“More than anything, what sticks in the mind is the sound of David Moores’ voice faltering. Standing in front of unhappy shareholders in the Bill Shankly Suite at Anfield, the Liverpool chairman sounded beaten, like someone hit by a sudden realisation that things had changed. It was January 2004, the 12th year of the Premier League era but the first of a new economic reality. Six months earlier, Chelsea had been bought by a Russian billionaire named Roman Abramovich, whose £120million-plus transfer outlay that summer was only just short of the combined expenditure of the Premier League’s 19 other clubs. In the famous words of David Dein, then Arsenal’s executive vice-chairman, Abramovich had ‘parked his Russian tanks on the lawn and (was) firing £50 notes at us’. Football had always been split between the haves and the have-nots. Now there was a division between the haves and the have-yachts. …”
NYT/ATH