Like many people, I had spent much of the last year or so wondering about the supine reaction of Liverpool supporters to the Gillett & Hicks take-over. Here were two people coming in with no apparent prior interest in Liverpool Football Club, making numerous promises and claims, but with the prevailing common knowledge becoming apparent that they didn't have the cash up front to pay for it. Very few people that closely connected wondered aloud where the money was going to come from. The club was being purchased for £300m and the new stadium will cost something like £400m. These are substantial amounts of money. They were also making promises of spending obscene amounts of money on players. In spite of this, Stars & Stripes flags were flown on match days. The arrivistes were feted as saviours. It was almost as if no-one had been paying any attention to what had gone on forty miles up the road at Old Trafford for the last few years or so. Considering that Liverpool is the city that was the birthplace of Militant, the home of the Dockers' strike and a city which remains one of the most politically left-wing in Britain, it was all most perplexing.

Over the last few weeks or so, the wheels have come spectacularly off the wagon for the new owners. They may have secured the refinancing package that they desperately needed, but it hasn't come cheap and it is now common knowledge that, just as at Manchester United, a football club is effectively paying for itself to be taken over by outside investors, and at a cost of £30m per year in interest payments alone - money which, ultimately, will come from the supporters themselves. The seeds of the problems for Gillett & Hicks were sown in their treatment of Rafael Benitez. Whatever the shortcomings of Benitez are, he has taken them to two European Cup finals in three years and is still enormously popular on Merseyside. The club's apparent misjudgement of this incurred the wrath of the supporters and a demonstration march to the ground towards the end of last year. The lack of harmony within the club may or may not be directly responsible for the club's slump in form, a slump so severe that it hasn't merely ended their Premier League championship bid but will quite possibly result in them taking part in the UEFA Cup next season rather than the Champions League. There was a further demonstration against Gillett & Hicks at the recent match against Aston Villa. Something, one suspected, was in the air. At last.

The upshot of it all is "Share Liverpool FC", launched today in the city by Rogan Taylor, a long time Liverpool supporter and the chair of the Football Supporters Association, Kevin Jaquiss, a lawyer specialising in employment law who was part of the group responsible for writing the legal model upon which all supporters trusts are based, and Phil French, a former director of communications of the Premier League who is now employed as the chief executive of Supporters Direct. In terms of knowledge and support, you couldn't really ask for much more experience. The plan is a simple (if ambitious) one: persuade 100,000 Liverpool supporters to pay £5,000 each and raise £500m to buy the club, and then run it as a not-for-profit mutual society, with no shareholder dividends and no profit. The group has had a somewhat shaky start (such was the level of interest that the web site collapsed fifteen minutes after it went live and, at the time of writing, hasn't recovered yet), but this would appear to bode well for them - a considerable amount interest in a concept that very few people had even heard about as recently as a couple of days ago.

So, can it work? Well, it can. These are monstrous amounts of money, though - are there 100,000 Liverpool supporters in the world who will part with £5,000 in order to take control of the club? Are there that many supporters groups that will band together and buy shares between them? The next few weeks will provide a few answers to this, but it is worth remembering that if nothing else, we should applaud the principle of this idea. Some, such as the apparently "humorous" website Who Ate All The Pies, have already chosen to scoff at the announcement, with a magnificently ill-informed article on the announcement that appears to have been written on the back of a cigarette packet in the pub. I don't know which part of their piece on the subject (which I'm not linking to from here - if you want to see it, you can go and look for yourselves) is the worst: "They should leave the running of the club to the money men in suits who know about such things", or "this is communism at its most hare-brained" are vying with each other (and a whole host more) for the most the most ill-informed comment on the subject. Having embarked upon second and third readings of it, I can confidently state that more or less every single sentence of it is as bad as the one that preceded it.

The Simpsons has a habit of occasionally dropping in cameo performances from the stars of other animated series, and it always leave me feeling strangely uncomfortable. Seeing Fred Flintstone sitting on the couch at 742 Evergreen Terrace has the effect of making me look around, just to check that the world is still turning and that I haven't slipped, without noticing, into a parallel universe. Soap operas, thank heavens, don't do the same thing nearly as often, but I had to check that there was just the one sun in the sky this morning with the news that Dennis Wise has been appointed as the General Manager at Newcastle United, an appointment which has further reinforced my opinion that Mike Ashley is suffering some sort of nervous breakdown.

