OY! Football Association, FA Premier League – where the LFC are you? Knock, knock. Is there anybody there? Are you on another prawn sandwich-scoffing junket?

My club, Liverpool, the one I have supported since I was six years old, almost five decades ago, is being kicked through the courts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in a squalid squabble over ownership and owed cash.

Some observers have pointed to this being England’s most successful club.

Winners of 18 top-flight championships, five European Cups, seven FA Cups, seven League Cups, three UEFA Cups and the best collection of muzzies in the 1980s ever. Yet LFC is reduced to the status of a whore being fought over by suitors, some of whom you would not trust in a cathedral, let alone in an alley, and most certainly not in a courtroom.

But the tradition of Liverpool, its illustrious treasure trove of silverware, even its assemblage of above-lip hair, are irelevant.

Football fans put up with a terrace full of topspin most times. They pay their money and they seldom get the truth, the whole truth – usually it’s nothing of the truth.

They’ll take the good times and the bad, the stellar stars and the Nobby no-marks and cheer or jeer.

But unlike owners, directors, managers and players, who all exit richer or poorer some day, fans remain from sperm to worm, womb to tomb, unremittingly loyal, relentlessly optimistic.

And whether a team’s followers number a few hundred, or hundreds of thousands, whether their trophy cabinet amounts to a shelf or a strong-room, they do not want their favourites to be scrapped over like some minging slice of offal by two ravenous dogs.

It’s easy, too easy, to tar erstwhile owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett as the most obvious desperados. The no-thanks Yanks have seized flimsy legal straws in downtown Dallas to stymie a potential sale which has been sanctioned not once but twice by England’s own High Court.

Another flawed player in this sheer drama of tawdriness is former Liverpool owner David Moores, who made an absolute mint in delivering the Anfield club into the clutches of specialists who amass yet more riches by loading acquisitions with debts.

Moores, whose family had long been trusted guardians of the club has since said he was sorry for what developed. He was trailed no doubt by crocodile tears leading all the way to the bank.

If potential buyers of a football club have to undergo due diligence of a club’s assets, why are not those self-same would-be investors also given a thorough examination of their so-called financial muscle?

If such a reciprocal policy was carried out surely it would corral football away from the grasping avarice and dollared-eyes of carpet-baggers, chancers and loaders of untold millions of crippling debt.

And that’s where the FA, the domestic game’s rulers, and the Premier League come in as others culpable in the collapse of a well-respected institution into easy-pickings prey for shameless exploiters.

There is supposed to be a fit and proper person test applied to would-be owners of England’s elite clubs. Does that not take into account just what cash resources wannabe owners have at their disposal?

Not one ordinary fan of any professional football club can go to a bank or building society and get a mortgage without having the correct deposit, besides also having the adequate means to pay the rest of the loan’s term.

But the sale of close on half of the Premier League to foreign investment has been allowed amid an atmosphere of anything goes. If they are American, Middle Eastern or from the Far East then they must have the resources under-pinning a laissez-faire attitude.

Even if the Liverpool sale goes through, what are the fans getting instead? That’s a fear that stalks all clubs under foreign ownership from Manchester United to Portsmouth.

So why has the FA and the Premier League not seen fit to see off those vultures who come armed with loans alone to saddle their chosen victim with untold debt?

The silence from both organisations is as embarrassing as it is deafening.