Imagine if Joel Glazer, the joint chairman of Manchester United, told a room full of journalists that he was a big supporter of the 39th game idea. Not only that, but he wanted to take a real humdinger of a match, perhaps one of the marquee fixtures of the season, abroad. 'The more important the game, the more excitement,' said Joel.
There would, understandably, be uproar. We would hear from columnists, custodians and every fan pressure group.
The disaffected at Manchester United would take to the airwaves claiming this is precisely the sort of stance that demonstrates why the Glazers should not be in charge of their club.
It would be claimed that they have no feel for the supporters or for English football, its history and heritage. All they are interested in, we would be told, is the bottom line, and if that comes from the Far East or the West Coast, they would sell out our fans in the blink of an eye.
So what happened when Tom Werner, chairman of Liverpool, said it? Exactly that statement. The quote falsely placed in the mouth of Joel Glazer in the first paragraph. Nothing. Not a squeak of protest, not a murmur of dissent.
Werner, the man who will run Liverpool on behalf of the new American owner John Henry, strongly advocated a scheme that has come to represent everything crass and commercial about the modern game, and was good-naturedly disregarded.
This is what is known as a honeymoon period.
Henry is fortunate that his stewardship is still being assessed in the most benign terms, because to peer beneath the surface may give concern.
Advocacy of the 39th game, of debt, a stadium project that may now take four years to complete, a reluctance to address the weakness of the squad in the January transfer window, these are all stories that have emerged from the Henry camp in recent weeks, and failed to attract juicier headlines than his wife Linda picking up singing tips from the Kop on Twitter.
Henry is new to football. It is clearly too much to expect that he should fall immediately in step with the traditionalism of the Spirit of Shankly.
Yet while scepticism meets the announcement that the Glazers are to pay off the cursed PIK loans with £220m from outside the club, the Henry regime can make statements that support seismic change in English football and we smile politely.
Nobody is saying Henry is a fool. Subjects such as global expansion and club debt are being debated constantly in football club boardrooms, while taking time to plan a £400m project is only sensible. Nor would he be the first to decide that the January transfer window is a minefield best left unexplored.
Yet it remains true that had such pronouncements or stratagems come from a Glazer or a sheik they would not have passed without comment. Henry has been painted as the antidote to a slew of dubious foreign owners, but he might not be that different after all.
This is his chairman, Werner, on the 39th game. 'Pre-season matches are great but why not have an actual match in the season? The Premier League is the strongest league in the world and its reach is global. The number of people globally who watch has impressed me and we hope to expand that imprint. I think the more important the game, the more excitement.'
This is Henry on debt. 'It is a big issue with Manchester United, but the New York Yankees have a debt of $3.5billion and I have never heard a Yankee fan complain because they built a $1.5bn stadium. The difference is between stadium and acquisition debt.'
No, the difference is the $2bn that the Yankees owe that is nothing to do with the stadium, but who is counting? Certainly not us. We're too busy admiring the lovely Linda to be thrown by the fact that the new owners of Liverpool quite fancy a match in Honolulu.
Look at Werner's quote again. He is not advocating an extra round of fixtures. His plan is not for the whole league to decamp to different continents on one, mad, weekend, but to cherry-pick a fabulous fixture - it could be one of Liverpool's home matches against Manchester United or Chelsea - and send it to Singapore, the way the NFL do with their one-off games at Wembley.
It is as unnerving a statement as has been made by any chairman in 10 years, a far more radical proposal than the one abandoned by Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore in 2008.
Many owners would agree with Henry about the Yankees' debt, but fans would not. Fans are obsessed by red numbers right now. They have all been turned into accountants by the Glazer regime at Old Trafford and if club debt looks to affect the ability to run up more debt by spending on players, the balloon really goes up.
Yet Henry continues to enjoy an easy ride, because the debt he talks about will finance a new stadium. Maybe.
Henry 's people are currently revisiting the plans for a £200m facelift at Anfield, mothballed in 2005, taking the capacity to 65,000. This is a wise move. They are also reassessing the development at Stanley Park. Again, this is sensible. The time-frame for these projects, however, has now lengthened to 2014, meaning there could be another four seasons of Liverpool falling behind more robust rivals.
If the club spent that long without Champions League football, what calibre of players would grace the new stadium? History means little to the modern footballer. These days nobody joins Nottingham Forest because they are bewitched by the glory years under Brian Clough.
And by the sound of it nobody joins Liverpool at all until next summer. Roy Hodgson greeted the Henry regime by talking up the changes that needed to be made in January, but the manager has gone quiet on the subject of late.
Henry told a fans group that immediate investment was unlikely and he had been advised that to thrive in the volatile January market was difficult. Yes it is, but not impossible.
'The current players must each week live up to the history and respect the club has engendered,' Henry announced, by way of solution. They can't. They're not good enough. That was why the manager was rather hoping to open for business at the start of next year.
None of this makes Henry a bad guy, just a not so very different guy. Perhaps Liverpool's supporters are so grateful to Henry for saving them from Tom Hicks and George Gillett that they will accept any crack in the paintwork. Maybe they simply think Henry and Werner are new to our game and will learn; or maybe we will.
Read more:
MARTIN SAMUEL: Are John Henry's Liverpool crew just Double Glazers? | Mail Online
