LIVERPOOL, England (AP) -Tom Hicks walked into The Albert pub, and the celebration was on.
His son Alex had just proposed to girlfriend Portia Tuma on the pitch of the renowned 123-year-old ground that's home to Liverpool FC, and the group went off to lift a few pints with the blue jean clad crowd, under a ceiling filled with banners celebrating many of the world's well-known soccer clubs.
A few hours later, it was time for son Tom Jr.'s 30th birthday party, held at a long table lit by candelabra in Circo, a new hotspot near The Beatles Story museum, overlooking the River Mersey. And then, the next day, was the big match against Manchester United, the opener of a Premier League day that also included Arsenal vs. Chelsea down in London and was billed as "Grand Slam Sunday'' by British media.
"It was kind of a special weekend,'' said the elder Tom Hicks, the co-owner of Liverpool, one of three Premier League clubs controlled by Americans. "I had my whole family there.''
The fast-paced match was somewhat deflating for Hicks, who wore a red Liverpool scarf around his neck as the crowd sang "You'll Never Walk Alone'' before kickoff. Manchester United won 1-0 on a 28-degree Sunday afternoon so raw that many players wore gloves, becoming the first visiting team since Everton from 1908-10 to post four straight shutouts at Anfield.
At the final whistle, with the sky turning a steely purple-gray ahead of the 3:53 p.m. sunset, the 3,000 or so visiting supporters in the Anfield Road Stand, surrounded by police in yellow vests and security in orange, sang out heartily: "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way! Oh what fun it is to see United win away!''
"I think our team played like they mentally didn't think they were good enough to win, played tight,'' Hicks said a few days later from his Dallas office, sounding more analytical than critical.
The 61-year-old Hicks has been a well-known figure in U.S. sports since purchasing the NHL's Dallas Stars in 1996 and baseball's Texas Rangers in 1998 from George W. Bush's group. And his profile increased when he signed Alex Rodriguez to a $252 million, 10-year contract before the 2001 season only to trade him to the New York Yankees three years later.
But nothing prepared Hicks for the notoriety he gained last spring, when he joined Montreal Canadiens owner George Gillett Jr. to take control of Liverpool in a deal valued at $431 million.
They followed Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer owner, who bought Manchester United in 2005, and Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner, who purchased Aston Villa in 2006.
With a stadium in the middle of a neighborhood and a fan base that obsesses over its stars with constant love, admiration, condemnation and dread, the club is at the center of Liverpudlians' attention. Imagine the Red Sox Nation intensified many times over.
"There are two forms of ownership: There is legal shareholding ownership, and there's stakeholder ownership,'' said Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League. "They all feel they own it. And so while somebody may be the legal owner and the person who owns the shares, in a sense you're not really the owners. You're still only the custodians.''
Liverpool has won a record 18 league titles in England, two more than Manchester United and five ahead of Arsenal, but Liverpool hasn't finished first since 1990 and has seen Manchester United - its neighbors a 60-minute train ride to the east - win the Premier League nine times since. Although Liverpool has won five European Cups, most among English clubs, just one of them has been since 1984.
Dallas won the 1999 Stanley Cup under Hicks, but the Rangers haven't even made it to the World Series. Liverpool's fans are counting on Hicks and Gillett to spend money for players that will restore the team to the glory days of Ian Rush, Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish.
"I think the fans are very serious fans. They want to make sure Liverpool is a top side, and they're going to be skeptical of a lot of things until we do it,'' Hicks said.
An American accent is suspect these days in Liverpool, an urban area of 800,000 that will be one of Europe's cultural capitals next year. Several of the locals, known as Scousers for a local stew and their thick accents, ask Americans whether they know the owners and what they think Hicks and Gillett will do.
In late November, manager Rafa Benitez openly questioned whether the club was prepared to spend for players when the market reopens in January.
"They don't understand what the transfer window means in Europe,'' Benitez said. "They need to understand how difficult it is to sign players.''
Benitez was told by Hicks to worry about games, not acquisitions. It became known as "The Rift,'' and before a European Champions League match against FC Porto on Nov. 28, about 2,000 fans marched from The Sandon pub to Anfield to support the coach.
"They wanted to protect Rafa. That part you have to admire,'' Hicks said. "We think Rafa's terrific. We put all that behind us.''
