It was Bill Shankly who said that Jesus was the first socialist. The spirit of Anfield is, above all, the swelling chorus of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, whose words like much else associated with Liverpool came from the United States.
Jeff Bezos, who along with other billionaire chums Eduardo Saverin and Amit Bhatia are looking to buy into Anfield, is a very different kind of American to Oscar Hammerstein, a key player in the Hollywood anti-Nazi league, who wrote the words sang so passionately on the Kop. Bezos is a man who does walk alone, an alpha businessman who is now looking to buy his way into this great fortress of working-class socialism. The enemy, truly, are at the gates.
Except that the enemy own the fortress and have always owned it. Bezos will simply be the most obvious, glitzy and unapologetic of the stream of millionaires and billionaires who have wanted to be part of this extraordinary club.
During Shankly’s final two years at Anfield, the ones that produced the league title, the Uefa Cup and climaxed in the swaggering demolition of Newcastle United in the 1974 FA Cup final at Wembley, his chairman was Sir John Smith, who represented the quiet conservatism of the Merseyside business class.
There was considerable investment from the Moores family, who had made their millions with the Littlewoods football pools. Sir John Moores, who became chairman of Everton, was a Conservative councillor for Sefton, and Britain’s first billionaire. His nephew, David, became chairman of Liverpool.
An announcement confirming the deal is expected to come as early as this week (Photo: Getty)Shankly worked in a city that was not especially socialist. Anfield stands in the Liverpool Walton constituency which in the February 1974 general election saw 31 per cent of the votes go to the Conservatives, who had held the seat when Shankly became manager in 1959.
The city was run by a Liberal-Conservative coalition council. Nobody votes Tory in Walton now – 3.5 per cent at the last election – but while the city swung to the left, the football club did not.
There was Graeme Souness appearing in Alan Bleasdale’s drama set in a city that had fallen apart, Boys from the Blackstuff. There is a film of Kevin Keegan on a private jet, turning down an invitation to join Margaret Thatcher to promote European sport because “my dad [who had been a miner] would kill me”. By then, Keegan was playing for Hamburg.
However, many of their teammates would have instinctively understood Bob Monkhouse when the comedian related his agent’s reaction after he appeared at a Conservative Party rally during the 1983 election. “Well done, Bob. You’ve just alienated half your audience.”
To become involved in party politics was poison. In any case, they mostly lived in Southport and Formby. Their horizons were the greens of Royal Birkdale golf club rather than the riots rolling down Upper Parliament Street in Toxteth, witnessed by the young Robbie Fowler, who would come out in support of the striking Liverpool dockers.
The Moores family continued to run Anfield until 2007 by which time the club’s fanbase was no longer representative of the city. Now just 21 per cent of season-ticket holders have a Liverpool postcode. For Everton it is 84.
Moores’s successors, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, were despised not because they were friends with George W Bush or because they were American or very rich, but because they were the wrong type of millionaire. The kind that loads the club with debt and uses its money to pay off their own loans. Their time was best summed up in a book by the journalist Brian Reade called An Epic Swindle.
The men who succeeded them, Fenway Sports Group, were the right kind of millionaires, who rebuilt Anfield, won titles and returned the European Cup to Merseyside. Whether Bezos and friends are the right kind of millionaire will depend on how much money they put in and how successfully it is spent.
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Opinion: Liverpool’s last Scouser is finished on Merseyside Transfer news: Liverpool’s five attacking targets – with one clear favouriteThere is no financial return that Liverpool can offer that would possibly interest Bezos. Liverpool are valued at a maximum of £4.3bn. The rise in the Amazon share price over two days in August made Bezos roughly that sum.
If he invests – and he has pulled out of two NFL deals in Seattle and Washington – it will be for what not even firing himself into space aboard a private rocket can give him. It will be for glory.
However, this is a Liverpool whose captain, Virgil van Dijk, claims are “a club in transition,” which is a footballer’s way of saying “a club on the brink”. Glory might be harder to come by than money for Bezos and, however it is funded, glory has been the only yardstick by which Liverpool has judged its millionaires.
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