LONDON — It might have been a real red-letter day when John Henry, the American principal owner of Liverpool, posted 835 words to the fans on the club’s Web site on Monday.

The purpose of Henry’s letter was to bridge an ocean of distance between running a baseball franchise in New England and one of the oldest soccer teams in dear old England.

The word franchise is common parlance in the States, where Henry heads the financiers of Fenway Sports Group, which revived the Boston Red Sox. But talk about franchise in soccer raises the hackles of Englishmen, especially Liverpudlians who follow their team from childhood to death.

Reading between the carefully crafted public relations lines, Henry and his investment consortium do seem to have grasped that essence of Liverpool.