Re: Club Refinance Thread
Share we go again: Liverpool fans on living with the Bluenoses
Written by Robbo Huyton Tuesday, 28 September 2010 09:49
THE prospect of a Liverpool-Everton groundshare has AGAIN reared its head following comments from Kenny Dalglish and Bill Kenwright. Here, two Liverpool fans on opposite sides of the fence debate whether it should ever be allowed to happen.
YES - says IAN LATTA.
IT’S time we got real. We need a new stadium and quick and the only way I can now see that happening is if we share with Everton.
You’d be surprised how easy that trips off the tongue when you think about it.
A few years ago, I’d have never let that thought cross my mind, let alone write it in a magazine.
I’d have been that fella chained to the bulldozer or scaling the top of the Main Stand, (well, I would if I wasn’t scared of heights) screaming ‘til the end to make it all stop.
Things have changed massively since then. Debt, results, the emergence of Chelsea and, now, Man City, Spurs and Villa.
Now it just seems madness to me for both Liverpool and Everton to want to build 50,000 to 75,000 seater stadiums in the same city when our grounds are a mile apart from each other.
Why would we want to saddle ourselves with tonnes of debt to build it just so we could say it’s all ours and nobody else's?
You’d think as Liverpool fans we’d run a mile when the ‘D’ word is mentioned. We’ve had a bellyful of loan repayments to last us a lifetime.
All this for a stadium which is used for two league matches a month, maybe a European match and maybe a domestic cup match. So, for the rest
of the time, it does nowt apart from the odd conference, Istanbul night and Christmas do.
The sums don’t add up any more.
See footie stadiums don’t come cheap. Talk is now around the £250million-£300m mark to build the new Anfeld. We can’t afford that. Who’s going to buy the club, clear most of the debt then shell out another huge wedge on a new stadium?
The only way forward for us is to look at a shared stadium with North West Development Agency and Liverpool City Council as investment partners.
Think of the millions we could invest in the team to buy another Torres, a Villa, a Silva, if we had a shared stadium.
Now I can already hear those who think this is the worst idea since last issue when I said it was time for Rafa to go – and jab their fngers on how
the Italian teams don’t want shared stadiums anymore.
Well, let’s look at Italy. Yes, both Inter and Milan apparently want their own stadiums and Juventus are set to move to their own ground next year.
But the thing here is that I’m not holding up the Italian way as some sort of panacea to our woes, just that other clubs have shared grounds and it can work.
See it’s simple. We have the shared stadium which means building costs are halved (or slimmed down massively if the city council and NWDA chip in).
On our home match days, we keep all the ticket receipts, hospitality, pies and programmes, Everton do the same on theirs.
The stadium is named after a sponsor like Arsenal’s Emirates which injects more cash towards the build cost. The seats are the corporate colours of the stadium sponsor, which in turn increases the sponsorship cost.
You get some fancy lighting system in like the Allianz Arena which glows red when Bayern Munich are at home and blue when 1860 Munich is playing and voila, you have one shared stadium.
The Kop is at one end, the Gwladys Street is at the other. Shanks statue, Paisely arches and Eternal Flame are outside the new Kop, Dixie Dean is on the other side.
It would be 65,000 seats – a modest capacity but I think realistic in these times and a number we’d actually fill, with the ability to ‘fill in’ seats at a
alter date and ‘lose’ them for Everton’s home matches if they couldn’t sell out their home matches.
If they can build stadiums where the pitch can come out of the ground and when seats can be removed to reveal an athletics track, then they can remove seats for Everton’s home matches.
All the sponsors and ad hoardings would be electronic –like the pitch-side ones we have now – which means the adverts and club specifc ads could be changed with a click of a mouse depending on who’s at home.
Ok, so that’s stadium name sorted, seat colours, receipts, capacity and ownership sorted. See, it’s not that diffcult.
The biggest obstacle we have isn’t logistics, it’s mindset. We’ve been brought up to think that we always have to have our own stadium – that that’s the way we do things over here.
But it doesn’t always have to be that way. What did Barrack Obama say – change we can believe in.
Would you really care what colour the seats were, what the stadium was called, who owned it as long as we were winning regularly again?
If the money saved from building our own stadium could be ploughed into the team to win the fabled 19th?
This isn’t about selling our sole for the sake of winning, it’s about being practical in tough times.
I know stadiums are part of a club’s identity, of course they are, but in my view nights like St Etienne or the Chelsea Champions League semi-fnal in 2005 were made by the fans – not by the stadium.