Interviewed on the radio last night, Kevin Keegan sounded somewhat bemused and unhappy at the appointment. After all the fanfare of his resurrection-like return to St James Park (though it is always worth pointing out that this particular "Geordie Messiah" isn't actually a Geordie himself, and that his first significant involvement with Newcastle United was practically beating them single-handed for Liverpool in the 1974 FA Cup final - he didn't sign for Newcastle until 1982, by which time he was way past his best and had already retired from international football), Newcastle have played some atrocious football in his two matches in charge so far, barely registering a shot on target against either Bolton Wanderers or Arsenal, but I doubt if he could reasonably have been expecting such a, well, peculiar appointment to be made, especially without his own authorisation.

Leeds United supporters seem happy enough with it all and, indeed, why shouldn't they be? I fully understand that they would be top of the table if it hadn't been for the fifteen point deduction that they suffered during the summer because of the attempted sleight of hand over their financial crisis at the time, but their supporters seem to have long enough memories to be be fully aware of the fact that it was Wise that took them down in the first place and that his appointment and retention at Elland Road seemed to be largely on the basis that he is one of the few men in football that actually likes Ken Bates. They have spent heavily since the transfer embargo placed upon them was lifted, and being near the top of League One, for a club that was competing in the Champions League earlier in this decade, should be their minimum requirement, points deduction or no. The only cloud on their horizon is the spectre of Dave Bassett, seemingly appointed as caretaker-manager - another ghost from the past, who seems unlikely to be the man to provide them with very much success or, indeed watchable football.

Considering how dull the January transfer window has been, we should be grateful to Leeds and Newcastle (as well as Liverpool) for providing us with as much mirth as they have done. Football needs this level of incompetent administration to give the rest of us something to giggle over, and you get the feeling that it just wouldn't be the same if everyone was ably administrated. All we need now is for Jose Mourinho to be offered the Leeds job, only for him to turn it down, leaving them with Steve McClaren in charge, and the circle will be complete.

This season's major trend has been a very singular type of managerial sacking, involving "intolerable pressure" building up in the media, directors and owners panicking, and a manager's job becoming basically untenable, regardless of whether he deserves to be sacked or not. In some cases, it was undignified to the point of being embarrassing to watch, such as at Chelsea, where the boardroom politics, the despotic ownership and the ridiculous amount of control given to senior players were made public. At Newcastle, Sam Allardyce did the impossible, in becoming a figure of public sympathy for being ousted through a mixture of supporter ignorance and an owner that seems to be too eager to please said ignorant supporters.

Now, at Liverpool, the position of Rafael Benitez seems to have been undermined still further by the actions of their owners, George Gillett and Tom Hicks. It has become apparent as the season has worn on that Liverpool are not going to mount a serious championship challenge in the Premier League. In fact, if anything they seem to have taken a backward step since last season, and are currently playing like they have more in common with the likes of Everton, Manchester City and Portsmouth than they have with Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal. The money that was reported to be delivered to Benitez to further strengthen his squad doesn't appear to have been forthcoming, and now there are worrying rumours coming from Anfield regarding a need to restructure the club's finances ahead of the construction of a proposed new stadium in Stanley Park. There are some Liverpool supporters that are starting to sound increasingly alarmed, to the point of drawing similarities with the beginning of the decline of Leeds United.

The problem at the centre of Liverpool's current difficulties is the funding of their take-over last year. As with Manchester United, Liverpool were subject to a leveraged buyout, meaning that Gillett and Hicks utilised stock market rules to purchase the club for a fraction of its actual value. At the time, Liverpool's supporters were very supine about it all. Stars and stripes flags were waved at Anfield. The new owners were more than happy to lap up the praise when they got to the European Cup final in May, even though they'd had precious little to do with it. This season, their big summer signing Fernando Torres has carried them single-handedly through the season. They made a dog's dinner of getting through their group stage, losing to Besiktas and Marseille in a group that they should have had sewn up with games to spare. In the Premier League, they have slowly and consistently fallen further and further away from the top three since the start of the season.

The major problem for Liverpool FC is that they simply cannot afford to not qualify for the Champions League this season and, indeed, every season for the forseeable future. The buyout of the club cost £300m, which has been loaded against the club itself. On top of this, one of Gillett and Hicks' first acts when they took over was to promise to build a new stadium, at a cost of a further £300m. Liverpool were already said to be £80m in debt at the time of the buyout. Gillett and Hicks are said to be trying to restructure the club's finances through the banks, but this in itself is an expensive business. A recent report in the Daily Telegraph put the cost of the restructuring at £15m, and the cost of the new stadium has already risen to £400m, with £20m having already been paid to architects.

In the beginning, Liverpool's supporters were open to the idea. Broadly, they supported Gillett and Hicks against their rivals in bidding, Dubai International Capital, who represent the interests of the ultra-wealthy Maktoum family. Gillett and Hicks said the right thing. However, leverage buyouts are done for one reason. To buy something that is considered under-valued in the market without putting much investment in and sell it on at a profit. DIC may well have the funding to underwrite the club's debts, but they have already stated publicly that they don't much want to pour money into a black hole (and why, indeed, should they?). The danger, for Liverpool, is that they could end up hundreds of millions pounds in debt, unable to service so much as the interest payments on debts that they may already have unnecessarily run up.

