by tubby » Sat Jul 15, 2006 10:11 pm
I didnt want to stat a new thread on this seeing as it sort of ties in with the stadium quite a bit. Anhyway i found this on newsnow and thought it had some interesting bits in.
Moores and Parry: Time For A Change?
Everything look’s pretty good for us on the playing front at the moment. Four new signings have arrived, Bellamy to bolster the attack, the exciting Gonzalez for the left wing, the experienced and equally exciting Aurelio for left back and the very highly rated young Argentinean centre back Gabriel Palletta. All this and according to Rafa, another two or three players on the way. click here.
We’ve also managed to offload a few, chief among them, the Great Didi Hamann has eventually ended up at Man City and Cisse has gone to Marseille on loan with a view to a permanent £8 million switch, I’ve read that moving out these two players alone, has freed up £5 million on the wages bill. So our on field activities are going extremely well at the moment and we are all looking forward to next season with a certain degree of confidence.
The powers that be at the club will also be very pleased with the way things are going on the playing front, not only because like us they want the club to be successful but also because it deflects us from looking too closely at our off the field activities. In this area things at the club are pretty dreadful and seem to be getting worse. It should be a cause for concern to us all because if things don’t improve soon, its going to have an adverse effect on the team.
When we speak of the powers that be at the club, we tend to talk of Moores and Parry almost as if they were a single entity, joined at the hip. But, let me nail my colours to the wall here and say that I am a fan of our Chairman David Moores and hope he remains at the helm for many years to come. He is an old school type chairman, who is a passionate fan, remains out of the spotlight, doesn’t interfere in team affairs and in general I believe he always has the best interests of the club and its supporters at heart.
However, I believe he is making one big mistake. On the field he has a manager in Rafa, who is making huge progress with the side and really taking us forward but off the field he has Chief Executive Rick Parry who has been a long time in the job and yet seems incapable of taking us forward as a club and I believe its time for a change.
We are playing a very dangerous game when we are relying on the fruits of Rafa’s success with the team, to prop up the club but that’s exactly what seems to be happening at moment and I believe the fault for this ultimately lies at Parry’s door. Remember that Rafa is in charge of all team related matters but Parry as Chief Executive is responsible for all matters related to the club as a whole, including players contracts and transfer negotiations and it is in his area’s of responsibility, that a lot of questions need to be asked.
They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day but you can bet that it was built a hell of a lot quicker then Liverpool’s new stadium. I’ve lost track of the years that have passed since we seriously discussed building a new stadium but in all those years all we’ve got to show is a location and a few computer generated images of the proposed design. The costs for this stadium have been spiralling away from the original estimate and the longer we delay, the more its going to cost but despite this, not a single sod has been turned so far and there’s no sign of anything happening in the immediate future.
We are told that the key to getting this stadium started, is investment. Parry has spent years and a small fortune on consultants in an attempt to find a single potential investor. Yet, despite the fact that he has been prepared to talk to anyone, from a corrupt Thai Prime Minister to the Kraft family, and the fact that Liverpool are one of the most famous clubs in the world and have probably never been more marketable then they are right now, he has failed miserably to attract a single investor. I can see only two potential reasons for this, either the package he is offering to investors is unattractive or he isn’t selling it to them properly. In either case, the responsibility is Parry’s.
One of the most important areas in attracting investment is a healthy balance sheet and Parry and his consultants seem to be doing a lot of messing around in this area, often to the detriment of the team. We went into last summers transfer window in what appeared to be a healthy financial position. We had just won the Champions League which is the richest prize in the game. Winning it is meant to be worth somewhere between £40-60 million maybe more, we also received over £7 million for finishing 5th in the league and we will have also had a few million for getting to the Carling cup final, but where did it all go?
Rafa spent about £20 million on Crouch, Reina and Sissoko but he also brought in a few million from player sales, however it was towards the end of the summer transfer window that things got interesting. Despite the signings he had made, Rafa insisted that a right winger and a centre back were his priorities and we bidded for a few but their clubs usually wanted about a couple of million more then we were prepared to offer.
Then Michael Owen became available and despite the fact that Rafa made it pretty clear he didn’t want him, some of the people behind the scenes seemed to want him back at the club and Parry spent a lot of time trying to broker a deal. Owen eventually ended up signing for Newcastle but so much time was wasted on this deal that Rafa didn’t want, that there was no time left to fill the two area’s he had marked as a priority. On the last day of the transfer window we sold Baros for £6 million and made a desperate last ditch attempt to bring in Simao for about £10 million but this fell through.
A couple of things bug me about this sequence of events. Firstly, why is it that the club weren’t prepared to pay an extra million or two for some of the players Rafa wanted and yet they were prepared to consider paying the guts of £16 million for a player he didn’t want? Secondly, I will return to my earlier question, if we bid £10 million for Simao and received £6 million for Baros, where did that money go? In the January window, the Legendary Robbie Fowler returned on loan, Kromkamp came in on a swap for Josemi and the only money spent was about £5 million on Agger, so still no real sign of the cash.
