Ugly scenes of jeering fans at the stadium. A team bought with a mountain of debt, with creditors at the door. A messy sale with legal wrangling and an indebted owner clinging on. If that sounds familiar to Liverpool supporters then it should.

This is not the sad tale of Liverpool's ownership woes. Five thousand miles across the Atlantic, it's the recent history of the Texas Rangers baseball team. What the two teams also have in common is the man at the centre of both controversies: Tom Hicks.

In an uncanny parallel, the events at Anfield have been closely mirrored in the boardroom at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, near Dallas, where Hicks's ambitions to build an international sporting empire began to crumble, while bloggers in Texas labelled him "enemy No1 in the Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex".

Hicks had made his fortune with a venture capital fund – buying or investing in companies and then selling them off at a profit – and was collecting a string of sports teams, including the Dallas Stars ice hockey franchise, the Texas Rangers, Liverpool and a professional rodeo circuit.

It was the Texas Rangers that first pushed George W Bush to public prominence when he led a consortium that purchased the team in 1989. While Bush went on to bigger things, the Rangers failed to perform and in 1998 the club was sold by Bush's group to Hicks for $250m.

In the easy-money era of the 1990s and 2000s, financing such deals was no trouble for a successful businessman such as Hicks. But the collapse of Wall Street in late 2008 saw a credit squeeze that stopped banks refinancing the huge loans they had once been so eager to offer.

By early 2009 the Hicks Sports Group (HSG), the holding company for Hicks's empire, had defaulted on repayments for $525m worth of loans. Soon after, Hicks placed the Rangers into administrative bankruptcy known as Chapter 11, to fend off creditors while he attempted to sell the club in a deal that would have allowed him to stay on as a shareholder.

But – in a pattern Liverpool fans will recognise – other parties took legal action to halt what they saw as a sweetheart deal, and baseball's governing body, Major League Baseball, had to move in as the team's administrator, making $40m in loans to keep the team going as the squabbling dragged on. More than a year later, in August this year, a court ruled that the team had to be sold by auction, and Hicks's role was removed. The new owners are a group headed by the baseball superstar Nolan Ryan but paid $80m more than Hicks had first proposed.

Before the sale of the Rangers, HSG was estimated to owe 40 lenders approximately $600m in loans, unpaid interest and fees. Hicks is also trying to sell the Dallas Stars ice hockey team. A similar saga is unfolding, with Hicks holding out for a better price. A local sports blogger, Brandon Bibb, says he thought Hicks had learned his lesson from the Rangers debacle. "Well, I was wrong," Bibb says. "Instead, it's become clear that Hicks's objective is to try and squeeze every last nickle he can out of these investments, the Stars, Rangers and Liverpool be damned."

And that's not all: the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Hicks sold his luxury chalet in Aspen for $18.5m, saying his family preferred to go on holiday elsewhere. Has a man estimated to be a billionaire in 2009 found himself in financial difficulty? It is impossible to say, since Hicks's holdings are privately owned and so not available for public scrutiny. But for some among America's wealthy the Wall Street meltdown and property market collapse has slashed their net worth.

George Gillett, Hicks's co-owner at Liverpool, is an even more reticent figure. Gillett was the majority owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team, the Liverpool of the NHL that once dominated the league but with little success in recent seasons. Gillett sold the team and their arena last year for an estimated $550m.

There may be a silver lining for Liverpool fans, if the Texas Rangers' experience is anything to go by. Despite the months of uncertainty, the Rangers had their best season in years in 2010, winning their division.

The other good news is that the first thing the Rangers's new owners did was cut the price of beer at the stadium. No chance of that at Anfield, sadly.