Whatever Happened To Hicks And Gillett?
With Liverpool thriving on the pitch and FSG going on four years since their last major unforced error, it is something of an odd time to cast one’s mind back to the dark days of Hicks and Gillett. But I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about whatever happened to them.
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As a quick refresher, those were truly dark days for the club. Their time on Merseyside was trophyless. When they sold, the Reds were in the relegation zone. Hicks and Gillett didn’t simply fail to invest in the club, they stripped it of value. Hicks and Gillett ran up huge debts for both their holding company and the club itself, with large portions of LFC’s operating profits being used to service the debt. Administration was a real threat, and the late David Moores went public saying he regretted selling his controlling interest to Hicks and Gillett.
It likely worked out for the best that he sold to them though, because the alternative was Sheikh Mohammed, the absolute autocrat of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE. Personally, I’d rather have our owners be commodities traders (John W. Henry), Hollywood producers (Tom Werner), and hedge funds (RedBird Capital Partners) than a tyrant whose wealth and power are built on literal slave labor. But I digress. LFC was saved by bankers when the Royal Bank of Scotland, who owned Hicks and Gillett’s debt, forced the sale of the club to get their money back.
Both men have left sports. Tom Hicks, now 78, was heavily involved in Texas sports. He’s the man who gave Alex Rodriguez a then-baseball record $252 million contract to join the Texas Rangers and also owned the NHL’s Dallas Stars. He was forced to sell both teams by bankruptcy courts shortly after selling LFC. He didn’t just run teams into the ground; he had bankrupted Hicks Sports Group, cutting his net worth nearly in half in the process. He seems to have settled into retirement, and there is an elementary school in Frisco, Texas that is named after him because he donated the land on which it is built.
Gillett, now 86, didn’t fare much better. His sports empire included a NASCAR team, the Montreal Impact of the USL First Division (minor league soccer), and the legendary Montreal Canadiens. Like Hicks, he had to sell all his sports assets because of the absolute mess they had made. He sold the Canadiens to the Molson family (yes, as in Molson beer) in 2009, the NASCAR team in 2010, and the Montreal Impact folded in 2011. As of 2016, he was still paying £125,000 a month to creditors who funded his purchase of Liverpool.
The man who sold to them, David Moores, seems to have been blessed with a quiet life out of the public eye after selling. He and his wife passed away within weeks of each other in 2022, having lived long enough to see his beloved LFC right the financial ship, end their league title drought, and conquer all of Europe for a sixth time. I like to think of that as a happy ending.
