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Posts Tagged ‘street’

• No further action after incident on 8 January in Yarm
• England winger was visiting friends and family on Teesside

Stewart Downing will not face charges relating to the Liverpool player’s arrest last month on suspicion of assault, police have said.

The 27-year-old England winger was held for questioning following an alleged incident at the Cross Keys pub in Yarm, Teesside, at around 1am on 8 January.

A 32-year-old woman also arrested at the time on suspicion of assault remains on police bail.

A Cleveland police spokeswoman said: “A 27-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of assault following an alleged incident at a pub on Yarm High Street has been released without charge.

“A 32-year-old woman who was also arrested on suspicion of assault remains on bail pending further inquiries. Inquiries are ongoing.”

Downing played for his hometown club, Middlesbrough, before moving to Aston Villa and then Liverpool in the summer of 2011. He was believed to be visiting friends and family on Teesside at the time of the incident.

Liverpool
guardian.co.uk

• Prospective Roma buyer has stake in Liverpool ownership
• Uefa rules do not allow influence over more than one club

Will the takeover of Roma by the Boston-based private-equity investor Thomas DiBenedetto have any implications for Liverpool?

Digger only asks this question because DiBenedetto is also a stakeholder in the Fenway Sports Group, which owns 100% of the shares in the Anfield club. As the two teams’ respective leagues currently stand, Roma would qualify for next season’s Europa League. Liverpool are four points off qualification for that competition.

If both clubs qualify, then it is possible Uefa’s rules governing the integrity of its competitions would come in to play. These state: “No individual or legal entity may have control or influence over more than one club participating in a Uefa club competition”. This is defined as “holding a majority of the shareholders’ voting rights” or “being able to exercise by any means a decisive influence in the decision-making of the club”, among other things.

If any clubs fall foul of these rules the lower-ranked team (in this case Roma) would be excluded from the competition. It is possible that these rules would apply in this case, though one can not be certain because it is impossible to ascertain how much of the FSG DiBenedetto owns.

Last week FSG sent out a press release announcing that it would no longer be trading under its former guise of New England Sports Ventures LLC. However, NESV is still the name of the holding company that is registered with the Massachusetts Corporations Division. This official channel has no publicly available information relating to NESV’s equity structures. Neither does the Division of Corporations of the State of Delaware, where NESV is ultimately domiciled.

Usefully for investors who do not wish to disclose their identities or the nature of their investments, Delaware never does oblige them to make public this sort of information. The Premier League does oblige its clubs to make public the identities of any shareholders with stakes in excess of 10%. Regrettably, Liverpool does not do this, saying only: “The sole owner of the Liverpool Football Club and Athletic Grounds Limited is New England Sports Ventures, trading as Fenway Sports Group. John Henry and Tom Werner are generally responsible for the management of Fenway Sports Group.”

Ian Cotton, the Liverpool executive who deals with matters relating to the club’s ownership, could not be contacted. An email to FSG’s generic address went unanswered. So Digger asked the media department of the Boston Red Sox what it knew of FSG, the parent it shares with Liverpool. It responded that it would attempt to put Digger in touch with DiBenedetto (he did not call back last night either, although he was probably quite busy putting his deal for Roma together). It also said that the identity of the clubs’ shareholders and their respective stakes “is not public information”.

The one little chink of light FSG has recently shed on who owns it is as follows: “Fenway Sports Group is led by Principal Owner John Henry and Chairman Tom Werner, with additional ownership interests being held by a select number of prestigious individuals and The New York Times.” Why so secret? Surely fans are entitled to know who owns their club, whether they are baseball or football fans, because sometimes it just might have an impact on the integrity of a competition.

West Ham to upgrade Olympic stadium

West Ham United will spend £90m on a stadium upgrade in an effort to fix the problems suffered by other football-club tenancies of Olympic stadiums.

The Hammers take over the Stratford site after the Paralympic Games next year. Then they will direct a sum equivalent to that Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson spent on his ill-fated takeover of the club in 2006. The experience of other clubs who have moved in to purpose-built Olympic stadiums suggests West Ham have their work cut out in getting it right. The US private-equity investor Thomas DiBenedetto was quoted by the Gazzetta Dello Sport yesterday that the Stadio Olimpico does not serve Roma, the club he is buying this week, sufficiently well.

“The Olimpico simply just do justice to the fans’ passion; the stands are too far away from the pitch and the noise from the crowd is not the same at that distance,” said DiBenedetto. “A new stadium is a must, an English-style stadium so that it benefits the players too.” Roma’s difficulties may relate as much to the age of the stadium – it is 52 years old. However there have been similar complaints from Espanyol about their occupancy of the 20-year-old Barcelona Olympic stadium. West Ham insist their fans will benefit from a vibrant atmosphere, will invest in retractable seating and a new roof, in an effort to keep the noise in.

