Reclaiming the Kop? Analysing Liverpool Supporters’ 21st Century Mobilizations

Introduction

Football supporter protests against the various commercializing processes involved in English football have become key stories worthy of serious sociological debate in recent years. At Manchester United FC, a group of football supporters felt so disenfranchised by issues connected to the financial and cultural ownership of the club that in 2005 they set up FC United of Manchester, a non-league and semi-professional alternative, which has achieved a level of success in both attendances and trophies (Brown, 2007, 2008). This example followed AFC Wimbledon, which was established by supporters of Wimbledon FC (later renamed MKDons) in 2002 after the parent club announced plans to relocate 70 miles north in Milton Keynes (Joyce, 2006). Also at Manchester United FC, tens of thousands of match-attending supporters take part in a highly visible ‘Green and Gold’ movement by wearing the club’s original playing colours to show distaste for the club’s owners. Such disharmony is not new – Melucci (1996) pointed out that prerequisites of collective action are to have people who regularly come together, with similar purposes and renew their beliefs and identifications with a movement – and this is applicable to the context of football (and other spectator sports) where fans aggregate with the common purpose of supporting a team. As such, football has a rich history of supporter protest movements that is particularly vibrant amongst the Italian Ultra groups (Testa and Armstrong, 2010) and it must not be forgotten that however spurious Taylor’s (1971a, 1971b) explanations of football hooligan activity may now seem, he was arguing that it was essentially a reform-based collective action through which the committed ‘sub-cultural rump’ of supporters protested against their perceived ‘loss’ of the game. Yet most football-based protests do not achieve their aims. Thus whilst, as Wagg (1984: 199) pointed out, a football team manager may occasionally be relieved of his duty after a fan protest, the commercializing processes of football remain unchanged. ¹ Indeed, despite strong fan collective action, Wimbledon FC did relocate to Milton Keynes and vociferous Manchester United FC supporter mobilization has not forced the resale of the club; ‘success’ at such movements has been to establish alternative football clubs that, perhaps, opt out of as many of the explicitly commercializing processes as possible.

This article discusses the Liverpool FC (hereon Liverpool) supporters’ mobilizations that played a role in forcing unpopular American co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett to sell the club to (currently) popular American owner John W. Henry’s New England Sports Ventures (NESV) in October 2010. In doing so, the article focuses on the Spirit of Shankly (SOS) movement. The full story of the movement cannot be detailed here, but is presented in Millward (2011), which provides a sociological analysis of several football supporter protests in the 21st century. Instead, this article principally uses Manuel Castells’ (1998, 2000[1996], 2004[1997], 2009) theories relating to transnationalism and social movements in a ‘network society’ to analyse the key issues of a local-global nexus in protest and the role of social networking technologies in the movement, and to discuss and unpack the various forms of ‘power’ that resulted in the sale of the football club in 2010. It must be stated that the article is not an attempt to ‘test’ Castells’ theories as a sufficient way of explaining today’s social world but merely to use his work as a way of discussing some of my findings. Methods used involved a range of qualitative data collection techniques, such as participant observation at the movement’s public rallies and demonstrations, personal interactions with members of SOS (who had varying levels of commitment to the group), and an analysis of internet ‘e-zine’ messageboard discussion material from the ‘Red and White Kop’ (RAWK) fansite, blogs, the various Liverpool fan groups’ ‘Facebook’ pages, ‘fanzine’ material over a 20-year period and interviews with key spokespeople for the group given in the mainstream local and national media. This research is of strong contemporary significance given that both the Labour and Conservative parties’ manifestos for the 2010 General Election pledged that they would explore ways in which football clubs could be transformed into fan-owned mutual associations (Conservative Party, 2010: 75; Labour Party, 2010: 50) and although the 2011 cross-party inquiry into the governance of football marked an attempt at state intervention on the issue (Football Governance Inquiry, 2011), quite how this could be achieved remains to be seen.

SOS was born as the Sons of Shankly in the backroom of the Sandon public house from a meeting consisting of around two hundred people on 1 February 2008 but was soon renamed Spirit of Shankly to avoid the unnecessary exclusion of women. At its inception, it had ‘short’, ‘middle’, ‘long’ and ‘ultimate’ aims, which ranged from greater fan-care initiatives of running affordable travel to ‘European away’ matches to a financial ownership of the club. In short, many of the group’s aims coalesced around the desire to have a louder voice in the running of the club. Although the official aims did not include specific reference to Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the discourse emanating from both spokespeople and lay members derived from their ownership and perceived untruths they had told on purchasing the football club. On the same night, ShareLiverpoolFC was launched with the explicit aim raising £500m through fans’ pledges and buying the club from Hicks and Gillett, thus providing the club’s global fan-base with ownership of the club.

