BY ROSS HEPPENSTALL
Here’s one for you: Imagine a Super League side based in Liverpool, owned by Marwan Koukash and armed with an ambition to become a serious force in the game.
Picture this new club playing other big-city teams such as Leeds Rhinos, London Broncos, Toronto Wolfpack and possibly even New York.
Sounds rather improbable doesn’t it?
Well, this was the typically bold rhetoric spewed forth by the controversial former Salford Red Devils chairman recently.
The millionaire racehorse owner, who relinquished control of the Red Devils just over 12 months ago, says he is keen to get involved in rugby league once more.
After dropping his interest in launching a new club in Cumbria and pulling out of a bid to take over Widnes Vikings, Koukash has curiously switched his focus to Liverpool.
In partnership with two other local businessmen, Luke Backhouse and Andrew Mikhail, Koukash has identified a site for a new stadium and wants to build a club from scratch, although he did not rule out buying out an existing club and re-locating it to Merseyside.
The consortium is looking at following the example of Toronto by entering the competition at League 1 level, in either 2021 or 2022, and hope to launch the project at the Magic Weekend this year, which is being for the first time at Anfield in May.
“I’ve looked at a number of clubs to invest in and get involved because I love rugby league,” Koukash said in a recent interview with the Press Association.
“Rugby league is in my blood, as it is in the blood of Andrew and Luke.
“The three of us are fairly comfortable financially and we have invested heavily in rugby league in the past in the form of sponsorship or ownership.
“We are in discussions with the council and we’ve got options on a ground, which I think will end up being in the Sefton area of Liverpool.
“We’re going to build a new ground and get started as soon as we can.
“We’re open to starting in League 1 or the alternative maybe is we are told by the RFL that it might be easier to buy an existing club and re-brand it.
“We hope to launch the project at the Magic Weekend and this year we will try to encourage the amateur game in Liverpool and also introduce rugby league into the schools.
“There is a lot of groundwork to be done but we intend to do it from ground zero.”
What Merseyside-based Koukash should know by now, though, is that Liverpool is a football hotbed and has never cared much for rugby league.
Much like the Beatles, the city’s football clubs are famous the world over.
Liverpool have won 18 league titles and five European Cups while the Everton have nine top-flight titles and five FA Cups.
Liverpool is a weird and wonderful place in so many ways; a coastal statelet divided by accent and attitude from the English hinterland.
Laid out haphazardly in a mosaic of redbrick streets, on a gentle slope where the River Mersey meets the salt of the Irish Sea, Liverpool has more in common with Dublin or Marseilles than Birmingham or Leeds.
Waves of immigrants have spiced its unique flavour.
Independence, verbal wit and physical toughness are prized, authority resented.
The inner city especially has a raw, gritty feel; at times it seems to crackle with a special charge.
The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung called it the ‘pool of life’.
Nowadays, Liverpool is a genuine world-class destination with a vast array of plush hotels, bars and restaurants.
But football continues to dominate the city.
Scousers are a proud but insular bunch at times and people from nearby towns such as Widnes, St Helens and Wigan are commonly derided as ‘Woolybacks’.
Rugby league, a sport synonymous with these areas, has traditionally been greeted disdainfully, or at least dismissively, by many Liverpudlians.
For them, football is a religion and Saturday the day of worship.
Growing up in the market town of Ormskirk, around 11 miles from Anfield, my schoolfriends and I would make the regular pilgrimage to watch Liverpool play.
A twenty-minute train ride would take us to Kirkdale and we would walk past Goodison Park, around Stanley Park and pay £4.50 to stand on the famous Spion Kop.
The atmosphere, the cauldron of noise, the smell of beer and cigarettes, the humour, the chanting, the sense of belonging and the passion for the club made for an unbelievable experience.
As young lads not yet even in our teens, did we deserve something this good?
Nearly everyone I knew supported Liverpool because at the time they were enjoying a golden era in the 1980s.
One friend of mine followed Everton and I actually went to Wembley with him to watch the Toffees play against Nottingham Forest in the long-forgotten Simod Cup.
But I digress.
The point being that in my local area growing up, just outside of Merseyside (although we did have a Liverpool postcode), it was football, football, football. Rugby league did not register.
Little has changed in the three decades since.
I always remember one girl who followed something called rugby league – a code apparently different to normal rugby (we played union at our school) and one which I knew nothing about.
She was a Wigan fan and would tell me about her regular trips to Wembley to see her team lift the Challenge Cup.
This was at a time when Wigan were largely unstoppable.
But in the whole of our school year, I believe she may have been the only follower of rugby league and therein lies the point.
It is a sport that has traditionally struggled to establish a footprint outside of the towns and cities in which its professional clubs play.
Take Wigan, St Helens, Warrington and Widnes.
All towns in the north-west of England of not dissimilar size and all within half an hour’s drive of Liverpool.
These four clubs boast a proud rugby league history and subsequently a significant support base for their team.
But few people outside these towns care about them and that, in a nutshell, is rugby league’s problem.
It struggles for relevance outside its own small, parochial northern enclaves.
Certainly Liverpool, along with its great rival and neighbouring north-west city of Manchester, has never shown much affection for rugby league.
History tells us that.
There was a Liverpool City club for one ill-fated season in 1906-07 which saw them finish bottom.
London Highfield relocated to Liverpool in 1934 and became Stanley, then City, and finally moved to Huyton in the late 1960s.
After various name changes and locations including Prescot, Runcorn and St Helens, they folded in 1997.
The amateur club scene in Liverpool is similarly hit and miss – Liverpool Buccaneers played in the Rugby League Conference but Liverpool Lions, established in 2008, now appear to be the city’s only active rugby league club.
It is indicative of the code’s struggle to make any inroads in Liverpool and many long-standing observers of the game feel it is doomed to fail there.
With no existing fanbase or amateur support to provide support, how could a new professional club survive?
Even St Helens, with all their success during the Super League era, have had little joy in establishing a fanbase in the city.
And yet Koukash seems ready to press on with his bid to establish a rugby league club there.
Koukash, who owns a hotel in Liverpool, says, although the club will almost certainly start out in the third tier of the professional game, the aim will be to reach Super League.
“I’m a great believer in big brands and I think it would be fantastic to have a team like Liverpool playing a team like Leeds on television,” he said.
“That would have a massive influence on people because, while St Helens-Wigan was a fantastic game, people automatically think it’s a town sport.”
Koukash has already tried and failed in his bid to make Salford one of the top clubs in Super League.
There were plenty of controversies during his Red Devils reign – points deductions, sacking of coaches, legal battles, relegation skirmishes and fights with the Rugby Football League.
Crucially, however, there was no real success during his stewardship.
Whether or not the Palestinian can now break the rugby league mould in Liverpool remains to be seen, but it could be fun watching him try.
