Speaking of Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a good piece up on Liverpool F.C. getting approval last week to expand its stadium’s capacity by 14,000 seats, and how it did so by secretly buying up houses in the neighborhood around the stadium, leaving them to rot, then getting the Liverpool city council to approve tearing them down as an anti-blight measure:
As of last year, Liverpool F.C. owned 150 homes around their historic stadium, Anfield. Almost all of them were vacant. “There are thieves ripping the lead off people’s roofs,” Chris Coyle, whose mother lived among the vacants, told the Liverpool Echo at the time. This was just the tip of the iceberg: the Guardian reported that over the past decade, miscreants lit some of the blighted houses on fire, threw bricks at the few remaining residents, and in 2001 a woman using one of the vacant homes was murdered. In what one resident called “dereliction by design,” Liverpool was accused of buying properties just to let them rot, driving prices down and residents out so they could more cheaply expand Anfield.
Gordon acknowledges that it’s not clear whether this was the original plan or just a lucky outcome — as he puts it, “t would be far too generous to credit Liverpool with carrying out a nefarious, coordinated plot across three ownership groups when it demonstrated so much incompetence on and off the field.” Either way, though, it’s a new twist on stadium shenanigans — I’ve seen a lot of crazy tactics over the years, but this is the first time I’ve seen a pro sports team accused of blockbusting.