There's a set playbook sports teams follow when they want a new stadium. The team announces its intentions, commissions a few architectural designs, and pays for an economic impact study touting the (mostly fictional) benefits a new stadium would have on the community. Few teams have taken the Nixonian approach of poisoning their own community to make those benefits more apparent.
As of last year, Liverpool F.C. owned 150 homes around their historic stadium, Anfield. Almost all of them were vacant. "There are thieves ripping the lead off people's roofs," Chris Coyle, whose mother lived among the vacants, told the Liverpool Echo at the time. This was just the tip of the iceberg: the Guardian reported that over the past decade, miscreants lit some of the blighted houses on fire, threw bricks at the few remaining residents, and in 2001 a woman using one of the vacant homes was murdered. In what one resident called "dereliction by design," Liverpool was accused of buying properties just to let them rot, driving prices down and residents out so they could more cheaply expand Anfield.
(...)
There's no question Liverpool could have handled this situation better, either by fairly compensating the residents—reports consistently indicated Liverpool would try to underpay the largely senior citizen occupants for their homes—or by keeping the neighborhood functional in the interim. But, perhaps most insultingly of all, the club was deceitful, using third-party brokers to mask the club's motives. As a Lothair Road resident told the Guardian last year, "If Liverpool had been honest from the beginning, said they wanted our houses to expand their ground, we're realistic, we know they're a huge football club, most of us support them, deals could have been done. Instead they were underhand, blighted the area and we've had to live like this for years." Whether Liverpool's neighbors would have been reasonable at the onset is up for debate, but ultimately beside the point since the club never bothered to find out.
One of the main reasons Liverpool needs to expand the stadium is to keep revenues in line with soccer's global powerhouses. Arsenal, for example, has made boatloads of money off its new stadium in North London. But this global presence and ambition comes with a price, often to the people closest to the club. As much as Liverpool—and every sports team, really—wants to market itself as a tight-knit community of die-hards, the reality is the club is governed by a global perspective, often at the expense of their closest fans. After almost two decades of neglecting its neighbors, Liverpool may finally be ready to repair their own home. Full story...
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As of last year, Liverpool F.C. owned 150 homes around their historic stadium, Anfield. Almost all of them were vacant. "There are thieves ripping the lead off people's roofs," Chris Coyle, whose mother lived among the vacants, told the Liverpool Echo at the time. This was just the tip of the iceberg: the Guardian reported that over the past decade, miscreants lit some of the blighted houses on fire, threw bricks at the few remaining residents, and in 2001 a woman using one of the vacant homes was murdered. In what one resident called "dereliction by design," Liverpool was accused of buying properties just to let them rot, driving prices down and residents out so they could more cheaply expand Anfield.
(...)
There's no question Liverpool could have handled this situation better, either by fairly compensating the residents—reports consistently indicated Liverpool would try to underpay the largely senior citizen occupants for their homes—or by keeping the neighborhood functional in the interim. But, perhaps most insultingly of all, the club was deceitful, using third-party brokers to mask the club's motives. As a Lothair Road resident told the Guardian last year, "If Liverpool had been honest from the beginning, said they wanted our houses to expand their ground, we're realistic, we know they're a huge football club, most of us support them, deals could have been done. Instead they were underhand, blighted the area and we've had to live like this for years." Whether Liverpool's neighbors would have been reasonable at the onset is up for debate, but ultimately beside the point since the club never bothered to find out.
One of the main reasons Liverpool needs to expand the stadium is to keep revenues in line with soccer's global powerhouses. Arsenal, for example, has made boatloads of money off its new stadium in North London. But this global presence and ambition comes with a price, often to the people closest to the club. As much as Liverpool—and every sports team, really—wants to market itself as a tight-knit community of die-hards, the reality is the club is governed by a global perspective, often at the expense of their closest fans. After almost two decades of neglecting its neighbors, Liverpool may finally be ready to repair their own home. Full story...
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