have been in line with the Liverpool way? We also tried to sell to the Kraft family, pretty much anyone who would be interested in purchasing the club was canvassed. And there wasn’t really any bites. But the PR Machine stated that Moores was taking his time to make the right decision for the future of the club. Then DIC came to have a look and we got the PR again that this was a great company who really cared about LFC etc. And out of the blue the americans came waving their chequebook and all of a sudden it didn’t seem like DIC were the best, the americans were. Was I the only one who nearly shat myself with fear when I heard that we were a great “franchise”. How much time did Moores take to make the decision to sell to two men, whom he knew very little about. Was this really in the best interests of the club?
One of the things Moores states in the interview is ““If I could have afforded to take the club forward I would have done, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the sort of money you need for a new stadium and £30-40m a year for new players”. This is where his management comes in, and the appointment of Parry to the CEO position. Parry should be the money man, the guy who gets the club money from merchandising, leveraging the brand etc. And he’s done fuck all. Now I think that Tom Hicks is a total spanner, but I do agree with him over one thing. Parry’s performance since taking over the reigns of the club has been appalling. And Rafa still doesn’t have 30 to 40 mill a year for players (unless he sells).
If you compare Parrys performance to Peter Kenyon when he was at United you’ll see a marked difference. People laughed at the stupid united fans buying ManU wine amongst other ideas but the bottom line was that it generated revenue. They made money out of all of their assets including their name, and not just out of their players and what they won. Don’t forget that up till the early 1990’s man u had done nothing for years in the league, we were streets ahead of them. But they’ve done ok since then at turning the clubs performance around both on and off the pitch. Arsenal have moved from Highbury to the 60,500 capacity Emirates and signed a 100m naming rights deal under David Dein’s watch. This will make them the money they need to compete.
Parry couldn’t even satisfy a demand for LFC shirts for the CL final in 2005 from Reebok……… And what has he achieved from 2005 to move us further forward. Selling our club to the yanks and nearly losing Stevie G due to not doing his job right.
During the time that Moores had the club “in trust for LFC Fans” (and had Parry as our CEO) Anfield has not been transformed to compete with the financial clout of the other big clubs. We are currently 6th in the premiership for ground capacity. And if you look at the attached link you’ll see that our new 60,000 stadium in Stanley park will still be a smaller stadium compared to many of our competitors. (click here)
Now this information is not totally accurate, it’s a little out of date, but what is accurate is the current stadium capacity of the grounds and the other clubs intentions for their stadiums. Suddenly a 60,000 stadium seems a little small. And of all of the other clubs on this list the only one I think that could compete with United on out and out capacity would be Liverpool. If we built a 100,000 seater stadium we’d be able to fill it.
There is many ways we can generate money for this club, some nice some not so nice. We can sell naming rights to our new stadium, look at signing some top class players to generate revenues from their naming rights (that’s the main reason Madrid want Ronaldo and Man u don’t want to sell him) amongst other things. This will not happen quickly enough under Parry’s pathetic reign at the top. And what has this got to do with Moores? Well he backed Parry after Hicks called for his head. So did the Gillett’s, but this was purely to piss Hicks off. I can guarantee you that if the yanks were getting on ok Parry would be out on his arse. Hopefully they stay friendly enough over the coming months for this to happen. But Moores backed Parry out of loyalty. Well, he did hide behind Parry any time there was any flack directed at the club.
Also Parry is earning massive wages. An except from this BBC article tells all (click here) “Rick Parry, the chief executive, has been well rewarded for it. The day before the takeover the old board agreed to pay him a bonus of £500,000, some of it no doubt notching up all those air miles going to Thailand and Dubai seeking an investor. Parry earned £388,500 and was entitled to a 60% bonus. This means that despite the loss Liverpool made he will make more than £1m. Parry’s contract also says that if there is a takeover he needs two years’ notice”. Is his performance worth 1 Million pounds approx per year? I think not.
So what has this got to do with Moores? The bottom line is that if Moores had gotten someone with proper business knowledge in to run Liverpool we’d be flying now. There would be enough revenue coming into the club to fund players, stadiums etc. As it currently stands we are 10th in the Deloitte Football Money league behind Arsenal, Chelsea and United as well as other European Clubs. Barcelona doubled their revenues since 2002/ 2003 so what did they do, what are we doing to do the same. As long as Parry is involved I’d say not. He can’t even organise enough shirts for the online LFC website during the biggest football match under Moores control of the club.(click here)
So in my humble opinion Moores doesn’t care as much as he lets on, and hasn’t got the integrity to call his sale of the club to the yanks what it was – a business deal. He presided over a period of downfall of our club from being the most successful in England (and English club in Europe at the time) to where we are now. The fallout from Heysel cannot be blamed for this, United and Arsenal (and Everton who was doing ok in the league at this stage also) were also banned from European Competition for the same period we were. And we were winning leagues, cups and doubles during this time under Kenny so we were well placed to go forward. Hillsborough may have cast a long shadow over the club but it shouldn’t have changed it as a business.
Moores has also been involved in the appointment of in my opinion, an inept CEO in Parry who is paid massive wages and has to be given 2 years notice to get rid of him. Moores is the number one reason the club is in the state it’s in at the moment because of who he sold it to. But he’s 88 million richer and a lifetime member of the board. Not bad for a piss poor performance, is it?
Apologies that this blog has turned into yet another epic, but I think it was worth it and there should be plenty there for you guys to mull over, check out the “click here” links by the way, I think you will find them interesting. Of course, opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one and everyone thinks that everyone else’s stinks! So there may be some people who feel that AnimalCol or myself are being unduly harsh on Moores or indeed Parry (ok, maybe that’s stretching things a bit too far!), but if there is anybody out there who would care to mount a defence on their part then as ever you can e-mail me by using the link on the left-hand side of the page and I can assure you I will give your views equal prominence on a future blog.
Anyway, I’ll sign off for now and I hope that in the next blog we will be getting back to the football and judging the merits of the Robbie Keane signing.
Keep the Faith
