Soccer: Hicks and Gillett put up for sale sign at Anfield

Liverpool's American owners have put the Premier League club up for sale, heralding the end of their three-year tenure after mounting pressure from banks and furious fans.

Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr have finally conceded they no longer have the resources to strengthen the Liverpool team and build the new stadium they promised after buying the 18-time English champions.

Amid their own feuding and heated fan protests, the tycoons tried in vain for more than two years to find an investor who would be willing to pump money into the club and reduce the debt of £237 million resulting from their leveraged takeover.

After failing to attract a minority investor, Hicks and Gillett tasked Barclays Bank to lead the search for a buyer, while hiring British Airways chairman Martin Broughton to assume the same role at Anfield and oversee the sale.

"There has been a long process of Hicks and Gillett looking for investors - the decision has now been made to exit," said Broughton, who is a fan of Premier League rivals Chelsea. "This is not the ad hoc process that has been along so far."

Broughton said a takeover would be completed "in a matter of months." Hicks and Gillett would be expecting at least £500 million ($1.1 billion), which Dubai International Capital offered in 2008 and was rejected by the squabbling owners.

"Owning Liverpool Football Club over these past three years has been a rewarding and exciting experience for us and our families," Hicks and Gillett said in a brief joint statement. "We have now decided together to look to sell the club to owners committed to take the club through its next level of growth and development."

During the sale process, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia will not call in the Americans' loans and there will be no fire-sale of players.

"I think the club is moving forward and that's positive," said manager Rafa Benitez, who was infuriated by the owners when they considered replacing him with Jurgen Klinsmann. While the search continues, Broughton said that Benitez would stay in charge and be granted a transfer fund for the summer. He also insisted that there was no pressure to sell Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard.

During the Hicks and Gillett reign, Benitez was able to buy Spain striker Fernando Torres for a club-record £20.3m in 2007. The club's revenues have soared by 55 per cent in three years and the owners kept debt far lower than at Manchester United, where it exceeds $1 billion. But the lack of funds to spend on players last year has had an impact on Liverpool's performance on the field this season.

Runners-up last season, Liverpool are languishing in sixth place this season, six points adrift of fourth place and the final English berth in next season's Champions League.

Liverpool are in the semifinals of the Europa League, the second-tier knockout competition, because they were eliminated from the group stage of the Champions League, which they won in 2005.

Liverpool have also been financially hamstrung by the economics of their 45,000-capacity Anfield stadium, where there are limited luxury suites and amenities to generate extra revenue. Preliminary building work on a 60,00-seat replacement started in the adjacent Stanley Park in June 2008, but it was halted in October due to the global economic meltdown.

"There is an overwhelming logic to any buyer to complete the new stadium," Broughton said. "We're talking about maybe 2014 before the stadium is up and running. But it increases the capacity and gets a lot more money into the club."

Hicks and Gillett have meanwhile been shoring up their financial positions in the United States. Gillett sold the NHL's Montreal Canadiens, the Gillett Entertainment Group and the Bell Centre back to the Molson family for US$580 million ($818 million) last year.

Liverpool's next owners will not be allowed to saddle the club with debt in the same way as Hicks and Gillett, Broughton said. The club were seeking "the right sort of owners" and a heavily-leveraged takeover that relied on club revenue to service interest payments was unlikely to succeed.

"Some debt is inevitable, and it would be foolish to run a club like Liverpool with no debt. You would be mismanaging the balance sheet, but there is a difference between some debt and 100 per cent debt."

- AGENCIES