By Tony Attwood
When you start boasting about your ability to tell lies it is not a bad idea to make sure there is nothing lurking around the corner with the ability to kick you in the teeth.
That’s not exactly one of the basic rules in public relations – for the first rule of PR is to admit nothing that might come back to haunt you, but I guess they do things different in Liverpool.
Which is presumably why that man at Liverpool FC admitted to being so clever at lying over the issue of what was and what was not in the contract of Suarez.
And yes I am sure there are many Liverpool supporters who think that their man in the board room has proven himself to be jolly clever in getting one over on those silly Londoners. Except that these stories have a habit of coming back and kicking you rather firmly in the teeth. Just as this one has done.
Because with Liverpool charging up the league (what with them not being in the Champions League and FA Cup) and talking up their chances of getting into the Champions League for the first time in four years next season, they release their annual accounts which are bad enough for them to be debarred from the League.
And here’s the irony, for if they had said to Arsenal, yes, for £40,000,001 you can have the maniac with the penchant for putting his teeth into human flesh, then they would have had a much easier chance of making their accounts fit the Uefa FFP formula.
Liverpool have managed to pile up losses of over £90m between 2011 and 2013 which by my maths (although probably not by the maths of the Liverpool board) is a little bit over £37m as allowed by FFP between 2011 and 2014. But still, the board will probably say it was just a lie. I mean this maths lark. Who understands it?
Actually what I suspect they will say is that they spent most of this money on infrastructure – which is to say a new stadium. Except they didn’t. Build it that is. For as the Ems has risen from the recycling plant the Liverpool ground is still… well, not to put too fine a point on it, nothing.
Yes, money was spent by George Gillett and Tom Hicks on the Stanley Park project, but as Liverpool said in their legal battles with those two, the old owners had no intention of building anything at all. It was a con trick.
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Which means that Liverpool’s boast about not selling Suarez is going to be followed by saying that they overspent and made a loss because of a con trick. A lie and a con trick. It is quite an interesting way to run a corporation.
Of course what Uefa makes of this is anyone’s guess, but if Liverpool do come in the top four this season, and if Uefa accept that the money Liverpool lost in the non-existent ground project is an allowable expense, there is mostly certainly going to be an appeal from whoever comes fifth.
So, while Liverpool could have avoided all this uncertainty by selling Suarez to Arsenal (assuming Arsenal really did put in a bid) Liverpool spent £53.3m on the Suarez contract extension, which all things considered, could be called careless.
Never mind the board can always lie to Uefa.
And then boast about it later.
- Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
- Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
- The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal
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