A group of Liverpool supporters are to launch an ambitious plan to buy the Anfield club from its US owners.
A group calling themselves Share Liverpool FC aim to raise enough cash to oust Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
Rogan Taylor, a Kop season ticket holder and a director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool, is the man behind the campaign.
He said: “It is time to answer the concerns that football fans have about the patterns of ownership developing at our major football clubs.
“Thousands of Liverpool fans have already demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.
“Large amounts of debt is often laden onto newly-bought clubs and the fans know that in the end, it will be them who will have to pay it off through increased ticket prices and other schemes.
“In such a case, why not simply buy the club yourselves?”
The model proposed by Share Liverpool FC will be a ‘member-share’ scheme, aimed at raising £500 million to purchase the club from Hicks and Gillett and build a new stadium.
The group have cited Barcelona as an example of how the system could work. Barca currently has more than 150,000 members.
“What many don’t realise is that there are other ways of financing and taking ownership of big clubs,” Taylor added.
“In Germany and Spain, most top-level football clubs are simply ‘Not For Sale’. They are owned by many thousands of ‘member fans’.
“The Champions League has been won on six occasions in the last 15 years by clubs owned and run in such a way.”
