PREMIER LEAGUE:Liverpool's chief executive may pay a high price for the years of squandered opportunities

WHAT A shame a football season is set to break out at Anfield tomorrow night. Set against the thoroughly entertaining backdrop of Tom Hicks and George Gillett's poisonous vendetta, anything else - even the small matter of trying to win a sixth European Cup - seems almost a distraction.

It seems bizarre now, but there was a time when Liverpool's gruesome twosome were viewed as the epitome of the benevolent benefactor. Kindly Uncle Tom and cuddly George, always ready with a twinkling smile or cosy platitude, were supposed to be the antithesis of the flame-haired, black-hearted Malcolm Glazer, mysteriously cocooned away in his Tampa bolt-hole.

The trick worked, for a while at least. Before they had even tabled a bid, the pair took extensive advice from a British-based consultancy firm, boning up on the history of this defiantly different football club. Public comments were peppered with references to Liverpool's proud history, their riotously passionate supporters and the "Boot Room". Even the name of their controlling company, Kop Football Ltd, gave a nod to Liverpool's romantic past.

Now, the pair appear to believe PR is nothing more than a complicated way of deciding general elections. The past year has featured more lurid spats than a Gangsters and Molls night in an Albert Dock nightclub, with the acrimony reaching its peak last week when Hicks justified his demand for Rick Parry, the Liverpool chief executive, to resign by labelling his reign "a disaster".

"We have fallen so far behind the other leading clubs," he spluttered. "We have the leading brand in football but that is no good if you don't know how to commercialise it."

One half of Merseyside was immediately submerged by frothing rage and yet the supporters' ire was sparked less at seeing Hicks make another crass attempt to pile pressure on Parry, or even clumsily deflect attention from the most significant game of Liverpool's season tomorrow.

No. What really peeved Liverpool's red army was the infuriating, insufferable suspicion that Hicks - this loud-mouthed cowboy from the wrong side of the pond - actually had a point, even if he made it with all the subtlety one can expect of a man who counts George W Bush among his close personal friends.

The unpalatable truth is that in this rampantly commercial era, when England's major clubs are run with the ruthless ambition of multinational corporations, Liverpool still seems to be in the grip of small-minded shopkeepers.

The charge sheet is damning. In the time it has taken Manchester United to expand Old Trafford and Arsenal to move into the Emirates cash cow (£3 million-a-game, lest we forget), Liverpool have proved unable to even haul their plans for a new stadium in Stanley Park past the planning stage. The latest designs for New Anfield, shown to the world with such pride last year, are now accumulating dust in a disused storeroom. Costs have risen by £40 million -a-year since they were first mooted in 2001 and are now, thanks to the credit crunch and rising steel prices, prohibitively high.

Liverpool's failure to move out of their Anfield box-room would not be so costly if the other cogs in their commercial machine were turning smoothly. Yet the last 16 years have been one long sorry story of squandered opportunities: flaky sponsorship contracts have been torn up early, the club's brand has been shamefully undervalued in negotiations with potential investors and football's burgeoning markets in the Far East have not been pursued with sufficient rigour.

Parry is fortunate. Hicks' cack-handed attempts at playing the media game have allowed the former Premier League chief executive to emerge as the good guy, the man determined to protect the "Liverpool way" - whatever that is - from being levelled by this great bulldozer from the American south.

But his good fortune is not inexhaustible. The Merseyside public may help sustain the air of mysticism that surrounds Liverpool - many are still fulminating at the club's decision to allow the Kop to be sponsored by McDonalds in the mid-1990s - but they are not stupid.

It is one thing to be left behind by Manchester United, always a global pulling power, but quite another to be cast adrift from Arsenal, Chelsea and even Tottenham. None of those clubs can boast Liverpool's history or international renown, yet it is the Merseysiders who are currently ranked a lowly ninth in world football's rich list.

Disheartened by 20 years of domestic failure and no nearer reclaiming the league crown they last won in 1990, they will eventually seek a scapegoat. And with Rafael Benitez apparently fireproof and Hicks grimly determined to cling on to power at Anfield, Parry may yet prove a convenient fall-guy.