Money spinning

Recently signed sponsorship deals have it seems buoyed the owners’ spirits about the financial vitality of Liverpool Football club and their ability to make good on their long overdue promises from February 2007.

A spade in the ground maybe even the arrival of Snoogy Doogy.

Standard Chartered £80 million spread over four years is however unlikely to see digging implement arrive in Stanley Park any time soon. Also promises to plough (every pun intended) substantial amounts of the newly acquired bounty into the team will need to be realised if Messrs. Hicks and Gillett are to so much as start earning any credibility.

Debt levels may be defined as manageable by the Americans but will still exist and remain substantial and in no small part levied against the club rather than their own assets.

A telling comment from Christian Purslow is that windfalls such as this will be reinvested in including salaries - a suggestion that much of the limited war chest Rafael Benitez had available during the summer just gone was swallowed up by pay increases for those who penned and the new season’s bonus structure.

Chances are another round of rises would limit the pot for January, summer 2010 and so on.

There was and remains a need for Liverpool to do better and as well as their contemporaries in raking additional finance in which is why the current shirt sponsors had to come up with more or be replaced from a host of possible suitors.

Carlsberg have enjoyed a long and fairly fruitful relationship for much of the past 18 years but over the past half decade or so the deal has worked better for one party than the other. The brewer’s flagship brand has seen prolonged and extensive exposure across every continent of the globe through the clamour for Champions League and Premiership football.

It led to saturation across all markets. £7.2 million per year was hardly the going rate and paled into insignificance when compared with the riches Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and many other clubs in the top flight enjoyed.

Not all commercial deals struck under the reign of Hicks and Gillett have been so profitable. Thomas Cook receive a significant percentage of the tickets for all home games in exchange for a mere £1.5 million which are retailed at a mark up which includes hotel stays.

Tourists to the city and corporate clients may be an intended market but no small number of fans who live in the city are resorting to it as a method of gaining tickets which are getting as valuable to hold as gold dust.

Deals for a host of away games including European ones such as the one to come with Fiorentina next week mixing admission with an overnight stay or just a flight there and back attract an equally attractive fee and mean fewer and fewer tickets make it into the hands of those fans who had previously been able to obtain them. The attractiveness of the match allowing higher prices to be charged.

To expect Standard Chartered to be so generous without clauses based on performance and trophy wins is was always naive. Even though the money which will come in is a huge improvement it seems certain that there are such clauses.

A minority investor is said to be looked for but again this possibly hides a true agenda. Along with the recent quotes of £240 million naming rights for the new stadium it smacks of an alternative strategy and it can only be concluded that the optimism and talk is merely aimed at flagging any possible sale and hyping up the price.