Hicks and Gillett bought the football club for £175m on 7 February 2007. In doing so, they took on previous chairman David Moores’ 51.6 per cent stake for £88m alongside the club’s estimated £80m debt and the cost of building a new stadium (Hunter and Burt, 2007: 52). On 15 October 2010, the club’s ownership rights were sold to John W. Henry’s NESV for around £300m but with two-thirds of that fee going to pay off Hicks and Gillett’s acquisition debt which, with interest, had risen from £175m in February 2007 (Conn, 2010a). Thus, the capital return Hicks and Gillett received at the point of sale was much lower than the £500m that they hoped to achieve (as a minimum) when they declared the club to be for sale just six months earlier (Hunter, 2010a). On the day they bought the club and temporarily brought to an end its well-documented search for investment, Gillett said that, ‘we have purchased the club with no debt attached to the club, so it is very different from the Glazers [who had bought Manchester United and loaded the acquisition debt back on to the club]’ (quoted in Rich, 2007: 1) and also promised rapid development on the new stadium. Gillett and Hicks followed locally based major shareholders, including David Moores (of the Littlewoods’ ‘Football Pools’ empire) as Liverpool’s owners. Therefore, although the patterns of football club ownership had changed across the 1990s to account for the rise of the ‘new directors’ like Manchester United’s Martin Edwards (see King, 1997a) and were more spatially mobile, Liverpool’s ownership had remained under a traditional model.

Liverpool fans initially welcomed Gillett and Hicks’ ownership of the club. However, their emotions changed to disharmony from the summer of 2007, when it became apparent that work had stalled on the new stadium and it was perceived that the transfer funds available to then football team manager Rafael Benitez were too small. By March, Conn (2007: 3) had argued that Gillett and Hicks borrowed ‘close to £500m’ to buy the club, which included a £298m loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and leveraged this back on to it through the establishment of the Kop Holdings parent company. He stated that this figure comprised £185m to buy the club itself – including fees for Rothschild, their merchant bank in London, and for lawyers, accountants and financial PR advisers, with other associated costs – and £113m borrowed to absorb its £44.8m net debts, fund preliminary work on the stadium and provide working capital for the club. Later that year it was reported that personal disagreements between the two owners were halting their investments in the club. As a result of this and disappointment at other commercializing processes in football, two direct forms of protest were launched in February 2008: SOS and ShareLiverpoolFC, with a third, the semi-professional football club AFC Liverpool formed in the light of the rising ticket prices that meant many young and working-class supporters could no longer afford to attend games. The protest movement would eventually be supported in the summer of 2010 by Kop Faithful and SaveLFC, which were splinters of SOS.

The social location and consumption of football patterns of all SOS members is unknown as members only have to give their name, contact details and a nominal membership fee to formally join. However, I assert that the vast majority of the original members of the group were ‘traditional’ and ‘committed’ (Duke, 2002; Giulianotti, 2002) in their consumption of football by either regularly attending the club’s matches or making a conscious decision to give up their tickets because of its financial cost. SOS contained many of the Liverpool fan equivalents of ‘the lads’ that King (1997b) studied and some of those at the formation had actually been included in Rookwood and Pearson’s research (2011). The majority of the ‘core’ hails from within the boundaries of the city of Liverpool or its neighbouring boroughs of Sefton and Knowsley. In line with Castells’ (2004[1997]) argument that today’s mobilizations do not have a singularly identifiable leader, SOS was organized as an Industrial Provident Society although the elected board members and spokespeople tended to be from professional and ‘creative’ social classes (cf. Florida, 2002). As such, solicitors, civil servants, play writers and musicians were disproportionately represented with reference to SOS membership against the wider society.