At Manchester United, supporters were already protesting before the Glazer takeover. It might not have been enough to prevent the buyout there from going through (although anyone looking at the end of year figures coming from Old Trafford will be able to tell you that journalists stating massive profits there simply hasn't read the full story of how they've been massaged), but their disaffected supporters at least have an alternative. Liverpool supporters might just find that things could get a lot worse for them before they get any better.

Here's a video from December 1983 of Liverpool (about who's current woes I have quite a lot to say) coming up against what I can only presume was an unexpectedly feisty Coventry City side in the First Division. Commentary comes from a pre-histrionics John Motson.

It was the strangest thing, but Salomon Kalou's clearly offside goal was so far offside that it kept Sam Allardyce in a job for the next few days or so. The press had been predicting for the last few days that defeat at Stamford Bridge would probably cost Allardyce his job, but Kalou's goal was so far offside that the press focussed on that for a few days, allowing him to postpone his date with the hangman's noose for a few more days. Unless anything enormously disastrous happens tonight against Manchester City, he'll probably still there for this weekend's FA Cup match against Stoke, and it's difficult (even considering their recent form) to see them losing that match. I'd be surprised it Allardyce goes before the end of the season. He's too stubborn to go voluntarily and, if the details of his financial package are correct, he might be too expensive to sack.

I'm not, as you may be aware, a fan of Allardyce by any stretch of the imagination. I think that the much of the praise that he won at Bolton was overstated. His Bolton team was utterly joyless to watch and, whilst I understand that small clubs will always go down the route of making themselves difficult to beat, there will always be a low boiling point in the Premier League - a boiling point at which supporters expect entertainment. Twenty years ago, Wimbledon had perfected their party piece of hitting it long and hard, playing a physical game and scaring the hell out of "better" opponents. Their supporters didn't much like it, but it got them into the top division of English football for more than a decade. These days, though, in an era of £40 match tickets and the constant hubris about the Premier League being "The Biggest And Best League In The World", it might not be enough on its own. For Sam Allardyce, the line between success and failure is a very thin one, and there is no room for error when you're at a big club and not playing exciting, attacking football. Newcastle's supporters may have a long tradition of having been "entertained" (although there is, I think a considerable amount of myth to this - Keegan's 1996 team that blew the Premier League notwithstanding, I don't think that Newcastle United have consistently played "better football" than anyone else in the country over the last forty years or so), but in the realpolitik of the modern game, realising your limitations and maximising them early on can be one of the keys to building success over a period of time.

The problem is that time is the one thing that no Premier League manager has. Unlike further down the ladder, every Premier League match counts. There's no room for error. Newcastle haven't actually been that bad this season (they're eleventh at the time of writing, above such luminaries as Tottenham Hotspur and Middlesbrough), but we already know that Allardyce won't get the two or three years that he needs to lay down his authority at St James Park and set the seal on the way that he wants things to be done. He's costing them millions and millions of pounds, and they won't tolerate two more seasons in mid-table. Fortunately, though, some of the madder elements of the Newcastle support already have a replacement for him already lined up. Alan Shearer.

It's campaigns like this which lead me to the inevitable conclusion that some football supporters deserve anything they get. Shearer is, at the time of writing, taking his coaching badges, but anyone that saw his witless half-time performance on the BBC team during the England vs Croatia match (when his contribution to the attack on McClaren's tactics seemed to be limited to complaining that the players didn't have enough - you've guessed it - "passion") will already know that, however bad Allardyce turns out to be, Shearer will be twenty times worse. Also, Shearer, who has made it more than clear that he wants the Newcastle job, hasn't made any effort to get any coaching experience over the last couple of years. So, replacing Allardyce would be ridiculously expensive and Newcastle fans would be getting someone with no managerial experience that has already demonstrated only that he has the tactical acumen of a water biscuit.

In the harsh glare of the modern football world, even the likes of Newcastle United are now light years away from the top four, and the fact of the matter is that the best that Newcastle can recently hope for in the next three to five years would be to emulate Bolton, Everton or Spurs. Regular UEFA Cup football might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it must be better than whatever the vast majority of the alternatives are. Common sense, though, doesn't often intrude into the rampant egotism and unrealistic pipe dreams of the Premier League - a world in which a club with weekly 52,000 sell-out crowds and an estimated 1,000,000 supporters needs a multi-millionaire in order to secure a regular place in the top ten.