KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Direction of the club

I am conducting research for my dissertation. The subject of the dissertation is foreign owners in football, what i am looking to find is ways in which owners have either benefited or negatively affected different clubs. I have consent from the koptalk support team and i state that all names will be kept confidential, all im interested in are the opinions not the names.

My first discussion point i would like people to discuss is: how is the club moving or not moving in a better direction under the current owner John Henry, compared to Gillett and Hicks?

Thanks

Well Ben there's gonna be alot of split opinions on this one, in my opinion FSG aint as bad as there made out to be as they have clearly invested more hard cash in the club than ANY other owners in our history, under H&G i didn't pay much attention to the background stuff but it was run like a badly run brottel overall, the only thing im really worried about is our new stadium or stadium expansion i haven't heard anything on this in a couple of months now and doesn't look like they've put much in to it.

Lain, Bar, Faz and Stan are the ones to talk to about this background crack as from what i've seen they know alot about it.

The club has stagnated under FSG,they have stopped the club from potentially going bust but apart from that nothing has changed,they clearly are out of their dept when it comes to running a football club,that is evident in their inability to appoint a top class CEO and their handling of the Suarez/Evra affair,the fact that they never attend a match or even the Hillsborough memorial speaks volumes.

Also the fact they are rising ticket prices and tarting up the stadium suggests to me that they are looking to increase the value of the club to turn a profit.

Hard to add much to what wakka has said.

In my view they have been a disaster by hampering the critcal development the ckub needed to catch up with our rivals.

I would rather have gone into administration under Gillett and hicks than ths option which is the nowhere option. John Henry is clearly not interested in the club and cares only about profit but he wants ths without risk or commitment from his own assets.

I hate the man and the sooner he clears off the better.

Yep same here. Administration would have just done the same as what FSG have taken 2 and half years to do but in 6 months.

All they have done is reduce the wage bill, Sell senior professionals. Lied about clearing the existing debt when all they did was create a new loan. Not done anything in terms of the stadium, Now we are left with a very young and inexperienced squad and management.

FSG has put some money into playing staff there is no doubt,whether its been enough so far is any ones argument.I don't like this buy young an nurture policy myself if thats all the are going to do its not always what we need.As for the stadium one part of me loves Anfield and would love to see it brought up to date but only if its in line with other stadiums and that's where it falls down sadly.The way Anfield is situated makes it impossible to do what is required so i think we need a new stadium.FSG are revamping to save money,doing barely enough to make it look half respectable....keeping the club ticking over simply is not good enough though.

I dont see it.. LFC have been spending the same as before. Except now it's being offset by cost savings..

£30m a year invested from LFC's books. Not FSG pumping money into an investment. Not a single penny.

They are crooks and lie and pander to the fan base whilst half of them are "grateful" we didnt go under and they "saved" us..

I would agree with the above posters and would add that to some extent the excursion into football by FSG may be prompted in part at least, by a desire to try out their 'moneyball' approach in this context. I doubt if they realized just how competitive and money driven the PL is and the ever increasing turnover or drift of the best players from the less successful clubs to the more successful and richer clubs. That drain of players showing good quality is something that will impact negatively on their moneyball approach. Only time will tell if moneyball can be made to work in the cauldron that is PL football, if it does we may yet come to appreciate FSG, and if it doesn't we'll come to rue the day we ever heard of them, stuck in lower to mid league if lucky, with limited stadium capacity and no way up except via a sugar daddy, and then only if FFP will allow that.

We were all happy to see the back of Hicks & Gillet and generally speaking, people are happier under the ownership of FSG (so far there have been no protest marches or militant displays of anger). However, when Hicks & Gillet were running things we were always in the Champions League and even challenged for the title, and we had a great quad of players - we even had the 'best midfield in the world' for a while (i've yet to hear the 2013 version of the songs which presumably changes the names to henderson, shelvey, allen & suso!). We also didn't waste such enormous amounts of money on poor players.....

It could be argued that the only reason we did so well under them is because we had a phenomenal manager but that's for a different discussion.

Not taking into account mitigating circumstances or a varying degree of subjective beliefs, the bottom line is that we were doing much better as a team under Hicks & Gillet......but we're doing better as a 'club/business' under FSG.

I think FSG are better than G&H as with the latter we were going into administration which cannot be good for the club. That said FSG are business people who are looking at LFC as an investment (they don't even know what football is, let alone being passionate about it) and wish to get a decent return. Don't think this will not work in the long term if we want LFC to win the big trophies because they would prefer to take dividends out (when they can do so without weakening too much the team) instead of investing in the club. The Glazers at Manure are a good example, if there was no interest to pay,Manure would be matching City and Real in transfers every year. A Barca type fans ownership would be better for my liking if we cannot get a Sugar Daddy or at least a rich fan owner who will not look LFC as an investment but his pride and passion, for example what Moratti is to Inter.