Liverpool co-owner Tom Hick claims he expects to make four times the money he invested when the club is sold.
He and co-owner George Gillett officially announced LFC is for sale yesterday, appointing Martin Broughton as chairman to oversee the sale.
In an interview with Wall Street Journal the Texan said “I should make four times my money.”
Staggeringly, he claims he expects the Club to be sold for between £600m to £800m, saying “Liverpool will be the most profitable investment I’ve ever made.”
Hicks and Gillett bought the Club in February 2007, promising not to place debt onto the club – which they subsequently did (£243m at present) – promising to build a new stadium and “have a spade in the ground within 60 days” – something they haven’t delivered over 3 years later. Add in the broken promises of star signings like ‘snoogy doogy’, their infighting, public spats, approaching Klinsmann and a net transfer spend of approximately £2m over the last 4 transfer windows and it’s not hard to see why fans are unhappy with their “custodians”.
Yet Hicks still can’t see it, “When you feel fans turn against you it’s very frustrating” he said.
This is the same Tom Hicks who, within weeks of taking over the club in 2007 compared the purchase of Liverpool FC to the purchase of Weetabix:
“When I was in the leverage buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our 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 for Liverpool; revenues come in from whatever source and go out to whatever source and, if there is money left over, it is profit.”
3 years later Hicks looks like he’s going to get what he said he was going to get – a massive profit. Not forgetting the millions (approximately £8m between he and Gillett thus far) in personal expenses the two have taken out the Club. Yes, unbelievably their expense claims have been more than Rafa’s net spend last year.
This is the same ‘businessman’ whose son told a Liverpool fan to “blow me f**k face” just recently. The same ‘businessman’ who has financial problems ongoing with his Texas Rangers baseball team and has a history of ruining football clubs.
Good riddance.
Source: WSJ
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