Stadium delay puts Liverpool on dead-end street
Failure to begin building in Stanley Park hurts residents of run-down Anfield as well as damaging top-four hopes
Manchester United's arrival at Anfield on Saturday for Liverpool's first match since the club's owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, failed to raise the money for a proposed new stadium, could almost have been timed deliberately to hammer home Liverpool fans' crushing disappointment with the North American duo.
It was United's dominance of English football in the mid-1990s - eclipsing Liverpool, relentlessly expanding Old Trafford and wringing every last penny out of it - that drove Liverpool into their agitated search for a new and larger stadium. The only reason Liverpool were put up for sale was to find "investors" who would build the new stadium on Stanley Park, thereby pushing Liverpool's earnings somewhere near a level at which they would be able to compete with United. David Moores, the club's chairman and major shareholder, ultimately favoured the Americans over the rival billions of Dubai International Capital partly because Hicks and Gillett were more positive about their ability to get the stadium built.
In their formal offer to take over the club, Hicks and Gillett wrote to all shareholders that they had: "Indicated [their] intention to take forward the Stanley Park development ... and to commence building one of the leading stadia in Europe as soon as is reasonably practicable."
The offer document also made it clear that Hicks and Gillett had borrowed the £185m necessary to buy the club, and another £113m to pay off its debts and fund player signings. Instead of moving quickly to raise money for the stadium, last January the co-owners were refinancing those initial loans, taking out a £350m credit facility with Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS now has a mortgage over Anfield, the Melwood training ground and every lock, stock and barrel owned by Liverpool Football Club. That £350m has been borrowed just until this coming January, with the option to extend it only as far as next July.
Sceptics argued that Hicks and Gillett, having brought so much debt to the club, rather than investment, would struggle to borrow another £400m to fund the stadium, but Hicks denies that the club's indebtedness was a factor in the failure to do so this year. Instead, in a cursory statement last month, Liverpool blamed the credit crunch, saying "the building of the new stadium will be subject to delay" due to "global market conditions".
No further explanation has been forthcoming from Hicks, other than that all large projects are affected by banks' current reluctance to lend. The revised aim is for Liverpool to kick off in the new stadium a year later than planned, for the start of the 2012-13 season. Even if that does happen, putting Liverpool £750m in debt, by then United will have had four more seasons at their 76,000-capacity Old Trafford home; Arsenal will have had the same time at their lucrative new Emirates Stadium; and Chelsea will have had four more seasons enjoying the fruits of Roman Abramovich's largesse. Furthermore, Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi is now threatening to make Manchester City into nouveaux riches contenders for a top-four Premier League finish.
If Liverpool were to be knocked out of the qualification places for the Champions League, which earned them £21.6m last season, their long tenancy of English football's first rank could be lost.
Yet there is more to Hicks' and Gillett's failure to finance the new stadium than the challenge to Liverpool's footballing status. The new stadium on Stanley Park and plans to develop the current Anfield site into a hive of restaurants, shops and offices are central to plans to regenerate the area around the old ground, which, over the years, has declined into near-devastation.
Anfield could currently lay claim to being the most economically unequal place in Great Britain. Around the Premier League club's famous ground are rows of shattered streets whose houses have stood empty and boarded up for years. Like many areas in formerly industrial towns and cities, particularly in the north-west, old jobs disappeared in the 1980s and people moved away. Houses, if they were occupied at all, were let short term to people who had no stake in the area. The terraced streets of Anfield and neighbouring Breckfield were blighted by crime and many houses were burnt out before being sealed with grimly familiar metal shuttering, a process known locally as being "tinned up".
The area around Venmore Street, opposite the stadium, is, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation, the most deprived local authority ward in Britain. Crowds of fans walk past its boarded-up terraces on matchdays and it is difficult to imagine that Liverpool's Spanish striker Fernando Torres, the very definition of a European golden boy, can be parading his multimillion-pound skills just over the stadium wall.