Dream come true for England mascots

The FA made it a once-in-a-lifetime experience for 10 young people who were the mascots at England’s game against Ghana on Wednesday night. Every one of them represented one of the FA’s charity partners: Action for Children, the Bobby Moore Fund, Coaching for Hope and Street League. The 10-year-old Jake Hancox, a sufferer of Asperger Syndrome, was one of Action For Children’s representatives. He had never been able to join his older brother in playing the game in organised matches but at Wembley the FA gave him the opportunity to do something in football most other kids can only ever dream of.

Follow Matt Scott on Twitter: @diggermattscott

LiverpoolRomaMatt Scottguardian.co.uk

Public power struggle cut deeply into psyche of city where football has long been economically and emotionally intertwined

The clouds over Liverpool Football Club may have finally begun to lift, according to its beleaguered manager, Roy Hodgson, but for most of today even the rain couldn’t make up its mind on another drizzly afternoon of distant fiscal chicanery.

For the last week the city has emerged as the anchor point in a triangulated corporate finance operetta played out between a Texas courtroom, the chancery division in London and the geographical centre of all these corporate manoeuvrings: Liverpool FC – the jaded footballing powerhouse that may finally be free to fall into the arms of its latest US financier owners, NESV group.

“If [Tom] Hicks and [George] Gillett really are gone, it is a massive weight lifted for the whole city,” said Don Peterson, a Liverpool season ticket holder for the last 40 years and a resident of Woolton, in the south of the city. “They came in and tried to asset-strip the club. They broke every promise they ever made and showed utter contempt for the history of the club. At least now we can move on. With cautious optimism.”

Many felt disbelief at the sudden hopeful turn of events and relief at Hicks’s apparent withdrawal of his attempts to block a change of ownership, tempered by the dread that the Texan tycoon might yet “bring another rabbit out of the hat”. Like bedbugs and clothes moths, it seems carpetbagging American speculators are a particularly tough parasite to shift.

Above all, this has been a time of terribly wearing uncertainty for all concerned. “It’s one of the biggest days in the history of the football club,” said Gary Flack, a city centre taxi driver and a lifelong Liverpool fan.

“Forget the cup finals. This is D-day for us. The club is an integral part of the city. We now need to move on. We need to regenerate.”

It is always tempting to overplay the parallels between football and the things that happen around the edge of it, but in Liverpool the two have long been both emotionally and economically intertwined.

Susan Johnson, who works in a cafe across the road from Anfield stadium, said: “The whole area is hurting from what’s been going on. But the good thing is people do come together in a crisis in Liverpool. That was why a lot of people from around here went down to London [to the high court] on Tuesday. They felt powerless and they just wanted to get their voices heard.”

The peculiarly public nature of the recent power struggle seems to have cut deeply. This is a club that has long taken an almost exhibitionist pride in its own sense of doing things the right way.

Until the sale to Hicks and Gillett in 2007, Liverpool FC had been owned by the Moores family for more than 50 years. Managerial succession came via the understairs bootroom of coaches, with the club’s modern successes inspired by the charismatic demagogue manager Bill Shankly, who mingled with the club’s fans on matchdays and talked openly about football’s role as a function of the working communities out of which the great powerhouse northern industrial clubs had grown.

This sense of a proud history brought to a brutal full stop seems to have multiplied the recent humiliations.

“It was never the Liverpool way to do things in public like this,” said Eddie, another taxi driver. “There was an idea that things would be done properly, for the good of the club. But these cowboys we’ve had in, they sold us down the river. We just wanted them out.”

Flack agreed, but warned: “The heart of the club was taken out when it was sold as a plc and any kind of decency that existed before just isn’t there now. The days of gentlemanly behaviour among the owners have gone and we’re in the hands of the financial world. The new owners have promised to get rid of the club’s debt and that’s a big thing. But it’s still big business and we’re all pretty small fish now.”

It is perhaps in the streets around Anfield that the poignancy of Liverpool’s recent plight is most keenly felt. This is a place of deep urban decay, a world away from powerbroking in the Royal Courts of Justice or the mid-Atlantic collision of corporate legal instruments.

The area is strikingly depopulated, with row upon row of derelict houses. The school is boarded up. The shops are shut. The whole place reeks of blight and stasis. A regeneration package that was reportedly linked to stadium development reached a standstill while the club remained in limbo.

Pensioner Lillian Kirby has lived near the stadium for 12 years. “The football club has always been a very important part of the community,” she said.

“It has been really bad for all of us. We’re never sure if the rebuilding we’ve heard about is going ahead or not. They started knocking down houses in our street and now they’ve stopped.

“We just want it all to be finished. Maybe after today we can finally move on.”

LiverpoolBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk