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Thousands of miles from Anfield fans of Texas Rangers have contended with a familiar tale of debt and financial crisis

Ugly scenes of jeering fans at the stadium. A team bought with a mountain of debt, with creditors at the door. A messy sale with legal wrangling and an indebted owner clinging on. If that sounds familiar to Liverpool supporters then it should.

This is not the sad tale of Liverpool’s ownership woes. Five thousand miles across the Atlantic, it’s the recent history of the Texas Rangers baseball team. What the two teams also have in common is the man at the centre of both controversies: Tom Hicks.

In an uncanny parallel, the events at Anfield have been closely mirrored in the boardroom at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, near Dallas, where Hicks’s ambitions to build an international sporting empire began to crumble, while bloggers in Texas labelled him “enemy No1 in the Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex”.

Hicks had made his fortune with a venture capital fund – buying or investing in companies and then selling them off at a profit – and was collecting a string of sports teams, including the Dallas Stars ice hockey franchise, the Texas Rangers, Liverpool and a professional rodeo circuit.

It was the Texas Rangers that first pushed George W Bush to public prominence when he led a consortium that purchased the team in 1989. While Bush went on to bigger things, the Rangers failed to perform and in 1998 the club was sold by Bush’s group to Hicks for $250m.

In the easy-money era of the 1990s and 2000s, financing such deals was no trouble for a successful businessman such as Hicks. But the collapse of Wall Street in late 2008 saw a credit squeeze that stopped banks refinancing the huge loans they had once been so eager to offer.

By early 2009 the Hicks Sports Group (HSG), the holding company for Hicks’s empire, had defaulted on repayments for $525m worth of loans. Soon after, Hicks placed the Rangers into administrative bankruptcy known as Chapter 11, to fend off creditors while he attempted to sell the club in a deal that would have allowed him to stay on as a shareholder.

But – in a pattern Liverpool fans will recognise – other parties took legal action to halt what they saw as a sweetheart deal, and baseball’s governing body, Major League Baseball, had to move in as the team’s administrator, making $40m in loans to keep the team going as the squabbling dragged on. More than a year later, in August this year, a court ruled that the team had to be sold by auction, and Hicks’s role was removed. The new owners are a group headed by the baseball superstar Nolan Ryan but paid $80m more than Hicks had first proposed.

Before the sale of the Rangers, HSG was estimated to owe 40 lenders approximately $600m in loans, unpaid interest and fees. Hicks is also trying to sell the Dallas Stars ice hockey team. A similar saga is unfolding, with Hicks holding out for a better price. A local sports blogger, Brandon Bibb, says he thought Hicks had learned his lesson from the Rangers debacle. “Well, I was wrong,” Bibb says. “Instead, it’s become clear that Hicks’s objective is to try and squeeze every last nickle he can out of these investments, the Stars, Rangers and Liverpool be damned.”

And that’s not all: the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Hicks sold his luxury chalet in Aspen for $18.5m, saying his family preferred to go on holiday elsewhere. Has a man estimated to be a billionaire in 2009 found himself in financial difficulty? It is impossible to say, since Hicks’s holdings are privately owned and so not available for public scrutiny. But for some among America’s wealthy the Wall Street meltdown and property market collapse has slashed their net worth.

George Gillett, Hicks’s co-owner at Liverpool, is an even more reticent figure. Gillett was the majority owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team, the Liverpool of the NHL that once dominated the league but with little success in recent seasons. Gillett sold the team and their arena last year for an estimated $550m.

There may be a silver lining for Liverpool fans, if the Texas Rangers’ experience is anything to go by. Despite the months of uncertainty, the Rangers had their best season in years in 2010, winning their division.

The other good news is that the first thing the Rangers’s new owners did was cut the price of beer at the stadium. No chance of that at Anfield, sadly.

LiverpoolUS sportRichard Adamsguardian.co.uk

• Club’s holding company not listed among other sports assets
• David Beckham’s retirement not a blow for FA kit sponsor

Tom Hicks has kept his shareholding in Liverpool separate from his other sports assets in apparent fear of a collapse of the highly leveraged Premier League club. Digger has obtained a corporate flowchart detailing all of the sporting interests Hicks has held through his holding company, HSG Hicks Sports Group.