The football club's role in this neighbourhood's decline and planned resurrection has been a long-running issue. Many residents bitterly resented the club, a decade ago, for buying up houses on Skerries Road, next to Anfield, and leaving them empty in case the club ever wanted to knock the row down and expand the stadium. Then, in 2000, there was uproar about leaked plans worked up by Liverpool and the city council, without consultation, to build a new stadium and, in the process, demolish 1,800 houses.
That prompted a change at the club, towards a closer relationship with the community, and the current plans for Stanley Park followed extensive consultation with groups of residents who retain a defiant pride in the area.
A group remains opposed to building on the park, but planning permission was granted largely because the project is intended to regenerate this blighted district. The new stadium was conceived not only as a landmark move for the world-famous club, but as a statement of confidence in the city's future. The development of the old stadium site, to be renamed Anfield Plaza, is designed to bring in 900 jobs.
"Anfield Plaza is central to the area's economic revival," explains John Kelly, Liverpool city council's executive director for regeneration. "We are very disappointed that the project has been delayed. The local people, in one of the most deprived areas of the country, have been waiting a long time."
While the club stagnates, the council and local organisations have been getting on with things. Improvements to Stanley Park are going ahead, helped by £16m in grants. New housing has been built, or houses improved - including on Skerries Road, which was taken on by a development company and now looks very spruce. The football club lost a £5m European Union grant to build the required community centre in the new stadium because they ran out of time; the money has been allocated instead to improving four local facilities.
However, people are still living around bleak streets, with hundreds of houses awaiting demolition, amid poverty which is shaming.
"A lot of work is going on," says Marie Rooney, a long-term activist and chair of the local Anfield and Breckside Community Council. "But the stadium was supposed to be a catalyst, and jobs created, which hasn't happened. I've lost confidence. A lot of people have, because we have been waiting so long. It's an embarrassment now. The Americans seem to want to do it without spending their own money, but I have lost confidence in whether they have the ability to deliver."
Hicks and Gillett say they still have that ability, with borrowed money, but starting next year.
Failure to begin building in Stanley Park hurts residents of run-down Anfield as well as damaging top-four hopes
Manchester United's arrival at Anfield on Saturday for Liverpool's first match since the club's owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, failed to raise the money for a proposed new stadium, could almost have been timed deliberately to hammer home Liverpool fans' crushing disappointment with the North American duo.
It was United's dominance of English football in the mid-1990s - eclipsing Liverpool, relentlessly expanding Old Trafford and wringing every last penny out of it - that drove Liverpool into their agitated search for a new and larger stadium. The only reason Liverpool were put up for sale was to find "investors" who would build the new stadium on Stanley Park, thereby pushing Liverpool's earnings somewhere near a level at which they would be able to compete with United. David Moores, the club's chairman and major shareholder, ultimately favoured the Americans over the rival billions of Dubai International Capital partly because Hicks and Gillett were more positive about their ability to get the stadium built.
In their formal offer to take over the club, Hicks and Gillett wrote to all shareholders that they had: "Indicated [their] intention to take forward the Stanley Park development ... and to commence building one of the leading stadia in Europe as soon as is reasonably practicable."
The offer document also made it clear that Hicks and Gillett had borrowed the £185m necessary to buy the club, and another £113m to pay off its debts and fund player signings. Instead of moving quickly to raise money for the stadium, last January the co-owners were refinancing those initial loans, taking out a £350m credit facility with Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS now has a mortgage over Anfield, the Melwood training ground and every lock, stock and barrel owned by Liverpool Football Club. That £350m has been borrowed just until this coming January, with the option to extend it only as far as next July.
Sceptics argued that Hicks and Gillett, having brought so much debt to the club, rather than investment, would struggle to borrow another £400m to fund the stadium, but Hicks denies that the club's indebtedness was a factor in the failure to do so this year. Instead, in a cursory statement last month, Liverpool blamed the credit crunch, saying "the building of the new stadium will be subject to delay" due to "global market conditions".