It was in the following month’s AGM that we finally saw where the cash had gone. The previous years AGM had reported the club seriously in debt but last years AGM was a much happier place. Thanks to the money brought in by Rafa’s success with the team, the debt had been seriously reduced and once again thanks to Rafa’s offloading some of the deadwood from the Houllier era, the wages bill had been reduced from 70%+ of the clubs annual turnover to 57%. The shareholders were so happy with these figures that nobody thought to ask why the wages bill had been allowed to drift over 70% in the first place?
These much improved figures were good news for the club but were largely brought about by Rafa’s excellent work with the team rather then anything done by Parry. And yet Rafa was rewarded by only having about a quarter of the money brought in by his success on the field being spent on the team and the rest being used by Parry to prop up the balance sheet to help him attract investors. It seems we’ve come a long way from the days when our then manager Kenny Dalglish once proclaimed that the assets of this club would always be seen on the pitch!
It may seem pedantic of me to be talking of such things when we ended up having a successful season but in my view the result of missing out on the priority targets of a centre back and a right winger indicated by Rafa last summer, could have been disastrous but we got away with it. Thankfully Carra and Hyppia got through the whole season virtually injury free and it was left to Gerrard to selflessly move to the right wing for a large part of the season and play out of his skin otherwise our season could have been much different. As for the improvement in our balance sheet, a lot of good it did, Parry is still no closer to finding an investor.
If this was just a one off then it wouldn’t be so bad but it seems that the same thing is happening all over again. The success of the team last season brought in money from winning the FA Cup, winning the Super Cup, our participation in the World Club sandwich competition, we had a decent run in Europe and I believe our 3rd place league finish was worth in the region of £10 million in prize money. But of the 4 players we have brought in so far, Gonzalez doesn’t count because he was signed last year, Aurelio was brought in on a free, Palletta cost about £2 million and Bellamy cost £6.5 million. So we’ve only spent £8.5 million so far and we’ve recovered some of that and improved the wages bill by offloading some players, so why haven’t we signed Daniel Alves yet?
Alves is a very talented Brazilian right sided player, an area that we badly need to fill ahead of next season. There is a large list of clubs who want to sign him but he has already gone on the record stating he wants to come to Anfield and Rafa wants him here, so what’s the problem?
We have been negotiating with Sevilla for him since before the World Cup but are no nearer an agreement. I’ve heard two reason’s for this, one says we won’t meet their valuation for the player and the other says that we have met their valuation but can’t reach an agreement on the initial payment. In either case the total fee involved is somewhere between £10-12 million and the Sevilla chairman has said we are 10-15% away from reaching agreement, so we are talking about a sum of money that is less then £2 million that is blocking this deal from happening, relative chickenfeed at this level of the game.
This is yet another example of the clubs penny-pinching antics that could prevent us from signing a player that Rafa badly wants. We may still very well sign him but the reality is we should have signed him weeks ago and he should be here training with his new team-mates and getting ready to make his debut at Wrexham tomorrow.
This is absolutely crazy stuff. In Houllier’s final years as manager it was clear he’d lost the plot and we were going nowhere and yet the club let him waste a fortune on substandard players, now we have a manager in Rafa that can bring us success and we won’t spend the money! I don’t expect us to be able to compete with chelski in terms of spending but for God’s sake these days we are even being outspent by the likes of Newcastle and Spurs! Its time to wake up and smell the God-damn coffee.
In our attempts to find an investor to help us fund the new stadium we seem to have become a club which is more interested in building a successful balance sheet rather then a successful team. I’m not suggesting Moores is totally blameless in this but it is Rick Parry as our Chief Executive who has the responsibility of sorting this stadium/investment situation out and it is his inability to do so that is effecting the investment in the team.
Money is the lifeblood of the modern game and the increased capacity of a new stadium is essential for the future of the club. The building of this new stadium will be the biggest undertaking in the history of the club. We need a man in charge who can successfully oversee both the building of the stadium and the building of the team in equal measures. I think Parry has had more then enough time to get things started but has failed to do so, how much longer will his ineffectiveness in this area be allowed to continue? Its time for him to move on and a new Chief Executive should be appointed who can bring some fresh thinking to the project and who can support the work Rafa is doing with the team rather then relying on him to dig him out of a hole.
I also though Id add on the fact that becasue Man Utd have been told to stick it by Horseface will this Jeapordise any possibly moves for strikers like Defoe or Kuijt?
Last edited by
tubby on Sat Jul 15, 2006 10:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
stadium in England 100,000. Yeah thats right 100,000 and ask Tony Blair to stump up some of the money( why not He paid billions for a big tent in London) Regenerate the whole Anfield site by building a new stadium, Hotels, bars restaraunts, appartments, shops, casinos and build a new stadium. HOW? Well ok this is hard to swallow but Ground share for 2 seasons with EVERTON, For F**K sake breathe. It would only be for 18 months or so. Think of the future,.
welcome back fella 
