After his Texas Rangers baseball side filed for bankruptcy
with £360million of debts and his Dallas Stars ice hockey
franchise being sold, Liverpool will be the last of Hicks three
main sports investments to be offloaded.
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Liverpool co-owner Tom Hicks claims there is a
large number of "interested buyers" in the club he and George
Gillett put up for sale last month.
Having leveraged huge debt on the club - parent company Kop
Holdings' were £351million in the red last summer with annual loan
repayments of £40million - the Americans decided to end their
tumultuous reign at Anfield.
Liverpool are up for sale with an asking price of between
£600million to £800million.
Those figures have hardly had investors knocking down the door
of chairman Martin Broughton, who was appointed to oversee the
process.
However, Hicks, who has suggested it could take between 12 and
18 months to sell the club, still believes there are plenty of
candidates to take over.
"Liverpool has a really big universe of interested buyers," said
the Texan.
"There are a number of wealthy people all over the world,
particularly in the Middle East and Asia, who are enormous
Liverpool fans."
The 64-year-old admits he has had enough of owning clubs and
sports franchises and is trying now to sell all of his
interests.
His Texas Rangers baseball side filed for bankruptcy on Monday
some 13 months after its parent company, HSG Sports Group,
defaulted on £360million of debt.
The Dallas Stars ice hockey franchise is also being sold.
Liverpool will be the last of his three main sports investments to
be offloaded.
And Hicks, who has been the target of a sustained and often
vitriolic fans' campaign to sell up at Anfield, admits the
high-profile nature of ownership had taken its toll.
"Sports has never been my primary business," Hicks told
Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
"We are systematically selling our sports assets to focus on our
core businesses like private equity and real estate.
"The lack of privacy in sports is something that my family and I
aren't willing to undertake any longer.
"We'll always be big fans but we want our privacy back."