The US owners have transformed Anfield, healed rifts with the community and addressed blight but poverty remains stark
Throughout Tuesday’s exhilarating Champions League night at Anfield, when Roma were overpowered by Jürgen Klopp’s resurgent Liverpool, there was an irresistible sense of a whole club, not just a team, coming to fruition. Eight years after the Boston Red Sox owners, Fenway Sports Group, bought Liverpool and cleared the £200m debt from the dismal 2007 acquisition by Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the club have been greatly renewed. Their old ground, in which supporters’ songs recall European adventures under Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, has been transformed by the booming new £114m main stand and the strolling and shopping space outside that was claimed around it.
It may seem an odd fate for the few people who were left in Lothair Road and one side of Alroy Road after 20 years of shocking blight, to be moved and the three rows knocked down to make way for that space, but Liverpool have done it up tastefully. It is not all about the new corporate areas and megastore and the Hilton hotel shortly expected to be announced; the memorial to the 96 people killed at Hillsborough 29 years ago is a centerpiece outside the stand.
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