Less of Moores in Liverpool's future
By Alan Hansen
Last Updated: 1:38am GMT 05/02/2007
However important this week is for Liverpool, one in which the club look like they will finally be taken over, it will not be as important as the next five to 10 years. Those seasons will decide whether Liverpool regain their former heights, competing regularly for championships and European Cups, or whether they will slide into mid-table anonymity. And for Liverpool mid-table anonymity means finishing fourth because those supporters who come to Anfield week-in and week-out will tell you fourth isn't good enough.
Liverpool chairman David Moores (r) and chief executve Rick Parry
Selling up: David Moores (r) and chief executve Rick Parry
Whatever deal the chairman, David Moores, does this week, it will be with the best interests of the club. He is a man who is not just a Liverpool fan but someone who has the club in his blood; all he has ever wanted to do is go into the dressing room after a game, share in the success of the team and the feelings of the supporters. All you can ever ask of a chairman is that he gives his manager time and money to do his job and if you study the years Graeme Souness, Roy Evans, Gerard Houllier and now Rafa Benitez have spent in the manager's office at Anfield, he has bankrolled the lot of them.
I believe that in his heart David does not want to sell his stake but he realises he cannot take the club any further because that means funding a new stadium, which of all the items on Liverpool's agenda is priority No 1. Anfield holds 44,000, Old Trafford can seat 76,000 and those are figures which make it hard for any Liverpool manager to compete.
The club are paying the price of failing to cash in on the great years in the Seventies and Eighties when Liverpool were the leading club in Europe. The people running the club were tuned in to the football rather than the commercial side of things – Anfield did not get the first corporate box until 1992, whereas Manchester United, who were winning nothing much in those years, were always aware of making money.
They were not forward-thinking enough then, but if Liverpool do go back to winning titles and build on their success in the European Cup final two years ago, they will be as big as United. Wherever I go in the world watching football, the two clubs who are mentioned first are United and Liverpool. And yet when it comes to the major competitions they have been, one night in Istanbul aside, in the wilderness since 1990.
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In the years to come, Liverpool will have to appeal to another generation of supporters, who have not been brought up with the history of the club. Increasingly, people want to support winners and, as I've said about Chelsea, nobody in Asia is going to want to buy the shirt of a team that finishes second.
In a perfect world Moores would remain as chairman and take Liverpool back to their former heights but this is not a perfect world, this is football in 2007.
There will be some Liverpool supporters who will feel uncomfortable that it will now be run by people not brought up with the club. The arrival of the Glazers at Old Trafford stirred the same feelings two years ago but with United top of the Premiership, are they an issue any more? It will be the same with George Gillett and Tom Hicks if they complete their takeover. They will discover that what everybody, from the cleaning lady to the chairman, is subservient to what happens on the pitch.
What happened on the pitch at Anfield on Saturday was not something that would linger in the memory. Liverpool, for all their possession, had too few variations. Too many balls seemed to go long which played straight into the hands of Alan Stubbs and the Everton defence who headed everything away.
For Liverpool it was a disappointment not a disaster. Their Premiership record at Anfield, with no goals conceded since October, speaks for itself and they have recovered wonderfully from the two heavy defeats inflicted by Arsenal in the cups.
When Benitez said that Everton were a small club, it was obviously wrong. Everton are a great club with a fabulous history but I knew what he meant. Everton, like every team who are sixth or below in the Premiership, come to Anfield to defend. There is a problem with Benitez's English but this was the point he was making. He was not trying to be arrogant or condescending because Benitez is not that kind of man.
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