Castells and the Information Age: Networks, Power and the English Premier League

Castells (2000[1996]) argued that the capitalist ‘mode of production’ underwent a deep perestroika in the 1980s as the nature of ‘the mode of development’ shifted from the industrial towards the primacy of informational and transnational forces of production. This social transformation was driven by the development of a new technological paradigm that allowed information and material capital to move across the world instantaneously. Castells saw this network as a geographical space with discrete points bound together by connections of links, people and objects, where capital and ideas can flow between nodes that are spread across multiple and distant spaces and times. According to Castells (2000[1996]), networks became the primary form of social organization throughout the world and, emphasizing the transnational socio-cultural and economic values of such connections, he argued that this made established national boundaries – and regulations – increasingly porous or ‘lighter’ than in previous eras. The triumph of the capitalist mode of production over the Soviet statist mode of production, Castells (2000[1996]) suggested, lay in its more effective take up of the affordances made possible by the new networked mode of development, which he referred to as capitalist perestroika. The efficiency of the network organization is dependent on its ability to integrate useful nodes into a transnational ‘space of flows’ which bypasses ‘places’ that obstruct organizational goals (Castells, 2000[1996]).

In Castells’ account, capital is largely synonymous with power. However, capital takes mobile informational forms as well as material and ‘traditional’ symbolic forms. Castells (2000[1996]) suggested that the new technologies that are powering the space of flows in the network society have broken down ‘natural’ senses of time, as well as the logical sequences of time. The space of flows generates what Castells calls ‘timeless time’, which is the globally simultaneous ‘now’. In the network society, communication and collective action are also forms of ‘power’ (2004[1997], 2009). He argued that this type of power is cognitive, cultural and inherently social between subjects as it is the capacity of actors to affect the minds by affective and emotional responses to information (given through channels such as the mass media; Castells, 2004[1997]). Most recently Castells (2009) has built on this work to emphasize the point that new social network technologies have underlined actors’ abilities to be able to change the status of the relationship between media and power, providing avenues for the development of political action and social mobilization.

Many dimensions of the English Premier League (EPL) which Liverpool competes in can be considered as part of a transnational space of flows. It is widely recognized that elite professional football in England had reached a nadir at the end of the 1980s as support became popularly conflated with ‘violence’ and, in the light of various ‘hooligan’ disasters, a moral panic erupted that saw government proposals that all football fans would have to carry identity cards (Giulianotti, 1999). Indeed, Taylor’s (1984) description of football in the 1980s as a sport in ‘recession’ seems accurate. The EPL was born as the FA Premiership in August 1992, and its new broadcasters, BSkyB, seized the opportunity to attempt to rebrand the sport by using billboard adverts depicting it to be ‘A Whole New Ball Game’ (Baimbridge et al., 1996). Thus, the EPL and its partnership with BSkyB was key to English football’s recovery from ‘recession’. One of the principles of Castells’ (1998, 2000[1996], 2009) argument is that the key agents in the ‘space of flows’ will settle in the most lucrative space, which is often global. This has proved to be the case with the EPL: although the competition is inherently nationally hemmed, it has become transnational with respect to the spatial dispersion of fans across the world, its recruitment of players and managers, and interest in individual clubs from overseas investors. In recent years, the number of countries in which it is possible to subscribe to digital broadcasts of matches has grown to 211 worldwide (personal interview, EPL senior financial director, 29 January 2009) and the cumulative values of the EPL’s overseas broadcasting contracts have loosely doubled with each new negotiation in the 21st century (Harris, 2010; Wilson, 2007). As capital is power in the network society (Castells, 2000[1996], 2009), the strength of overseas markets is growing apace, with the three-season overseas contract that was signed in 2010 being worth £1.4bn. This sum sits alongside the domestic broadcasting rights contracts that are valued at £1.782bn for the same time period.

