A leaked dossier allegedly drawn up by Everton FC’s director of communications during his former role at Liverpool compared prominent Reds fans to Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge.
The document is claimed to have been drawn up by Paul Tyrrell at the height of antagonism between LFC supporters and the unpopular Anfield regime run by Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2010.
It was leaked by the evertonarentwe.com fan website although it is not clear how the highly sensitive, internal report came into their hands.
The documents states that some Reds fans groups are “like the sporting version” of Cambodia’s 1970s revolutionaries, wanting to “get to Year Zero to start all over again and see the opportunity of furthering their general political beliefs through LFC”.
Journalists are also targeted and their allegiances and views identified, including former ECHO reporters Tony Barrett and Dom King.
Mr Tyrrell issued a firm “no comment” about the dossier today.
It is signed off PT and makes reference to how fans “regard the owners as evil pals of (George) Bush ... and the chairman (Martin Broughton) as Tory toffs and people such as me (with my family political background) as traitors.”
Mr Tyrrell’s dad was once a Labour mayor of Halton.
The Farm frontman and outspoken Reds fan Peter Hooton – who is referred to on the four-page list – said he was considering taking legal action over some of the claims about him in the dossier. Mr Hooton told other fans on web forums that he would be “getting his lawyers onto this”.
And Spirit of Shankly said it was disgusted to be compared to a “murderous genocidal regime” just for taking a different stand to the club’s management.
The SOS’s James McKenna told the ECHO: “To see this sort of confirms what we suspected, that there were briefings and dossiers and blacklists.
“You would think we were some kind of sinister political front. How can we be compared to a murderous regime committing genocide, and what is a ‘sporting version’ of a murderous dictatorship?
“If you look at what was happening in the summer of 2010, undermining the club didn’t come down to us.”
The fans are also accused of being happy to see the club plummet down the divisions, “effectively go bust and then reform in a pure Socialist form – run by a Supporters Trust”.
The dossier adds: “They failed in the past to take on the establishment in the form of the Conservative government in the 1980s ... and form a Trotskyist Independent People’s Republic.”
LFC sources said the club had been under a very different regime in the run up to the crisis of 2010 which saw Hicks and Gillett take the club to court during the ownership wrangle.
A spokesman added: “No-one from the club’s current management was involved with or had any knowledge of this document.”
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/spor...ews/leaked-list-compared-liverpool-fc-4025956
