Pools heir who became a popular chairman of Liverpool FC
DAVID MOORES, who has died aged 76, was a Littlewoods pools heir and the chairman and major shareholder of Liverpool Football Club.
David’s uncle Sir John Moores (1896-1993) was the founder of the Littlewoods football pools, mail-order and department store empire, which was sold for £750 million in 2002 to the Barclay family, who are now proprietors of The Daily Telegraph. Sir John was chairman of Everton FC but the family also had a
51 per cent interest in the rival Liverpool club, where David held the chair from 1991 to 2007.
David Moores’s tenure at Anfield – overshadowed by the glories of Manchester United under Alex Ferguson – was a period of mixed success which ended unhappily with the sale of the club to the American sports tycoons Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Moores himself was an owner in an older tradition, loyal to his managers and driven neither by commercial imperatives nor love of the limelight.
What motivated him, as one fan website put it, was “a lifelong and deeply held love of the club and its supporters”. In what was rapidly becoming a milieu of oligarchs and faceless investors, he was “the last of his kind, a millionaire fan”.
Moores inherited as his first manager the club’s former captain Graham Souness, who achieved FA Cup success in 1992 but was sacked, reluctantly on the chairman’s part, after poor results in 1994.
In Souness’s place, Roy Evans was promoted from long-serving coach to manager, then awkwardly harnessed as joint manager with the incoming Gérard Houllier – a compromise described by one commentator as “the kindest sacking in the history of the game”.
After Evans’s resignation in 1998, Houllier led the club in 2001 to triple triumph in the FA Cup, League Cup and Uefa Cup, followed by League Cup success again in 2003.
Houllier was succeeded by Rafa Benítez, who brought Champions League victory in 2005, in a famous comeback against AC Milan in the final, but Moores was concerned that his fortune was insufficient for the club to compete in a soaring transfer market against the likes of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea.
He let it be known that he was willing to sell, and Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai emerged as the likely buyer. But when that deal collapsed, the door was open for Hicks and Gillett, whom Moores declared to be “safe hands… not someone coming over to make a quick buck”.
Liverpool fans soon decided otherwise, however, and the
£174 million deal came to be seen as a disaster. As the debt-laden club fell to the brink of bankruptcy, Moores was moved to write to a national newspaper calling for Hicks and Gillett to “acknowledge their role in the club’s current demise and stand aside”. They duly did so, selling to another US buyer, Fenway Sports, in 2010.
David Richard Moores was born on March 15 1946, the second son of Cecil Moores and his wife Doris, née Steel. Cecil was the younger brother of John (their father was a bricklayer from Eccles in Lancashire) and joined him in the fledgling pools business in 1925, when John’s first partners pulled out. Cecil, who was credited with devising a time-stamped system for receiving coupons to prevent cheating, chaired the pools company in the 1960s and 1970s.
David’s elder brother Nigel died in a car accident in the south of France in 1977; when their sister Patricia died in 2017, a court battle ensued between her children over her
£40 million estate.
David Moores married first, in 1976, Kathleen Anders, a former Miss England, who died in 1977 when their car overturned on a country road in Lancashire, leaving David with serious head injuries. He married secondly, in 1983, Marjorie (“Marge”) Walmsley, who died earlier this year.
David Moores, born March 15 1946, died July 22 2022