The chart was filed with a US court in bankruptcy proceedings against Texas Rangers, the Major League Baseball franchise that has now been sold by Hicks, in which the courts had invited Rangers’ creditors to pursue other HSG assets.

That order could put at risk his stake in the Dallas Stars ice hockey team, as well as stakes in those organisations’ associated real estate operations, which sat alongside the Texas Rangers in HSG. Yet, curiously, Liverpool’s ultimate parent company, Kop Investment LLC, is not listed among them.

It is not known precisely how his Kop shareholding is structured since that company has never met its statutory requirement to file an annual return. But Liverpool’s ring-fencing out of HSG cannot have been for tax or legal reasons: Kop is registered in Delaware, the tax-friendly location where other Hicks investments are held. A spokesman for Hicks did not return calls yesterday after Digger put it to him that the purpose of the separation was to prevent Liverpool’s debts causing problems for other HSG assets. Despite their separation the dominoes have begun to fall.

No Beckham blow for FA

You might have thought that Fabio Capello’s decision to end David Beckham’s international career would impact the Football Association’s earning power from its sponsors. But apparently not, at least not much. The kit deal with Umbro means the bulk of its earnings are fixed and not contingent on the number of shirts sold. And as far as Digger can tell, Beckham’s only personal appearance over the past two years for the FA was for National Express, and they went all the way to Los Angeles to get it.

Clarke keeps out

Sir Dave Richards sees the facilitation of takeover deals for clubs as one of his responsibilities as Premier League chairman. So when Leicester City yesterday passed from Milan Mandaric’s ownership to that of Aiyawatt Raksriaksorn, a scion of a major Thai business dynasty, Digger wondered if Greg Clarke, the chairman of the Football League and a Leicester City season-ticket holder, might have greased the wheels. After all, he was previously chief executive of Lend Lease, the Australian conglomerate that has an outlet in Thailand. But Clarke was not involved in the deal and will not be involved in any other either. So it seems his views on what is required of an independent chairman differ from those of Richards.

Mills is no mug

When Sir Keith Mills this weekwarned he would withdraw TeamOrigin from the next America’s Cup if BMW Oracle press ahead with plans to use multi-hull boats, it was not a threat he made lightly. Mills, the deputy chairman of London 2012, and a Tottenham Hotspur board member, has poured eye-watering sums into his campaign but will walk away from it all if he feels there is no chance of winning the Auld Mug fairly. The strength of his feeling can now be quantified: in the first two years of the campaign launched in 2007, he and his investment partner, Charles Dunstone, spent £17m on the venture.

Referees can sleep sound all about it

In the absence of a sponsor to replace the departed England partner,Nationwide, there was space on the Wembley hoardings during Wednesday’s friendly win over Hungary. The FA chose to fill the void with evidence of the work it has been doing at grassroots level. “Ref assaults down 13%,” it trumpeted. That much, eh? Well, gotta have a dream.

LiverpoolBusinessMatt Scottguardian.co.uk

• Tom Hicks’ fortune valued at $950m in Forbes list
• Texan ranked 701st richest man in the world

Liverpool’s co-owner Tom Hicks has lost his billionaire status, according to Forbes magazine’s latest rich list. However, the Texan businessman was still ranked the 701st richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of around $950m (£620m).

The American, who also owns the Dallas Stars ice hockey franchise, has already agreed a deal to sell the Texas Rangers baseball team for £310m. However, he appears in no hurry to offload his 50% share in Liverpool, despite increasing pressure from disillusioned supporter against the way he and his co-owner George Gillett have run the club.

“We all know about his problems with his sports clubs here in the US and over there in England,” Forbes senior editor Matthew Miller told the Liverpool Echo. “He has had some debt problems. He has only just missed the cut [to be classed as a billionaire]. We think he is a 900 million to 950 million US dollars guy.”

Hicks and Gillett owe Royal Bank of Scotland £237m and have been unable to raise the money needed to build the club’s proposed stadium at Stanley Park. They looking to raise £100m through outside investment by the summer as RBS have requested they slash the amount of their debt.

Liverpoolguardian.co.uk