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Fenway Sports Group proudly proclaim they are turning fans into customers.

It is there on their website (fenwaysportsmanagement.com), under the portfolio section, right alongside the Liverpool club crest.

Click on that crest and you are taken to an honours list, a lengthy statement which ends with a celebration of the Reds 580 million ‘fans’ who span seven continents.

That’s one hell of a lot of potential customers FSG are hoping to tap into.

The potential riches are obvious.

But Liverpool’s American owners should also beware.

Customers are emotionally involved for 90 minutes. Then they take their custom elsewhere.

Supporters don’t. They live, breathe and eat their football clubs and despise their rivals.

Customers shop around and switch allegiances to better, more successful brands.

Football fans follow their clubs til they die.

They go home and agitate over poor performances.

They lose sleep, kick the dog and are difficult to live with.

But when times are good, they walk on air.

Customers cannot recreate an evening like Chelsea 2005. Like Arsenal three years later. Like St Etienne or the most celebrated of the lot, Inter Milan in 1965.

Those experiences were almost half-a-century apart, generated by different people at different stages of their lives. But they all had one common cause. They are Liverpool fans.

Football fans have memories, customers buy brands.

To supporters Anfield is a spiritual shrine.

In the awful aftermath of Hillsborough it was a place supporters went to for solace, for comfort, for belonging.

It is also a place where many people have enjoyed the happiest, most intense experiences of their lives.

Customers are people seeking to ‘buy’ that thrill.

There’s a feeling among many Reds fans that Anfield is now home to a growing number of ‘customers’.

They’ve heard of those great European nights, they’ve read the mythology and they want to buy the chance to witness it.

But they don’t create it.

Only true fans do that.

If FSG fulfill their ambition and turn Anfield into a stadium filled with customers, not fans, Anfield will be a lively, colourful, occasional noisy arena.

It will also be soulless.

Postscript: This column was written on Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon, FSG altered the wording on their website from "transforming fans into customers" to "transforming consumers into fans." That's a dramatic volte face. Does it indicate a change of policy? Or was the original wording erroneous? We can only hope both apply.