Gillett and Hicks (gettyimages.com)Liverpool fans' growing antipathy towards their club's co-owner Tom Hicks, who is close to strengthening his position at Anfield through refinancing the debt he incurred in buying the club, will be increased by the revelation of a US interview in which the American said that he intended to plough profits from the club into his US sports franchises.Prospective suitor Dubai International Capital was waiting to see if the level of opposition against Hicks and his partner George Gillett before last night's home match with Aston Villa might make Gillett any keener to sell up. But the hard bargain being driven by Hicks is illustrated in a video interview with the Major League Baseball (MLB) website which deals with the fears expressed by fans of his Texas Rangers baseball and Dallas Stars ice hockey franchises, that the £218m American Anfield takeover last February would damage their own clubs.
"People are worried that I might take money away from the [Texas] Rangers [Hicks' baseball franchise] to go to Liverpool," Hicks said. "But it is just the reverse. Liverpool is going to throw off lots of extra money which, if I choose to, I can use for the Rangers or the [Dallas] Stars [ice hockey team]."
It was revealed yesterday that Hicks intends to appear at the SoccerEx event in London in April, which hardly suggests that he is planning to move out of the sport any time soon.
The interview also provides a sense of how Hicks – whose Dallas Stars, purchased for $84m (43m), are now worth an estimated $254m – sees his sports franchises as business commodities. When he bought the Stars, he said, they were "a lousy franchise, playing in a crumbling arena... so I figured I could change all that; put them in a new arena, make them worth a lot more money and sell it and make money, because I'm a businessman. What I didn't count on was that I fell in love with hockey."
The angry Merseyside response to Hicks' revelation that he had approached Jürgen Klinsmann about the manager's job will hardly have left him "in love" with Liverpool and DIC may also find encouragement in Hicks' saying in the interview that he finds partisan Liverpool fans an alien entity. "There's a difference between American fans and not just European but UK," he tells MLB. "Liverpool football fans are on a different planet but God bless 'em they're proud of it."
The last line is really funny for him to say something like that... This fellow...
