Via Unprofessional Foul and the Guardian: Tom Hicks, the charismatic and widely beloved co-owner of Liverpool, has defaulted on the monthly interest payments on three separate loans worth a combined $525 million. Actually, since we may as well be precise in the face of gigantic pretend numbers, it was his sports investment company, the Hicks Sports Group, that missed the payments, but it’s more or less all the same thing. The HSG, which is not only an acronym but also the sound Liverpool fans tend to make in their throats when Hicks comes on the TV, is actively searching for investors for the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars, Hicks’s baseball and hockey teams. And Hicks swears that the banks won’t take over the teams.
This does and doesn’t affect Liverpool: It doesn’t, because Liverpool isn’t connected to HSG; Hicks owns his share of the club through Kop Investment LLC, which is the parent company of Kop Holdings, which owns Liverpool, which has a thing in it called the Kop. But it does, because Hicks and his co-owner George Gillett are just four months away from having to refinance a £350.5 million loan for Liverpool through Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia, and this news is bound to freak them out. It’s too soon to say what that will mean, but the clouds on the horizon for Liverpool are starting to look a little ominous. And I’m not just saying that because they’ve just re-signed Dirk Kuyt.
Read More: Billionaire Owners, Liverpool
by Brian Phillips · April 3, 2009
Wow. That’s not going to be good; RBS is busy reparing windows at the moment.
Also, IIRC Kop means ‘hill’ in Afrikaans or something like that. Came into use after the Boer War; used for the slanted hills on the end of pitches.
It refers to a battle in the Boer War. But I’m pretty sure that to Hicks and Gillett when they were setting up their holding companies, it just referred to the fact that someone told them it was a marketable thing in Anfield.
Sorry, just flashbacks from having a roommate that was a die-hard Liverpudlian (and Liverpool fan) in Birmingham.
His armband says that he’s for sale*
Torres, Torres
The check is in the mail it says
Torres, Torres
They sold the lad from sunny Spain
to Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
Fernando Torres, loan payment #9
* – I hope not
Sheikh Zayed is the deceased father of the current Man City owner, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. I apologize for the error. I could blame Google but it was really an operator error.
I suspect this is exactly the sort of news potential buyers were waiting for. Now they can bend Hicks over the barrel and get a cut rate price for Liverpool FC or Kop Holdings or Kop Investment or whatever.
joejoejoe — No one who leaves brilliant made-up supporter chants in this space has to apologize for mild generational inaccuracies in them. And switching Mansour in for Zayed doesn’t change the meter anyway.
Brandon — Similarly, no one who works the Boer War into a comments section—any comments section—ever needs to say they’re sorry for it.
j — You may well be right. And how happy is George Gillett that he ever went into business with Tom Hicks at this point? I’m guessing his photo from the Hicks Christmas card is just nasty with drawn-on mustaches and evil eyebrows at this point.
I wonder when supporters will realize that fat men bearing supposedly fat checks (but in reality purchasing using the team to finance its own purchase — wish I could pull that off!) are not their saviors, but their executioners?
hicks is dulusional if he thinks somebodys gonna put money into the clubs and not retain a holding stake.he cant afford to keep going about his business like this because the bottom line is, he simply cant afford to. get out of liverpool now