No further explanation has been forthcoming from Hicks, other than that all large projects are affected by banks' current reluctance to lend. The revised aim is for Liverpool to kick off in the new stadium a year later than planned, for the start of the 2012-13 season. Even if that does happen, putting Liverpool £750m in debt, by then United will have had four more seasons at their 76,000-capacity Old Trafford home; Arsenal will have had the same time at their lucrative new Emirates Stadium; and Chelsea will have had four more seasons enjoying the fruits of Roman Abramovich's largesse. Furthermore, Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi is now threatening to make Manchester City into nouveaux riches contenders for a top-four Premier League finish.
If Liverpool were to be knocked out of the qualification places for the Champions League, which earned them £21.6m last season, their long tenancy of English football's first rank could be lost.
Yet there is more to Hicks' and Gillett's failure to finance the new stadium than the challenge to Liverpool's footballing status. The new stadium on Stanley Park and plans to develop the current Anfield site into a hive of restaurants, shops and offices are central to plans to regenerate the area around the old ground, which, over the years, has declined into near-devastation.
Anfield could currently lay claim to being the most economically unequal place in Great Britain. Around the Premier League club's famous ground are rows of shattered streets whose houses have stood empty and boarded up for years. Like many areas in formerly industrial towns and cities, particularly in the north-west, old jobs disappeared in the 1980s and people moved away. Houses, if they were occupied at all, were let short term to people who had no stake in the area. The terraced streets of Anfield and neighbouring Breckfield were blighted by crime and many houses were burnt out before being sealed with grimly familiar metal shuttering, a process known locally as being "tinned up".
The area around Venmore Street, opposite the stadium, is, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation, the most deprived local authority ward in Britain. Crowds of fans walk past its boarded-up terraces on matchdays and it is difficult to imagine that Liverpool's Spanish striker Fernando Torres, the very definition of a European golden boy, can be parading his multimillion-pound skills just over the stadium wall.
The football club's role in this neighbourhood's decline and planned resurrection has been a long-running issue. Many residents bitterly resented the club, a decade ago, for buying up houses on Skerries Road, next to Anfield, and leaving them empty in case the club ever wanted to knock the row down and expand the stadium. Then, in 2000, there was uproar about leaked plans worked up by Liverpool and the city council, without consultation, to build a new stadium and, in the process, demolish 1,800 houses.
That prompted a change at the club, towards a closer relationship with the community, and the current plans for Stanley Park followed extensive consultation with groups of residents who retain a defiant pride in the area.
A group remains opposed to building on the park, but planning permission was granted largely because the project is intended to regenerate this blighted district. The new stadium was conceived not only as a landmark move for the world-famous club, but as a statement of confidence in the city's future. The development of the old stadium site, to be renamed Anfield Plaza, is designed to bring in 900 jobs.
"Anfield Plaza is central to the area's economic revival," explains John Kelly, Liverpool city council's executive director for regeneration. "We are very disappointed that the project has been delayed. The local people, in one of the most deprived areas of the country, have been waiting a long time."
While the club stagnates, the council and local organisations have been getting on with things. Improvements to Stanley Park are going ahead, helped by £16m in grants. New housing has been built, or houses improved - including on Skerries Road, which was taken on by a development company and now looks very spruce. The football club lost a £5m European Union grant to build the required community centre in the new stadium because they ran out of time; the money has been allocated instead to improving four local facilities.
However, people are still living around bleak streets, with hundreds of houses awaiting demolition, amid poverty which is shaming.
"A lot of work is going on," says Marie Rooney, a long-term activist and chair of the local Anfield and Breckside Community Council. "But the stadium was supposed to be a catalyst, and jobs created, which hasn't happened. I've lost confidence. A lot of people have, because we have been waiting so long. It's an embarrassment now. The Americans seem to want to do it without spending their own money, but I have lost confidence in whether they have the ability to deliver."
Hicks and Gillett say they still have that ability, with borrowed money, but starting next year.
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