Ian is an Anfeld season-ticket holder.
NO - says GARETH ROBERTS
REMEMBER Meja? A (crap) Swedish pop singer who in 1998 had a hit with ‘All ‘bout the money’?
Well, she, like people arguing for a groundshare, got it all wrong.
“It’s all about the money, it’s all about the dum dum duh dee dum dum. I don’t think it’s funny. To see us fade away. It’s all about the money...â€
So went said song. Any move to share with Everton would be all about the money – and it would see us fade away.
Smart-suited bean counters like Christian Purslow can bang on about business all they like - football is NOT all about the money.
Imagine telling Catholics their cathedral in Liverpool was closing and they had to go over the road and share with the Church of England.
Forget history, forget your religion, this is the future. This is business. We’re knocking down the place that you’ve called home, flogging the land and now you have to share.
It would never happen, of course. There would be uproar.
Yet it seems perfectly acceptable to suggest that my cathedral - Anfeld – should be closed (bad enough in itself) and that the club I love, Liverpool FC, should share a new ground in Stanley Park with that shower from the other side of said park, Everton.
Well sorry, no. Never. On so many levels, it’s a non-starter.
A club’s ground is central to its identity – it is its home, its powerbase, and it’s the cathedral for the fans’ religion: Liverpool.
To share it with your bitterest rivals would dilute everything to do with Liverpool FC – from the matchday experience to the framed picture of your club’s home.
It would be the end of a combined 250 years of footballing history - that’s how long Liverpool and Everton have lived in their OWN homes.
And how would it work? What would the stands be called? What colour would the seats be? Where would the Shankly Gates go? And what about the statue of good old Bill? Or the one of Dixie Dean at Everton?
Just move them, right? Wrong! Just move them! Why don’t we move Stonehenge? Six thousand years of history? So what – it would probably attract more visitors in London, stick it there, ‘ey?
What about the Liver Buildings? Bit out the way down there on the Mersey aren’t they? Stick ‘em in the middle of town – they’ll make more money there.
Liverpool has lost enough of its identity in recent times without sharing a ground.
And if we HAVE to move (or if the club simply refuse to consider redeveloping Anfeld) then if we’re going to have a soulless bowl of a stadium, I want it to be our soulless bowl of a stadium.
And not one with red and blue flashing lights either – this is Liverpool, not Blackpool.
It’s not about money, or business. It’s sport, it’s a team, a club, something that represents the city and means an awful lot to a hell of a lot.
Not only that, but the business argument appears flawed. Inter and AC Milan is always trotted out as this shining example of how groundshares DO work.
Well do your research, it doesn’t. If it does, why have Inter Milan paid for feasibility studies into building their own ground?
What about Roma and Lazio, they share? Yep, they hate it, too.
According to Comperio, the company approached by Inter to conduct the studies, sharing a stadium “inhibits the revenue that can be generated by Inter developing premium corporate facilitiesâ€.
So as the whole reason in the first place for wanting a new – or bigger – stadium is to generate more money to catch up with the Mancs, Arsenal, Chelsea, why not do it right?
And what about the city of Liverpool?
Two stadiums, two sets of jobs – two sets of sponsors. There’s a bigger picture.
If Manchester, Sheffeld, Nottingham, and Bristol can have two teams with two grounds, why can’t we?
Why do we have be the English testing ground for this supposedly visionary approach?
And if we merge the grounds, what next? Merge the teams? Half-red, half-blue kits with players turning out for Merseyside United or Everpool?
Silly maybe, but so is this groundshare idea. An idea that only came to light again because Everton’s Kirkby stadium fell through and is now being revisted due to Tom Hicks and George Gillett's 'all talk and no action' reign at Anfield.
David Moyes was asked about the prospect of sharing after the Tesco Value Stadium went tits up. “Maybe Everton need it more than they (Liverpool) do at this moment in time,†he said.
Too right. Because while we are in the the mire fnancially thanks to that pair of Yankers, Everton aren’t exactly rolling in it either.
Good old Billy Kenwright has been looking for a deep-pocketed Bluenose for years to either build a new ground or start saving the crumbling relic that is Woodison.
Well sorry Blues, clear up your own mess - we’re not bailing you out - why would we want to give our rivals a lift?
If we leave Anfeld (and the Football Quarter plan proves we don’t have to) then we’ll leave for a new Anfeld, the new home of Liverpool Football Club...and no-one else.
Share with Everton? As one wag put it on an LFC forum: ‘I’d rather share a tent with Purple Aki.’
