Liverpool Football Club can boast more than most about history, culture and success. Tom Hicks, Liverpool's now infamous co-owner, and his HSG Sports Group can also lay claim to being part of what has become the most fanciful sports transactions of all time.
Alex Rodriguez is without doubt the biggest and flashiest hitter in Major League Baseball. Such is his star status that, even with recent claims of steroid use dating back to 2003, his reputation appears to have remained intact and he is hailed as a core part of the New York Yankees 2009 World Series Championship success.
The all-conquering Yankees who are renowned as the world's richest franchise can undoubtedly afford to pay for the prime players in the game - especially when Tom Hick's Texas Rangers have helped to foot the bill.
Rodriguez's landmark 10-year $252 million contract in 2000 was a speculative move by the Rangers to secure a name that would likely be remembered as one of the greats of the game. By 2004 the team had traded him to the Yankees, but reportedly agreed to pay an estimated $67 million of the $179 million still owed.
The Yankees are champions once more. The Rangers face an uncertain future with their owner, the Tom Hicks' HSG Sports Group, facing creditors who are (reported by the Wall Street Journal) owed more than $540 million.
This is perhaps where the main concerns begin for Liverpool Football Club. The Texas Rangers are in some circles accepted as the 12th most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball and it is not them but HSG that is struggling financially.
The sale of the Texas Rangers appeared to be at a promising stage when a bid by baseball legend Nolan Ryan looked to satisfy many interested parties, not least many Rangers fans.
However, objections filed by creditor JP Morgan Chase Bank seek to remove the Rangers Ballpark lease from the sale of the franchise.
JP Morgan contends, Hicks Sports Group, transferred the lease to the team just before the bankruptcy filing without the bank's approval, as required in its loan agreement. The bank contends that the ballpark lease is not the team's property.
JP Morgan Chase Bank's intervention would mean that the ballpark would be cut from the deal making potential buyers possibly rethink their bids.
Kop Football Holdings Ltd is another Tom Hicks project. It is widely assumed that the reported £347 million is separate to Liverpool Football Club in many ways. Indeed, it has not saddled the club with the kind of debt that is often reported. Liverpool FC and Kop Football Holdings Ltd are not the same business.
Liverpool continue to operate as a club with no imminent danger. The club can afford to make marquee transfers and continue to celebrate its status as one of the major players in football.
It operates to a backdrop of fan unrest. Protests that involve ex-players and famous-fans have taken place on the steps of the city's most famous building. The more they push for a sale, the hope is, the club will be placed under new ownership and be free from the debt and despair.
Some Liverpool fans live in the hope that a new owner can help them start again. An owner who has come into clubs like Chelsea FC and Manchester City FC can wipe out all the debts. Liverpool are not those clubs. Their history and culture is something those clubs can only dream of. It is a terrible shame if one person can begin to think it can take on all that history. It is also unrealistic. The club would be unrecognisable.
Liverpool lack a state of the art stadium that would attract a big-time buyer who can make the club viable. However, the failure to build one may just have saved the club from themselves.
It seems an obvious assumption to make that it would be Kop Holdings Ltd who would undertake the loans and debt on the stadium and rent it back to the club. It would have sent that company's debt levels soaring, and if the co-owner was faced with the same situation in Liverpool as the one in Texas, there is only one realistic conclusion to be drawn as to where Liverpool Football Club would find itself.
The truth may be, the more Liverpool fans push for a sale, the closer they are to the point when the final cards will have to be played. Liverpool FC can never be the club it was and endeared it to millions across the world. It should never have been sold.
Liverpool were UEFA Champions League winners and had no obvious debt when it decided this business model was the future. Some say they chased the dream like others before them. It is unclear how much better it could ever have gotten. The conclusion - that greed is a powerful emotion.
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