SOS in the Global and Local Nexus

The experiences of transnational ‘spaces of flows’ in the network society can be disorientating for those who are happy to inhabit locally rooted ‘places’ and Castells argued that such individuals may come together to form defensive ‘communes, or communities’ in the safe ‘communal heavens’ (2004[1997]: 9) to seek solace in each other. Indeed, Castells (2004[1997]: 356) suggested that locally based bonds based on collective emotions of anger or loss are strong and ‘refuse to be flushed away by global flows and radical individualism’. Although SOS was officially conceived in February 2008 in the locally situated ‘space of places’ (2000[1996]: 408–12) of the Sandon hostelry where Liverpool was originally formed (Williams, 2010), its genesis stretches back to the ‘Keep Flags Scouse’ (KFS) and ‘Reclaim the Kop’ (RTK) precursor movements which were both established by ‘scouse’ Liverpool-based fans in the early 21st century. While these movements were, at least in the case of KFS, not overtly political or formally organized in the sense that SOS is, they were conceived to assert that its members were (subjectively) the authentic supporters of the club and that they could claw back some sense of cultural ownership of the club which they felt had been washed away by the impersonal nature of football in a highly commercialized age (Wells, 2007). Thus, although SOS did not wholly exclude non-‘scouse’ fans from its membership, it was formed as a place-based response to a space of flows that the EPL and Liverpool had both come to inhabit. This did not change until the summer of 2010, when mobilizations to force Hicks and Gillett to sell the club were stepped up. Indeed, until the end of 2009, SOS had explicitly used a ‘Yanks Out!’ slogan to mobilize support, which was accused by some strains of the media to be exclusionary. Whilst it is true that it plugs into a societal ‘xenophobic normality’ (Gotsbachner, 2001) by using nationality in a derogatory way, Touraine et al.’s (1983) theory of social movements shows this practice to not be unusual for mobilizations that protect against global forces. For instance, Touraine (2009) argues that social movements typically arise when a conflict is infused by issues of identification. This is what happened in the context of SOS when the conflict caused by the global commercialization of football is bound up with notions of fan belonging and identity. Touraine et al. (1983) argued that social movements tended to attempt reform (the ‘light’ in a mobilization) but can also be defensive (the ‘shade’ of a social movement). Hence, although the aims of SOS are set around an emotional reconnection of the football club with its (traditional) fan community, it runs a risk of ‘shade’ in promoting mildly xenophobic values through its slogans and of alienating those supporters who are viewed as falling outside of the elastic cultural boundaries of the club’s locality, as KFS and RTK are also claimed to have done. However, SOS was keen to refute any allegations of exclusion. For instance, during an interview with a Liverpool supporters’ group based in New York, SOS chairman Paul Rice argued:

We either pretend these people [non-Liverpool-based fans of the club across the world] don’t exist – poo poo them – or we say, okay: if you want to support Liverpool, there are certain standards that go with that; that set us apart. And we would hope that they’re the reasons you support Liverpool. Not because we win lots of trophies but because we have a certain attitude to things and we go about things in a different way. And there’s lots of lighthearted stuff about wearing [replica] shirts and whatever, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about having a bit more class and culture, and understanding where Liverpool Football Club has come from. And where it is and how it got there, and the values that are instilled in the club. (Paul Rice, 7 June 2009) ²

The response from the New York fan group was that they saw SOS as not ‘just embracing everybody but teaching them along the way’. Whether this ‘embrace’ could be viewed as exclusionary is debatable: on the one hand, SOS was prepared to accept new fans, but on the other, this was only on the condition that they assimilated their codes of supporting a team. Thus, overseas fans can be accepted but not on an equal footing to ‘traditional’ or ‘local’ supporters, which perhaps represents a defensive ‘shade’ in the movement. The explicitly local core of the group became evident again in February 2010, when The Observer newspaper ran an internet narrowcast transmission. This was linked on The Liverpool Way internet forum when a fan enquired about the role David Elder – the American who was chosen as the SOS delegate in the feature – held in the group:

Greater London has a population of in excess of 7.5m people, therefore the fact that SOS secretary Graham Smith responded by pointing out that no prominent members of the movement were within commutable distance of the capital strongly suggests that in early 2010 SOS was still highly localized to Liverpool. However, this practice was altered in the SOS constitution later that month and meant that additional branches could be established. Thus, by June 2010, SOS was informing supporters on RAWK that they wanted to open up new branches of the Union and ‘at the moment, I believe New Zealand, Birmingham, London, Dubai and Skem [Skelmersdale, a 1960s new town built in West Lancashire in the post-war slum housing clearance in inner city Liverpool] may be the first wave of offshoots’ (Roy Bentham, SOS travel officer, 14 June 2010). Before the start of the 2010/11 season, applications for SOS branches across the world were recorded on RAWK, as SOS – while, crucially, retaining its local core – took on a transnational dimension and this helped to shape a second wave of movement.