Gareth is editor of Well Red
Share we go again: Liverpool fans on living with the Bluenoses
Written by Robbo Huyton Tuesday, 28 September 2010 09:49
THE prospect of a Liverpool-Everton groundshare has AGAIN reared its head following comments from Kenny Dalglish and Bill Kenwright. Here, two Liverpool fans on opposite sides of the fence debate whether it should ever be allowed to happen.
YES - says IAN LATTA.
IT’S time we got real. We need a new stadium and quick and the only way I can now see that happening is if we share with Everton.
You’d be surprised how easy that trips off the tongue when you think about it.
A few years ago, I’d have never let that thought cross my mind, let alone write it in a magazine.
I’d have been that fella chained to the bulldozer or scaling the top of the Main Stand, (well, I would if I wasn’t scared of heights) screaming ‘til the end to make it all stop.
Things have changed massively since then. Debt, results, the emergence of Chelsea and, now, Man City, Spurs and Villa.
Now it just seems madness to me for both Liverpool and Everton to want to build 50,000 to 75,000 seater stadiums in the same city when our grounds are a mile apart from each other.
Why would we want to saddle ourselves with tonnes of debt to build it just so we could say it’s all ours and nobody else's?
You’d think as Liverpool fans we’d run a mile when the ‘D’ word is mentioned. We’ve had a bellyful of loan repayments to last us a lifetime.
All this for a stadium which is used for two league matches a month, maybe a European match and maybe a domestic cup match. So, for the rest
of the time, it does nowt apart from the odd conference, Istanbul night and Christmas do.
The sums don’t add up any more.
See footie stadiums don’t come cheap. Talk is now around the £250million-£300m mark to build the new Anfeld. We can’t afford that. Who’s going to buy the club, clear most of the debt then shell out another huge wedge on a new stadium?
The only way forward for us is to look at a shared stadium with North West Development Agency and Liverpool City Council as investment partners.
Think of the millions we could invest in the team to buy another Torres, a Villa, a Silva, if we had a shared stadium.
Now I can already hear those who think this is the worst idea since last issue when I said it was time for Rafa to go – and jab their fngers on how
the Italian teams don’t want shared stadiums anymore.
Well, let’s look at Italy. Yes, both Inter and Milan apparently want their own stadiums and Juventus are set to move to their own ground next year.
But the thing here is that I’m not holding up the Italian way as some sort of panacea to our woes, just that other clubs have shared grounds and it can work.
See it’s simple. We have the shared stadium which means building costs are halved (or slimmed down massively if the city council and NWDA chip in).
On our home match days, we keep all the ticket receipts, hospitality, pies and programmes, Everton do the same on theirs.
The stadium is named after a sponsor like Arsenal’s Emirates which injects more cash towards the build cost. The seats are the corporate colours of the stadium sponsor, which in turn increases the sponsorship cost.
You get some fancy lighting system in like the Allianz Arena which glows red when Bayern Munich are at home and blue when 1860 Munich is playing and voila, you have one shared stadium.
The Kop is at one end, the Gwladys Street is at the other. Shanks statue, Paisely arches and Eternal Flame are outside the new Kop, Dixie Dean is on the other side.
It would be 65,000 seats – a modest capacity but I think realistic in these times and a number we’d actually fill, with the ability to ‘fill in’ seats at a
alter date and ‘lose’ them for Everton’s home matches if they couldn’t sell out their home matches.
If they can build stadiums where the pitch can come out of the ground and when seats can be removed to reveal an athletics track, then they can remove seats for Everton’s home matches.
All the sponsors and ad hoardings would be electronic –like the pitch-side ones we have now – which means the adverts and club specifc ads could be changed with a click of a mouse depending on who’s at home.
Ok, so that’s stadium name sorted, seat colours, receipts, capacity and ownership sorted. See, it’s not that diffcult.
The biggest obstacle we have isn’t logistics, it’s mindset. We’ve been brought up to think that we always have to have our own stadium – that that’s the way we do things over here.
But it doesn’t always have to be that way. What did Barrack Obama say – change we can believe in.
Would you really care what colour the seats were, what the stadium was called, who owned it as long as we were winning regularly again?
If the money saved from building our own stadium could be ploughed into the team to win the fabled 19th?
This isn’t about selling our sole for the sake of winning, it’s about being practical in tough times.
I know stadiums are part of a club’s identity, of course they are, but in my view nights like St Etienne or the Chelsea Champions League semi-fnal in 2005 were made by the fans – not by the stadium.
Ian is an Anfeld season-ticket holder.
