Liverpool Sale Opens New Front In The Battle For Football's Soul

“As he lay on the battlefield dying,

With the blood gushing out of his head,

As he lay on the battlefield dying, dying, dying,

These were the last words he said.

‘Oh, I am a Liverpudlian,

And I come from the Spion Kop…’”

THERE’S SOMETHING APT about the words of this song, a chant more cherished by some Liverpool supporters than the turgid and pompous You’ll Never Walk Alone. The war for football’s soul has escalated this summer. Anfield is the latest front to ignite. Fan culture as we know it may have to ready itself for a last stand.

Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s owners, are on the cusp of selling some 30 per cent of the club to a group led by Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian billionaire. Other members of the consortium, particularly Jeff Bezos, have drawn the headlines, though. The 62-year-old is the founder of Amazon. We can be fairly certain that he was not a boyhood Red.

So what attracted the third richest man in the world – and his fellow investor Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook – to Liverpool? The Anfield atmosphere? The sense of community among fans? The thrill of competition? No. The answer is simple: profit.

While the game’s global audience was distracted by Gianni Infantino’s great World Cup sell-off, a more dangerous existential threat to the sport was developing at club level. John W Henry, Liverpool’s principal owner and one of the people who brought you the failed European Super League, is at the centre of it.

Henry has always struggled to understand why his superclub should have to endure playing teams like Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Brentford. In his mind, not only do Premier League also-rans provide a physical challenge that makes proceeding in European competition more difficult, they have little appeal to television audiences across the world. It is, for Liverpool, a lose-lose scenario (and lose they did to those three namechecked teams in the Premier League last season).

The head of FSG is based in Boston and goes through long spells when he is semi-detached from events on Merseyside. A number of individuals who have come into contact with Henry over the years took advantage of the summer’s matches at Foxborough to catch up with the 76-year-old. Remarkably, Henry didn’t know there were World Cup games being played in his backyard.

But what he does know about is business. Like quite a few people keen on monetizing football way beyond the present boundaries, he believes the superclubs can make the sort of financial leap that Google and Facebook managed. This latest deal is a step towards that ambition.

Where does it leave supporters? Well, the European Super League adventure brought the ugly term “legacy fans” into the game’s lexicon. There is a mood within the sport that the legacy is a burden that won’t last long. Tottenham Hotspur are phasing out their senior citizen discounts for season-ticket holders. That trend will increase as the traditional audience for football grows older. And once it dies out? The feeling is that the next generations will embrace dynamic pricing and the sort of treatment their predecessors would never accept.

Another idea that has long excited boardrooms is the Disneyland concept. The theory goes that it would be much more profitable if visiting Anfield, Old Trafford or even the Bernabeu was a once in a season – or even once in a lifetime – event. If someone saves for years for a pilgrimage, they are likely to splurge on tickets, merchandise and club activities to create a memorable experience. If every seat could be occupied by a different, money-no-object visitor for every game, profits would soar ever higher.

Would the atmosphere be affected? Yes. Would it matter? Not when the tills are ringing. There has been a recognisable change in the crowd dynamics of the NFL and MLB in the past few decades. Revenues have still risen. Enshittificaton is sly. It creeps along, gradually making things worse in unnoticeable increments. There’s never a jump shock, just a moment of despair when it dawns on you that things have changed beyond remedy.

But Bezos’s presence suggests a watershed is close. FSG are likely to back away from Liverpool gradually but they will probably cede control within five years. A decade ago, Henry claimed to be concerned about his legacy at Anfield. When he sold the club, he told me and others, he wanted to be sure it was in good hands. By his standards, Mittal, Saverin and Bezos might be ideal custodians for Liverpool.

Imagine, though, that trio listening to the famous Bill Shankly quote, the one memorised like a catechism by hard-core Kopites: “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.”

No one can hide from it. The battlefield is more clearly defined than ever before. Bezos and his mates have the big battalions but never doubt a Kopite’s defiance. Or the last words they said.