The Use of Global Social Networking Technologies

The 2009/10 football season was not happy for Liverpool. On the pitch, the team had followed up the promise of the previous season’s ‘runners-up’ position in the EPL with a disappointing seventh place finish which meant that the club failed to qualify for the Champions League. This was notable as the club’s former chief executive, Rick Parry, had referred to it as the ‘minimum acceptable standard’ six years earlier (quoted in BBC Sport, 2004). In June 2010, Rafa Benitez left his position as Liverpool manager. Away from the pitch, Liverpool had undergone a second loan refinance, with a credit facility of £350m (of which £290m had been used), in July 2009. This was due to be reviewed one year later and gave hope to many supporters that the club would be sold then in the light of the tightened loan agreements emerging from the ‘credit crunch’. At boardroom level, Rick Parry was replaced as chief executive by Christian Purslow, and Tom Hicks’ son – also named Tom Hicks – left the club’s board of directors in January 2010 after an ‘abusive e-mail exchange to a supporter whom he told to “Blow me fuck face”’ (Hunter, 2010a: 2). His place in the club’s boardroom was taken by British Airways chairman, Martin Broughton – who caused consternation amongst supporters by publicly supporting national rivals Chelsea FC. This left a board of Hicks, Gillett, Broughton, Purslow and Commercial Director, Ian Ayre.

On 16 April 2010, Hicks and Gillett made clear that they would consider offers to sell the football club for a price rumoured to be anywhere between £500m and £800m. The move was prompted by a final renewal of Liverpool’s loan with RBS, which made clear that Broughton, who was charged with the position of overseeing the sale of the club, was the only person who had the authority to change the personnel of the board of directors, whilst Barclays Bank was hired to attract potential investors (Hunter, 2010b: 3). On RAWK, fans cautiously celebrated the news with many calling for SOS to take further locally based ‘direct action’ of pre-match marches (virtual fieldnotes, April 2010). Hicks and Gillett’s desire to sell was forced by the global banking crisis that resulted in the UK government assuming a majority control of lenders RBS, which meant that Liverpool had to ‘reduce their exposure to it by £100m by July [2010]’ (Conn, 2010a: 1). As a result, Liverpool supporters – some motivated by the opportunity to force a sale of the club, whilst others were more concerned with the decline in the team’s results – began a second wave of protests which involved a reshaped SOS, altered by its absorption of ShareLiverpoolFC, as less exclusively local and increasingly transnational in scope (now referred to as SOS-SL) and the rise of splinter protest movements, such as SaveLFC and Kop Faithful.

SaveLFC was launched by Dundee-based Liverpool fan Roy ‘Hendo’ Henderson through the social networking website Facebook on 26 May 2010. It described itself as ‘a consumer-facing, communications-focussed group aimed at promoting education and unity in favour of fit and proper ownership’ (quoted in Roan, 2010), and according to its Facebook page, ⁴ promoted action in four ways:

These pointers illustrate how political actions mobilize in the ‘information age’ (Castells, 2009). Rather than asking supporters to take direct, localized action as SOS did – which requires match-day attendance and high levels of personal and financial commitment – SaveLFC gradually politicized fans by asking them to join the social network group and spread their images across the world. This brought two potential impacts: first, taking the protest to a transnational level in its internet-served viral form, utilizing Liverpool’s global fan-base; and second, encouraging fans to make stronger associations with the protest and join more direct pressure groups like SOS, by getting them to make a small commitment such as showing internet support. SaveLFC’s coordination of supporters displaying flags containing its logo at the 2010 World Cup also raised the profile of the Liverpool fan protests. Indeed, this protest received further global news coverage when a member of the South African branch of the Liverpool Supporters’ Club was accused of ‘being a hooligan’ by a ground steward during the match between Germany and Australia. This drew sympathetic responses from media across the world and created an image of the mobilizations across the world (BBC News, 2010). Kop Faithful’s roots lie within SOS, having been set up by Liverpool-based Alan Kayll whom the group originally charged ‘with responsibility to get the organization moving’ at its launch in 2008 (Spirit of Shankly, nd). Kop Faithful used RAWK and other internet media to encourage supporters to email senior bankers at JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank in the USA and RBS in the UK after a Manhattan-based fan had used his mobile telephone to photograph Tom Hicks outside his local JP Morgan and Deutsche branch and sent this to his Twitter account on 21 September 2010. Alan Kayll saw the photograph and immediately wrote a letter urging banks not to provide Hicks with any extra finance and posted this, with contact emails, on RAWK ⁵ as the campaign went viral and was even featured in The Wall Street Journal:

At Kop Faithful, our focus is the banks, preventing refinance to the existing owners and explaining to them why they should not help keep these owners in power. If we hear that Hicks is due for a meeting with a bank, within minutes we can mobilize via our forums and networks on Twitter and Facebook. Soon the bank’s e-mail system will be inundated. We have the intelligence needed to keep ahead of the game. Liverpool fans are everywhere and, once we have the information, we can act quickly. […] We plan to exert as much pressure as possible on RBS between now and their decision in October. They are receiving 10,000 e-mails a week from Liverpool fans. (Alan Kayll, quoted in Roan, 2010)

On 4 July 2010, SOS effectively ‘ate’ ShareLiverpoolFC when it held its ‘Our Independence Day’ event on the steps of St George’s Hall in Liverpool city centre. In doing so, the newly renamed SOS-SL launched a credit union plan in which fans could use the initiative to save money and then, in the future, a stake in the club could be collectively bought using £500 from each member. The plan was formed after the cost of £5000 per share proposed by ShareLiverpoolFC was deemed to be too high for working-class supporters, many of whom had experienced a tightening up of commercial loan agreements as a result of the ‘credit crunch’, and SOS-SL hoped that around 100,000 people might consider joining the Credit Union, collectively generating £50m. If supporters had not saved £500 at the point at which SOS-SL bought a share in the club, they would have the option of borrowing money from the Credit Union. This plan reduced the concern that ShareLiverpoolFC might actually deepen the exclusion of many less well-off fans, and helped articulate supporter representation on the club’s board of directors which was SOS’s long-term aim:

The Credit Union we are launching is vital to what we are trying to achieve. It’s open to all – accessible to all – whether you can save a fiver or fifty quid, whether you’re from Bootle or Bangkok, Anfield or America – apart from Tom and George – and we want every single one of youse to be a part of it; every single Liverpool fan to be a part of it. (Jay McKenna, 2010)

The intention marked a radical shift in SOS repertoires of action: the Credit Union idea was global in scope. However, at the moment the scheme was launched, it was local in operation as government regulations restricted membership of credit unions to those who lived or worked in the county in which the scheme is based. Therefore, only Merseyside-based Liverpool supporters could take part in the SOS-SL Credit Union. The ‘Our Independence Day’ event also aimed to boost the esprit de corps amongst members by interspersing the political speeches with entertainment provided by Liverpool-fan comedians and singers, which was narrowcast on Youtube. This action sat alongside the more established forms of protest, as a post-match ‘sit-in’ took place after the home game against Sunderland on 25 September 2010 and this was followed with a march of between 5000 and 7000 fans before the match against Blackpool one week later. Castells (2009) argued that one of the tools the internet offers to today’s mobilizations is a public sphere in which plans for action can be developed. In the context of SOS this happened from before its conception, when KFS and RTK were regularly discussed on RAWK. Indeed, the earliest forms of local ‘direct action’ were organized using RAWK but the protests from the summer of 2010 used the social networking technologies differently in that they moved beyond discussing and drawing fans’ attention to protest events to being organized explicitly through the internet. This opened up transnational connections in the repertoires of action which SaveLFC and, particularly, Kop Faithful used to put pressure on lending institutions in the light of the owners’ attempts to refinance the debt.

Unpacking ‘Power’ in Network Society Protests

On 15 October 2010 the shareholding of Liverpool was sold to NESV for £300m (with £200m of this sum used to pay off the club’s debts). However, this was not without Hicks launching a final attempt to retain ownership of the club. After Broughton, Purslow and Ayre united to form a majority position on the Liverpool board of directors and voted to accept NESV’s offer on 6 October 2010, Tom Hicks tried to replace the latter two directors, only to be told in the High Court that this action was unlawful (Traynor, 2010a: 2). Hicks and Gillett’s response to this action was to gain a ‘temporary restraining order’ from a Texas District Court against the independent directors, lenders RBS and NESV, to prevent the transaction of the club being completed (BBC Sport, 2010). Although this had no legal jurisdiction over a British company, it highlighted the transnationalism of business in a ‘network society’ (Castells, 2000[1996]) by stalling the sale because RBS has significant American assets which could have been damaged by disregarding the ruling. Hicks and Gillett also launched a short-lived threat of a $1.6bn damages lawsuit against Broughton, Purslow and Ayre after they claimed that they had overlooked higher offers for the club (Traynor, 2010b: 2). It is disputable how much power George Gillett had in the Liverpool boardroom then as he had defaulted on repayment of the £75m loan he took out from Mill Financial, an arm of the US hedge fund Springfield Financial Company, to invest in the club. Indeed, The Liverpool Echo speculated that Hicks may attempt to ‘join forces with them [Mill Financial] to try and prevent the NESV deal’ (Traynor, 2010b: 2). This produced a combined email response from SaveLFC and Kop Faithful to Mill Finance that read:

We write to inform you that if your company assists Tom Hicks in retaining his share in Liverpool Football Club, then the only return that you will see on your investment is bad publicity and a severe backlash from Liverpool supporters worldwide. ⁶

Less than one month later, the club was sold to NESV.

SOS-SL claimed the sale to have ‘been achieved through the magnificent efforts of the supporters, from the early days of formation in the Sandon Pub, calling Hicks and Gillett to account, to campaigning and protesting tirelessly’ (Spirit of Shankly, 2010) but such claims of fans forcing ‘victory’ need to be questioned. It seems fair to argue that the actions of supporter movements made clear to Hicks and Gillett that many fans wished for their removal from the club but, despite face-to-face meetings and protest and leafleting marches, Hicks, in particular, still had no desire to sell his shareholding in the club until it became apparent that Liverpool and Kop Holdings’ loans would not be renewed in October 2010. Rather, even then, Hicks led a court-room attempt to retain the financial ownership of the club. These actions suggested that the impact of global economic crisis – rather than the fan movements that had become increasingly savvy in targeting financial institutions across the world – played the ultimate role in removing Hicks and Gillett from Liverpool. Whilst supporters on RAWK were left in no doubt that Broughton, Purslow and Ayre played a crucial role in forcing the sale of the club, it could be argued that the role of the fan groups was negligible as they had no say in any of the decisions preceding the transaction. Indeed, the sale of Liverpool resembles a boardroom takeover that may exist in many limited businesses across the world. That said, on the evening of the transaction, Tom Hicks gave an interview to Sky Sports News in which he talked about the directors of the club having committed an ‘epic swindle of epic proportions’ in selling Liverpool to NESV and, significantly, the ‘militant’ role that many ‘internet terrorists’ – as the supporters involved in the movements – played. In making the latter argument, Hicks was surely principally referring to the second-wave movements in which supporters bombarded potential financiers with threats to their businesses if they supported his attempts to restructure the club and Kop Holdings’ debts. Whilst these movements’ key personnel were typically based in Liverpool and helped to declare a victory for ‘scouse solidarity’ (RAWK virtual fieldnotes, 13 October 2010), they relied on news updates from fans around the world (particularly in North America), highlighting the importance of the global-local nexus that was facilitated by information age social networks. Predictably, supporters on RAWK rejoiced at what was uniformly perceived to be a fans’ victory and declared themselves ‘proud internet terrorists’ (virtual fieldnotes, 16 October). Yet, it seems likely that it was the coming together of a network of pressure groups around the world rather than the parochial localism of the early social and cultural movements that played a supporting – rather than leading – part in the sale of the club, with the impacts of the global economic crisis underlying the transaction. Thus, ‘power’ became the complex intertwining of both material and ‘timeless time’ informational capital, of which the financial variety retained the upmost importance.