NO - says GARETH ROBERTS
REMEMBER Meja? A (crap) Swedish pop singer who in 1998 had a hit with ‘All ‘bout the money’?
Well, she, like people arguing for a groundshare, got it all wrong.
“It’s all about the money, it’s all about the dum dum duh dee dum dum. I don’t think it’s funny. To see us fade away. It’s all about the money...â€
So went said song. Any move to share with Everton would be all about the money – and it would see us fade away.
Smart-suited bean counters like Christian Purslow can bang on about business all they like - football is NOT all about the money.
Imagine telling Catholics their cathedral in Liverpool was closing and they had to go over the road and share with the Church of England.
Forget history, forget your religion, this is the future. This is business. We’re knocking down the place that you’ve called home, flogging the land and now you have to share.
It would never happen, of course. There would be uproar.
Yet it seems perfectly acceptable to suggest that my cathedral - Anfeld – should be closed (bad enough in itself) and that the club I love, Liverpool FC, should share a new ground in Stanley Park with that shower from the other side of said park, Everton.
Well sorry, no. Never. On so many levels, it’s a non-starter.
A club’s ground is central to its identity – it is its home, its powerbase, and it’s the cathedral for the fans’ religion: Liverpool.
To share it with your bitterest rivals would dilute everything to do with Liverpool FC – from the matchday experience to the framed picture of your club’s home.
It would be the end of a combined 250 years of footballing history - that’s how long Liverpool and Everton have lived in their OWN homes.
And how would it work? What would the stands be called? What colour would the seats be? Where would the Shankly Gates go? And what about the statue of good old Bill? Or the one of Dixie Dean at Everton?
Just move them, right? Wrong! Just move them! Why don’t we move Stonehenge? Six thousand years of history? So what – it would probably attract more visitors in London, stick it there, ‘ey?
What about the Liver Buildings? Bit out the way down there on the Mersey aren’t they? Stick ‘em in the middle of town – they’ll make more money there.
Liverpool has lost enough of its identity in recent times without sharing a ground.
And if we HAVE to move (or if the club simply refuse to consider redeveloping Anfeld) then if we’re going to have a soulless bowl of a stadium, I want it to be our soulless bowl of a stadium.
And not one with red and blue flashing lights either – this is Liverpool, not Blackpool.
It’s not about money, or business. It’s sport, it’s a team, a club, something that represents the city and means an awful lot to a hell of a lot.
Not only that, but the business argument appears flawed. Inter and AC Milan is always trotted out as this shining example of how groundshares DO work.
Well do your research, it doesn’t. If it does, why have Inter Milan paid for feasibility studies into building their own ground?
What about Roma and Lazio, they share? Yep, they hate it, too.
According to Comperio, the company approached by Inter to conduct the studies, sharing a stadium “inhibits the revenue that can be generated by Inter developing premium corporate facilitiesâ€.
So as the whole reason in the first place for wanting a new – or bigger – stadium is to generate more money to catch up with the Mancs, Arsenal, Chelsea, why not do it right?
And what about the city of Liverpool?
Two stadiums, two sets of jobs – two sets of sponsors. There’s a bigger picture.
If Manchester, Sheffeld, Nottingham, and Bristol can have two teams with two grounds, why can’t we?
Why do we have be the English testing ground for this supposedly visionary approach?
And if we merge the grounds, what next? Merge the teams? Half-red, half-blue kits with players turning out for Merseyside United or Everpool?
Silly maybe, but so is this groundshare idea. An idea that only came to light again because Everton’s Kirkby stadium fell through and is now being revisted due to Tom Hicks and George Gillett's 'all talk and no action' reign at Anfield.
David Moyes was asked about the prospect of sharing after the Tesco Value Stadium went tits up. “Maybe Everton need it more than they (Liverpool) do at this moment in time,†he said.
Too right. Because while we are in the the mire fnancially thanks to that pair of Yankers, Everton aren’t exactly rolling in it either.
Good old Billy Kenwright has been looking for a deep-pocketed Bluenose for years to either build a new ground or start saving the crumbling relic that is Woodison.
Well sorry Blues, clear up your own mess - we’re not bailing you out - why would we want to give our rivals a lift?
If we leave Anfeld (and the Football Quarter plan proves we don’t have to) then we’ll leave for a new Anfeld, the new home of Liverpool Football Club...and no-one else.
Share with Everton? As one wag put it on an LFC forum: ‘I’d rather share a tent with Purple Aki.’
Gareth is editor of Well Red
