Two American billionaires, Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise and the (US) National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars, and George Gillett Jr, owner of the Montreal Canadiens and formerly of the Miami Dolphins, had cobbled together in just two months an unlikely alliance to secure a reported £470-million funding package, via a loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland, to buy Liverpool Football Club and to allocate some £215 million to begin work on a new stadium. Hicks, a Texas acolyte and former business partner of President George W. Bush, had made his fortune from raising private equity to fund multimillion-dollar corporate takeovers. Liverpool Football Club was suddenly in the hands of the sort of global sports capitalists who made no secret of their financial motives, their ignorance of ‘soccer’ or their ambitions to model this highly atypical English football club, commercially, along the lines of an NFL franchise. They openly highlighted the attractions of English football’s booming TV monies, the growing Internet income streams for the English game, expanding markets for the Liverpool club in South-East Asia and in South America, stadium naming rights and even their plans for introducing American-style ‘bunker suites’ into the proposed new Liverpool stadium: underground ‘living rooms’ where corporate elites could dine in plush splendour and watch banks of TV sets before taking an elevator ride to their match seats. This seemed like ‘Americanisation’ writ large.

Second, the cosmopolitan ‘city of the sea’ of Liverpool was no stranger, of course, to global cultural exchange or, more specifically, to American cultural and commercial investment. Indeed, for much of its history Liverpool had looked west to Ireland and the United States for guidance and inspiration on identity issues more than it had to other English cities. Near its height in the early years of the twentieth century, the port at Liverpool had provided direct employment for up to 60,000 people in the city, much of it in trade involving North America. Even before the First World War, Americans were envied in Liverpool for their supposed modernity and stylishness, and American fashions were imported by Liverpool tailors, who regularly copied clothes brought in by seamen from the eastern seaboard of the USA. Later, this maritime connection – seamen on the passenger services to the USA were known locally as ‘Cunard Yanks’ – also fed directly into Liverpool street idioms and language, nightlife and music, with ‘the most American of English cities’ acting as a site of feverish transatlantic cultural exchange of a sort that allowed the city to take the lead in pop music in the world during the 1960s. In short, the city of Liverpool already had ingrained American sensibilities and sympathies well before Tom Hicks and George Gillett strode into Anfield early in 2007 with their ‘good ole boy’ homilies about ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ and their promises to make Liverpool FC the most successful football club in the world. Given the city’s distinctive history, the possibility of transatlantic investment and exchange in football did not strike most of its citizens as an especially alien or threatening intrusion.

This was the background against which, in May 2007, Liverpool had reached the European Cup (Champions League) final for the second time in three years. By the autumn of 2007, it had become clear that the American owners would have to renegotiate a new financial package worth £350 million with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the American investment bank Wachovia in order to pay off their original loans and raise cash to begin work on the Liverpool stadium. Revised plans for the new stadium insisted upon by the new owners had considerably increased its price, so proposals to raise a further £300 million for the funding of the new ground would now have to wait until 2009. Worse, despite their initial denials, the Liverpool owners now reportedly wanted to load the whole of the original acquisition debt of £298 million onto the club’s balance sheet, thus replicating core aspects of the Glazer deal at Manchester United. Gone was the earlier talk about ‘respect’ and the ‘tradition’ and the ‘heritage’ of the Liverpool club. Instead, Hicks chose to compare the purchase of Liverpool Football Club to that of a breakfast cereal company. ‘When I was in the leverage buyout 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 if there is money left over it is profit.’

Despite all this hugely distracting background noise and lack of focus and direction off the field, the Liverpool manager Benítez had soldiered on and had continued to strengthen his team and his squad by bringing in a number of differential quality signings in the summer of 2007. Yossi Benayoun was among them, a skilful and intelligent Israeli wide midfielder. Benayoun had real ability, some speed, mental strength and loads of energy – and he could also score goals. He was the signing Liverpool should so obviously have made when Benítez brought in the soon to be discarded Pennant. The Israeli might even have helped secure a second European Cup for Benítez in 2007.

The Liverpool manager had now assembled his talented Spanish spine – a great goalscorer, a sophisticated midfield organiser and a world-class goalkeeper. Also his key English midfielder Steven Gerrard seemed truly settled for the first time, and the Scouse Carragher was solid at the back. Benítez had signed some centre-back cover in the shape of Martin škrtel from Zenit St Petersburg in January 2008 for £6.5 million, and the manager was given more money to invest in the summer of that year. At last this was looking like a real championship squad in the making. Some judicious recruitment now and Liverpool would surely run the others very close. But Rafa’s spending in 2008 was mysterious and his targets proved, ultimately, to be self-destructive. In some strange ways, chasing the very competent and model professional Gareth Barry from Aston Villa was analogous to Roy Evans signing Stan Collymore in the mid-1990s, because it would eventually have the same sort of corrosive impact on the Liverpool team. Barry was highly rated and an excellent team player, but Benítez crassly let it be known that he was willing to sell the pivotal Xabi Alonso to bring in the Villa man. Not only did it seem like poor management to try to offload his key midfield organiser, but all this took place long before Barry was a confirmed capture, and in the end the England international stayed in the West Midlands. Predictably, Alonso decided he would leave Liverpool when the next chance came – which was for Real Madrid in the summer of 2009 for £30 million. Steven Gerrard, for one, was ‘devastated’ by Alonso’s departure.