A glimpse of "Our Liverpool: Never Walk Alone"
THE latest accounts from Liverpool FC show how important the commercial side of the club’s operations are to the club’s future, with a new stadium still as far away from being reality as it’s ever been following what looks to have been little more than a confidence trick from the club’s former owners.
The club have binned the plans for the stadium Tom Hicks promised he’d build and without the extra money coming in from all those extra seats – the whole reason the club was sold in the first place – Liverpool need to find other ways to compete with the rest of the sides looking for top four football, itself a good way to bring in extra income. The accounts show that commercial income is going up but with football reaching more and more people there’s still plenty of potential to keep it going that way.
One territory that the club and its new owners want to exploit is the US – and as well as sending the side out to play some football there in the summer the club have granted Fox Soccer unprecedented behind-the-scenes access for a new six-part documentary series.
“Our Liverpool: Never Walk Alone” will be produced by multi Emmy award winner Scott Boggins and will be available to watch globally in the autumn. If the series works as well as Fox and the club are hoping it won’t just attract new supporters, maybe it will attract new commercial partners – maybe even naming rights partners.
For us it’s about what we get to see in terms of the goings-on behind the scenes at the club, something that raised eyebrows when the announcement was first made. Our dirty laundry was far too public during the difficult days of the last regime and we wouldn’t want this to bring more of it out in the open again for the sake of ratings. And the announcement came a few days after an offshoot of the owners’ company in the US embarrassingly referred to “Liverpool’s world famous griffin.”
These fears seem to be unfounded, the people behind the documentary come highly recommended and LFC TV people will be around to provide guidance where needed. This isn’t going to be a half-hearted effort from a disinterested distant outlet.
The first promo for the documentary is now available, a teaser of what’s to come, and if that’s anything to go by it looks like it’s going to be something special:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TYNe34-Bkg
Filming will get underway in earnest with tomorrow’s cup final and will continue into the summer and those games in the States. Here’s hoping that first episode shows Steven Gerrard lifting that FA Cup.