After the Man. U. match, Hicks, Gillett and team chief executive Rick Parry met with Benitez. Everyone seems to be on the same page now, attributing whatever differences to the distance and language barriers.
"We wanted to see what we could do with the players we'd already bought. We just wanted to see if the team was going to jell,'' Hicks said. "And he went to a press conference and kind of pouted and answered the same question 20 times, 'I'm focusing on my team.' And then the media made up everything from that point forward. They made up that we were going to fire him. They made up that I told him to shut up. They made up this battle between Benitez and the Americans. It's really funny to kind of watch.''
Key to everything is the stadium and how much debt the club will incur to build it.
Football has been played at Anfield since 1884, when Everton was the home team. That club left in a rent dispute and newly formed Liverpool took over in 1892. The current ground, which has a capacity of about 45,300, consists of four covered stands, the oldest of which dates to 1973.
There are the Paisley Gates and the Shankly Gates, named after former Liverpool coaches, with the famous sign, "You'll Never Walk Alone.'' And there is the Hillsborough Memorial, where fans leave flowers in honor of the 96 supporters who were crushed to death on April 15, 1989, before a Football Association Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest in Sheffield.
The Kop, which rises in 72 steeply raked rows, is the club's soul and gets its name from Spion Kop, a hill in South Africa where British forces lost a battle during the Second Boer War in 1900. Liverpool's Kop once held 30,000, back in the days when fans stood on terraces rather than viewing from seats, but these days capacity is about 12,500. The screaming, singing supporters call themselves Kopites, and the roof acts like a megaphone that sends a wall of sound onto the field.
While Manchester United has expanded Old Trafford to 76,000 and Arsenal moved from 38,000-seat Highbury into 60,000-seat Emirates Stadium in July 2006, Liverpool has been trapped by the economics of Anfield, where there are just 34 luxury suites and few amenities. The club wants to build a new stadium in nearby Stanley Park.
Before the sale, the Manchester firm AFL drew up a proposal that the new owners hated. Then Dallas-based HKS proposed an expensive, futuristic stadium. Both firms are to come back with new proposals and present them to the owners in New York on Jan. 9. Hicks says there will be 110 suites, and team plans to move in for the 2011-12 season.
"We looked to make it as big as 80,000 but I think for our marketplace, probably the right size would be somewhere between 70,000 and 73,000,'' Hicks said. "That would be the third-biggest in England behind Wembley and Old Trafford.''
Its fan base is worldwide. Before the big match, Liverpool had its first million-pound ($2 million) week of merchandise sales - and in England, clubs don't share licensing income.
Matches are beamed to Asia and the United States. Out in California, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane - a Tottenham Hotspur supporter - gets up at 4:45 a.m. to watch the League.
"I think I view it as a fan. I view it with fresh eyes. For me, I'm a neophyte, I'm been following it the last few years,'' said Beane, whose baseball owner leads the group that operates San Jose's new Major League Soccer franchise. "The more you watch it, the more you get an appreciation as a former athlete for the athleticism when you see the best in the world.''
Hicks could have purchased Dallas' MLS franchise but decided not to. "In hindsight, I probably made the wrong decision,'' he said.
There's synergy to be gained with his U.S. franchises - Carlsberg at the ballpark, anyone? - but he doesn't foresee any regular-season matches being moved to the United States, just perhaps another preseason tour in 2009.
Other clubs could attract Americans. Stan Kroenke, who controls the NBA's Denver Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche and MLS's Colorado Rapids, already owns 12 percent of Arsenal. Yankees senior vice president Hank Steinbrenner said in the 1980s his family was approached about purchasing one-third of Tottenham.
"We should have done it. It was at a time before the big money hit European soccer,'' Steinbrenner said, adding that the League still intrigues him. "I haven't ruled out doing that.''
Scudamore welcomes the Americans.
"They bring sort of a fresh commercialism to it, which is always good,'' he said. "There's a degree of enthusiasm. There's a degree of positive attitude. There's a degree of can do. ... But I think all of them have been very cognizant of the fact that they don't know everything there is to know about football and, therefore, they've gone about it in a way that has been respectful to the other clubs and the traditions of the league.''
But in the end, the mark of success will be measured in trophies. That's what the supporters crave. That's what drives everyone from the players to the fans in the highest row of the Kop.
"It is their club,'' Hicks said. "The last family had it 51 years, and it's been around 115. Hopefully, we'll have it for a long time as well.''
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