Anfield Refurbishment: How Liverpool Moved On from Hicks and Gillett's Promise

February 6, 2007, and Tom Hicks and George Gillett promise that there will be “a spade in the ground” within the next 60 days as Liverpool’s new stadium project―the very reason why the Reds rushed into an ownership agreement with the two Americans in the first place―seemingly took a huge step forward.

Two-thousand-three-hundred-and-thirty-nine days later, that ground in Liverpool’s iconic Stanley Park remains untouched―bar the efforts of a few mischief making but ultimately good-hearted Reds―as, with Hicks and Gillett now long gone, Liverpool have taken on a different but welcome direction.

The initial plans for the new stadium in Stanley Park go as far back as 2002, but while a succession of people have passed through the Anfield corridors of power since then, they’ve never laid down anything approaching concrete on a structure which has been viewed as vital to the Reds’ hopes of competing for honours with the likes of Manchester United in England, as well as the Continental elite across Europe.

But when John Henry and Fenway Sports Group helped to oust the by then hated and extremely dangerous Hicks and Gillett in October 2010, there were plenty of sports fans who predicted what was going to happen next.

After all, Henry and FSG had realised that the power of their other sporting love―Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox―lay in their world famous Fenway Park Stadium, one of the great sporting theatres which had played host to so much drama, triumph and history during the existence of one of the USA’s most iconic teams.

FSG looked into the new stadium proposals that Liverpool had painstakingly drafted over much of the last decade, but they were always determined to maintain Anfield as Liverpool’s home.

The trouble was, that determination alone was never going to be enough.

The presence of residential houses so close to Liverpool’s home have always made an expansion of the current ground difficult, and ensured that the Reds were going to have to play a waiting game to ensure that they were going to secure the land that they wanted, with both the Main Stand and Anfield Road End clearly affected.

It hasn’t been an easy road for Liverpool to travel, with this excellent report from The Guardian’s David Conn detailing how the club have at times let their local residents down over what has been years of effort to secure the land they want, but with the City Council now getting on board with the attempts at an Anfield regeneration, things finally look like they are moving forward―as emphasised on the website www.anfieldproject.co.uk.

Hundreds of new and refurbished homes, around the same number of new jobs and plenty of other improvements to what is clearly a derelict and neglected area all bode well for the future of Anfield, with a stadium of up to 60,000 supporters able to cheer on a team hopefully inspired by their adapted surroundings.

There is still so, so much more work to do to make that somewhat idyllic vision a reality of course, but Liverpool and the club’s fans have to appreciate that they are in a much better position than they were all those days ago when Hicks and Gillett were making promises that their pockets were never deep enough to keep.

Anfield remains the club’s home and seemingly always will be, the task now is to create and mould a team who are capable of playing successfully in it.

Like everything else in this saga, that’ll be easier said than done.