KIETH DUGGAN SIDELINE CUTEVERY GREAT sports club has its patriarch, that charismatic leader whose ghost and influence blows through the corridors and walks the playing field long after his mortal body has left the earth. At Liverpool football club, that figure will always be Bill Shankly.

There are so many anecdotes revolving around the light, stinging wit the Scot employed to portray his fierce devotion to Liverpool and his pride in the club that it seems they can hardly all be true. It is said that, on a team visit to Brussels, he marked down a simple "Anfield" for his address on the hotel register, and when the receptionist raised an eyebrow in query, Shankly snapped, "that's where I live, son".

Many storied players were subjected to his acidic observations. One that lingers in the mind is his reaction to Tommy Smith when the star defender showed up at training wearing an elaborate tourniquet. "Take that poof bandage off - and what do you mean your knee is hurt? It's Liverpool's knee."

His devoted wife, Nessie, played the "straight guy" in many of Shankly's best quips about his Liverpool obsession. Clarifying the rumour that he had taken her to see a football match on their wedding anniversary, he set the record straight in a blistering retort that would have been funny but for the fact it was all probably true.

"Of course I didn't take my wife to see Rochdale as an anniversary present. It was her birthday. Would I have got married in the football season? Anyway, it was Rochdale reserves."

Over the years, these stories have become priceless nuggets in the grand theatre of Liverpool football club. Shankly was Scots to the bone but he possessed the native Liverpudlian trait of delivering the impudent and often deadly funny one-liner. But as the storm clouds of modern commerce gather over the famous football ground this week, it is one of Shankly's more straightforward pronouncements that seems most appropriate.

"The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's how I see life."

His vision was deeply idealistic then, and as Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the American co-owners of Liverpool, engage in an unseemly and soulless battle for outright possession of the club, those words have acquired a bitterly ironic edge.

The Champions League semi-final against Chelsea guarantees the Anfield faithful at least another couple of weeks in the traditional dreamland, rampaging through Europe and closing in on another continental final. But it is becoming clear that the qualities which made Liverpool unique as a sports club have already been deeply eroded by events since David Moores went for finance over sentiment and sold his family shares early last year.

The ugly war of words between the Americans has dismayed Moores and he has castigated the new owners in the Liverpool press, complaining they all but sold the club down the Mersey with empty promises and a financial package that placed the onus of debt firmly on the club rather than the individual.

It's likely Moores's disappointment is genuine. He made tens of millions in the sale of the family heirloom, but now can only sit idly by as strangers with no emotional attachment to Liverpool besides its value as a brand bicker over its commercial future.

It is easy now to castigate Moores for running with the money. But the truth is that before, and even after, the miracle night in Istanbul, when Liverpool were inspired by Steven Gerrard in turning a 0-3 half-time deficit against AC Milan into their most famous European triumph, there was a general recognition that, sooner or later, the club would need big-money backers.

The transformation of Chelsea, buoyed by the inconceivable wealth of Roman Abramovich, hastened the general conviction that without the muscle of billionaires Liverpool would be left in the backwaters of the modern game, a famous museum stripped of its collection. There was a rush to drive Liverpool towards modernity, to move the club to the new stadium at Stanley Park with all the trappings and comforts of a major sports franchise.

Liverpool's failure to win the league since 1990 has been a source of deep frustration, and this probably deepened the anxiety to secure an investor with deep pockets. Since the Americans took control, manager Rafa Benitez has been able to splash out, with the exquisite goal-scoring lust of Fernando Torres justifying the lavish fee of £18 million.

But against that, they are no closer to winning the Premiership and the Spanish manager has had to deal with the outrageous insult of trying to run his in team in the public knowledge that his owners held talks with a potential replacement without his knowledge.

Even Alex Ferguson, no lover of the Liverpool tradition, spoke with indignation about how Benitez has been treated.

Ferguson must be privately stunned by Benitez's seemingly wizardly nous when it comes to European competition. Runners-up in the 2007 final, they are back on the threshold of another appearance, with a showdown against Manchester United in Moscow the most evocative equation of any.

But it seems apparent that we could be looking at the dying days of the Liverpool tradition and a very real end to the values that Shankly's directory of bon mots were designed to reinforce. The tone of the argument over money and the cold rationale behind the viewpoints of both Americans not only means the club is fired through with volatility, it means sooner rather than later Liverpool will be just the same as any other major professional sports franchise.

The one source of hope - or fly in the ointment for the anxious investors from the oil countries or elsewhere - lies in the attempt to raise enough money so that Liverpool fans can own the club. Led by long-time Liverpool fan and authority Rogan Taylor, it was born out of desperation as much as inspiration but now includes old stalwarts like Phil Thompson and John Aldridge. The ambition - to get 100,000 fans to pitch in £5,000 a piece - may well be pie in the sky. Their aspiration is to base the club ownership on the Barcelona model.

They have a long way to go: a recent count suggested they have about 10,000 pledges.

But if Liverpudlians could take charge of their club before it gets passed around among the sheiks and Texan oil barons until it has been stripped of its soul, then it would provide a chapter in Liverpool history to match the melodrama of that night in Istanbul.

And it would, of course, lend an uncanny prescience and judgment to Bill Shankly's last word on socialism and on the club whose soul and ethics he shaped and tended back when such things mattered.