It is a Saturday afternoon outside Anfield, home to Premier League leaders Liverpool. The place is deserted besides what looks like a dad saving shots from his two young sons in the shadow of the famous Kop stand.
With the League banning all fixtures until at least the end of April, it will remain like this for a while yet. During that time, the club would’ve played three home games and probably clinched their first championship for 30 years – a boon to the small businesses that surround this mostly residential area north of the city centre.
It’s far from certain that the fixture list for this season will be completed. If it isn’t, or games are hosted in empty stadia, then the hit of the Coronavirus pandemic on football tourism in Liverpool is going to be immense. Awaydays to Anfield and Goodison, home to rivals Everton, make up a big chunk of a £4.9bn visitor economy that has thrived since the city became European Capital of Culture in 2008.
Michael Parkinson, a professor at the University of Liverpool and author of a book called Liverpool Beyond the Brink, said: “Liverpool will come through this. It is much more robust and more diverse than it was 30 years ago. But tourism is one of the biggest drivers of the economy and obviously it has taken a very big hit indeed.”
Round the corner from the ground lies Homebaked, a local bakery and café. A community land trust and co-operative, Homebaked was set up on the site of Mitchell’s, the last independent baker left in the area, with a mission to feed, educate and employ people in good jobs in what, for all Liverpool’s glory on the pitch, is one of the most economically deprived areas in the country.
On March 11, as Liverpool prepared to take on Atlético Madrid, Homebaked began to look into how its business model could survive the loss of its most vital revenue stream: matchday traffic. Both the bakery and café, which closed the Saturday before the British lockdown was announced, sell food to the local community without a mark-up, leaving them reliant on pie sales – including a prize-winning one named in honour of former manager Bill Shankly – to the supporters congregating outside Anfield and the club itself for profit.
“We supply Liverpool with 700 pies for each game, which brings in about £1,300, plus there’s about £4,500 on match-day sales from the bakery. For comparison, we take in about £700 in the cafe on a normal day,” its treasurer, Sally-Anne Watkiss, said. “All the margin we charge is in the match-day revenue. A pie costs £3.70 or £4.20; on a normal day it costs £3. Staff costs are also really low on match-day as it is fast turnover, and there is no [Value Added Tax] either as on cold takeaway, you don’t pay VAT.”
On the Saturday of the café’s closure, Homebaked sold the last of its fresh bread and all its stock of frozen pies from a side window, with yellow lines marked two metres apart on the pavement outside.
Soon afterwards it was able to secure funding from the Steve Morgan Foundation, a local charity that supports social projects in North Wales, Merseyside and Cheshire. Those funds enable them to send fresh bread every day to local food banks that then send the loaves out as parcels. “We are also taking donations. If people donate, we are sending free pies to Alder Hey [a local children’s hospital] and the Ambulance Service.”
Ms Watkiss added: “It’s interesting to see how community-minded businesses have been able to adapt so quickly. We’re nimble because we know what goods and services people here need.”
Homebaked owns the Anfield site through the community land trust, but its pies are made off site a few miles away in the district of Bootle. The Bootle property is owned by an offshore landlord that has insisted rent continues to be paid three months in advance.
Ms Watkiss said relying mainly on local suppliers has helped not only in sourcing essentials, but also in coping with the collapse in revenue. “The butcher we use is based on Walton Vale [about a ten minute drive away]. We are his biggest customer and he is very important to us too. When he heard about the matches getting stopped, he called us and said ‘If you need to freeze your bill, then don’t worry about it’. We have been able to pay him, but we really appreciate the offer.”
Tight connections with smaller firms that are not feeling the pinch have helped ease the strain. “Smaller organisations have paid us quickly, when they can. It is our creditors at big organisations that we have had more trouble with, they’ve added a lot of admin to the process and it has taken a lot of time and patience to get our money back. It took me all day to resend invoices for £100 for instance.”
The one exception is the club itself, which, after years of dithering over plans to expand its stadium which disrupted the local area, has become an increasingly supportive partner to local businesses and the wider community. “It’s very much a partnership with the club, they’re behaving like the good neighbours they should be and the relationship will be even stronger once we come out of this.”
Three quarters of the workers have been placed into furlough. Just five of the 20-strong team remain on site. Homebaked has applied for 80 per cent of their furloughed staff’s wages to be covered through a government’s scheme unveiled by chancellor Rishi Sunak on March 20. However, they don’t expect to receive the funds until May. “We managed to pay our staff for March and we are working hard to ensure we can pay our team in April but it is hard work. Cash flow is a major issue,” she said.
Mark Basnett, managing director at Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership, said there is a risk that cash constraints and the admin involved in applying for government schemes lead to workers losing their jobs. “The first priority has to be people’s health, but then protecting jobs and protecting businesses is right behind it,’ he said. “The job retention scheme is really helpful. But some small businesses are concerned about will they be eligible, and it will be another month before the payments will be made. Businesses aren’t completely sure, and that is why we are probably seeing some of them laying people off. You’re rolling out something that would’ve usually taken a year in a few weeks, you’re bound to get this problem.”
Local lawyers and accountants have offered to help out, advising on how to access the government’s bridging measures. “Our priority is to keep as many people in business, as quickly as we can, take up as quickly as possibly, initiatives,” he said.
With the best will in the world, Homebaked thinks it will be nigh on impossible to build up large reserves of cash in the future. “It’s just really difficult to build up a cash buffer when you’re in the food sector as the margins are so tight. It’s taken us six years to get to the point where there is one month of a buffer. It’s been a real slog to get to that point.”
For all the gloom, Homebaked sees this as a chance to show why they are so vital. Ms Watkiss said: “I hope that by the end of this, the economy looks different and that value is put on things that haven’t had a value before. Homebaked will come out of this stronger, we’ve shown our value by being able to do things like send fresh bread out with food bank parcels and helping the most vulnerable people to eat affordable, healthy food.”
Once the Reds are back on the pitch and the crowds return to Anfield and other tourist hotspots, Mr Parkinson believes a similar tale will reverberate around the city. “It has been a big hit, but you have a reservoir of young, entrepreneurial people who will come back from this. The base of the food industry is still national chains, but the trend is local and independent businesses. If we are looking at who will have gone to the wall and who will have survived, it will be the ones who are committed [to Liverpool] with local roots and suppliers.”
