Billy Hogan interview: Successes of 2024-25 and exciting events ahead

Looking at this season as a whole, it’s fair to say it has probably exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent Liverpool supporter. The transition from Jürgen Klopp to Arne Slot has been pretty much seamless. What is your assessment of that time period and how well it has gone?

Obviously no-one knew quite what to expect, right? If we go back to just over a year ago, back in January 2024, when Jürgen made his announcement, that was a real moment for the club. Jürgen, the personality and the person that he was, the manager and the coach that he was, there was a real sense of uncertainty in terms of, ‘Where were we going to go from here?’ I will say, credit to him in the sense of making that announcement, frankly, as early as he did in the season gave us the opportunity to really prepare and really plan. Normally that doesn’t necessarily happen as it relates to a manager’s tenure, they oftentimes come to an end very quickly. In this case, we had a bit more time.

Obviously we have seen, from an ownership perspective, the decision to kind of re-evaluate the structure; Michael Edwards coming in as the CEO of Football at FSG; shortly after Michael joining, Richard Hughes joining as our sporting director. And the work that has gone in from them and the football staff to identify – you never know obviously, but try to identify – the best person to carry on. I think what they found in Arne is somebody who obviously from a style of play, tactically, fits well with the club and the team that was already built. But also had the opportunity to sort of take it to the next level. That’s something that we’ve seen over the course of this year. And it has been seamless.

It’s a huge credit to everybody involved, and a credit to Arne obviously. I was involved on the pre-season tour and even just talking to some of the guys coming back from the training sessions and just the changes in terms of what they were doing on a day-to-day basis and how invigorated they were, it was just really a sense that there was a really good energy right from the start. Obviously everybody bought into that and we’re seeing the rewards of that now.

It’s not just on the pitch that we’ve been breaking records this season, off the pitch it has been a record season as well in a number of areas, including concerts, tours and partnerships…

Yes. I know we’re coming to the final match of the season but this is the last 10 days or so of our fiscal year. Our year starts June 1, so if you rewind 12 months we were coming to the end of last season and then launching into concert season. It seems a long time ago but we hosted Taylor Swift and P!NK, two of the biggest acts in all of music. Five different nights, 250,000 music fans coming through Anfield, which is just another great example of utilising the stadium in a way that is allowing more and different people to experience Anfield.

The concert season was a busy one – more to come on that obviously this coming summer. Then we headed off to the tour, a really successful tour in the States, we were in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and South Carolina. The opportunity for the team to start working with Arne at that point. And over the course of the season we have launched seven new partnerships through our partnerships team. We have just completed a pretty seamless rebrand, which has been really well received by the supporters and looks great. So, there has been a lot of activity.

And some big news on the merchandising front and retail as well…

Yeah, obviously a couple of weeks ago we were extremely excited to announce the upcoming partnership with adidas coming back into the family, which is terrific. We have obviously had a great relationship with Nike and we thank them. We’re in the final year of our agreement with them and actually this will be a record year in terms of retail sales, so thank you to everybody who supports the club through the retail channels. It has been a really important year from a merchandising perspective. And actually, we’ve just launched our 19th standalone store, which is in Copenhagen, so please go and visit it if you’re in Copenhagen. Daniel Agger, who took some time off from his coaching duties with the Danish national team, was nice enough to come and help us open that. And 19 is actually a unique number because it actually means we are now the team that has the most standalone stores of any football club, any US franchise, which is something for us all to be very proud of.

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