Shortly after their purchase of the club, John W. Henry and Tom Werner met with representatives from the Liverpool fan groups, although the extent to which genuine two-way communication will take place remains to be seen. Indeed, at the initial meetings there was no real sign that the consortium was prepared to sell the supporters a share in the club as SOS-SL hoped. Instead, the initial emanating promises related to the redevelopment of the club’s Anfield stadium and an increased budget for team strengthening but there was no suggestion that supporters would have a say in the governance of the club (Conn, 2010b: 1), which was enough to appease most fans. At the same time, NESV talked warmly about the possibilities of playing competitive games in Asia and North America in order to ‘increase revenues’ (Tom Werner, quoted in Gibson, 2010: 9), which would further take the club away from its localized community in the ‘space of places’ and into the commercial, transnational ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2000[1996], 2009). Yet the supporters groups did have some level of achievement: for instance, although the removal of Hicks and Gillett was not an official aim of SOS, it was certainly a uniting, unofficial motive for most activists and it is undeniable that the mobilizations – with the informational capital-infused connections between the local and transnational repertoires of action – playing some role in achieving this goal. Further, in January 2011, Liverpool announced that it would establish the ‘LFC Supporters’ Committee’ for which a group of 18 fans would be chosen from a round of open applications by a selection team including former player Ian Callaghan, Bill Shankly’s granddaughter Karen Gill, then-chief executive of Supporters Direct Dave Boyle, actress Sue Johnston, chief executive of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce Jack Stopforth, comedian John Bishop and the club’s commercial director Ian Ayre. The aims of the Committee were set around structured communication with key NESV personnel ‘to help ensure fans feel their loyalty is valued by Liverpool’ (Liverpoolfc.tv, 2011). This sounded as if fans were being given a say in the club’s governance and on RAWK supporters warmly welcomed the move, with one stating that: ‘With Ms Gill and John Bishop in place [both had appeared at the ‘Our Independence Day’ event], the foot is already in the door. It will be a travesty if the Union [SOS], after all they did help to get rid of the previous “owners”, are not invited to be a major part’ (21 January 2011). Five months later, the Committee was announced after 3705 applications were received, with Paul Rice and Samantha Armstrong of SOS-SL selected. Yet, despite supporter groups such as the official supporters’ club, ‘corporate fans’ and ‘international fans’ being automatically represented, SOS-SL’s two delegates had to be chosen as the ‘Merseyside supporters’ and the ‘female fans’ representatives. Thus SOS-SL did not automatically receive a place on the Committee, which meant that it could lose its voice should the Committee be reorganized in the future. Taylor (1971a, 1971b) argued that in football’s era of a perceived ‘participatory democracy’ supporters saw themselves as having a more significant role in the development of their football club than was actually the case. Viewed in this light, questions remain unanswered about the extent to which fan groups such as SOS can genuinely have an impact on the governance of ‘their’ club or, as in the case of Manchester City FC in the 1990s, whether this representation is more of an exercise in public relations than fan democracy (Conn, 2002[1997]: 217).

Conclusion

The rise of supporter protest movements against a wide range of the manifestations of elite sports’ commercializing conditions provides important fields for sociological inquiry. Indeed, the fact that both the UK Conservative and Labour parties pledged to investigate the structural conditions that seemingly created the alienation of supporters clearly testifies to the strong socio-cultural power of the collective actions. SOS and its splinter organizations played an important role in the fan protests that helped to force the sale of Liverpool in October 2010; as such it can be deemed a ‘successful’ mobilization even though none of its aims officially related to the removal of its owners. In this article, Castells’ theories around protest in the network society have been used to elucidate the analysis of Liverpool fans’ mobilizations with regard to their local sites across the world, the facilitating role that social networking technologies play in connecting these, and the meaning of ‘power’ in such protests.

Castells argued that material, informational and other symbolic forms of capital are largely synonymous with power in the network society. Castells also postulated that communication producing affective collective action in response to information is also a form of ‘power’ that is cognitive and cultural. His work on new social network technologies has underlined actors’ abilities to be able to change the status of the relationship between media and power and provide avenues for the development of social mobilization (2009). In the context of SOS, the fact that a series of mobilizations developed as emotional responses to a range of stimuli connected to the commercialization of the sport, the wedge driven between the football club and its ‘local’ community, and Liverpool’s falling status in world football did not automatically mean that Hicks and Gillett sold their stake in the club because of fan protest. Neither does it mean that Hicks and Gillett achieved a smaller price on selling the club – and might have incurred a ‘huge [financial] loss’ in doing so (Conn and Hunter, 2010: 1) – than they hoped to gain because of the mobilizations. Social movement scholars often overemphasize the achievements of the mobilizations they study, and suggesting that SOS, Kop Faithful, SaveLFC and/or SOS-SL caused the sale of Liverpool is to ignore a whole raft of other issues, such as the global ‘credit crunch’ that meant ‘risky’ loans – like that used to purchase Liverpool – were harder to renegotiate after Hicks and Gillett’s ‘investment’ in 2007. Global demand to buy into football clubs fell. The mobilization of groups such as SOS may have helped to increase the ‘risk’ element of such loans to financiers, through the communications over space and place that were facilitated by the social networking technologies that Castells (2009) discussed. However, the core form of ‘power’ continued to be material. Thus while Castells is correct to assert that power can be found in the complex intertwining of material, ‘timeless time’ informational capital and the cultural resources of affective collective action, financial power retained the uppermost importance in this mobilization.