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Published on February 2, 2008

Call it an attempt to re-romanticise football. A group calling themselves Share Liverpool FC has launched a campaign aimed to create a stakeholder base of 100,000 fans to raise enough cash to oust much-maligned Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett as owners of the much-loved Liverpool Football Club. The campaign kicked into first gear this week, and coincided with a similar scheme announced by followers of Manchester United on the same day.

The question of who exactly should run football clubs is not new. In fact, the model proposed by Share Liverpool FC, featuring a "member-share" scheme aimed at raising £500 million to purchase the club from Hicks and Gillett and build a new stadium, was inspired by examples elsewhere in Europe. The group has pointed to Barcelona as an example of how such an idea works. The Spanish club has more than 150,000 members who own the club. It's said that the Champions League, the biggest prize for European clubs, has been won on six occasions in the last 15 years by clubs owned and run in a similar manner.

Liverpool fans' disillusionment didn't begin with ticket price increases. The American pair, who took over from long-time owner David Moores more than a year ago, simply promised so much and delivered so little and used what the supporters thought was ungentlemanly tactics against team manager Rafael Benitez after a fallout over his demands for more cash to buy new players. The refinanced loan scheme was said to be the last straw, as it would put the duo's debt burden directly on the club.

"Are you here for profits or passion?" fans of clubs targeted for takeover often ask. But when it happens frequently enough, this question now pales in comparison to the excitement about new cash and potential new signings that new money can bring. If things go well, like at Chelsea and Manchester United, complaints about ticket prices or lack of local identity are reduced to a minority. While the jury is still out at Manchester City, bought by former Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra, due to better team performance, the uproar at Liverpool shows how the tide can turn easily against foreign owners.

Football fans are a pompous lot, yet they are extremely passionate, loyal and take immeasurable pride in their teams. One common mistake of club owners is a failure to treat the supporters as an essential part of the club. It's not just the players, stadium, coaching personnel and money that has made Liverpool or Manchester United what they are now. Their fans' immense, undying passion is the most important reason for their successes.

Fans are the soul of football. Every defeat breaks a football supporter's heart more than it does the club's owner. It's safe to assume that neither Thaksin nor the American owners of Liverpool have ever shed tears for their clubs, but tens of thousands of their fans around the world have.

The "Share Liverpool" campaign, however, has to overcome something much more stubborn than business-minded ownership: fans' own hunger for glory. It is this great desire that brought extraterrestrial investment into popular clubs in the first place. Fans' passion drives the game, with a great example being the support for English non-league club Havant and Waterlooville, who faced Liverpool in a recent FA Cup showdown. Their sponsorship came from local auto-service shops or restaurants, not airlines or the world's biggest breweries.

In the football world, reality always waits in the wings, ready to take over from fairytales. The Havant and Waterlooville story is inspiring, but if the team had not been drawn against Liverpool, the outside world would not have known that the club is also struggling financially. Its fans would have poured into the streets and celebrated if a billionaire offered to inject £50 million into the club.

The real question for clubs in Liverpool's situation is not where the money should come from, but how "owners" react when their team walk through a storm. What would the 100,000 Liverpool "owners" do if, say, their team lost 10 games in a row and missed a ticket to lucrative Europe?

Normally the two worlds meet at this kind of juncture.

The Nation