What would Shanks have said? That was the question older Liverpool fans must have been asking themselves yesterday as the club passed into American ownership. The simple truth is that the manager who made the club great would have been horrified and utterly unable to comprehend how such a state of affairs had come about.

Bill Shankly loathed foreigners and, indeed, the whole concept of “abroad” in a way that modern thinking would recognise as deeply xenophobic. Nothing illustrated his distrust of life away from these shores more than the club’s end-of-season tour of North America in 1964.

Trips to the United States were fairly regular events for Liverpool even in those less cosmopolitan times. When they won the championship at the end of the longest League season in history, in 1946-47, many pundits put it down to the liberal quantities of steak and orange juice they had consumed in rationing-free America the previous summer.

The tour of 1964, however, was a different matter, thanks to the exploits of four Liverpool lads with no interest in the beautiful game — the Beatles.

When the Liverpool party left Manchester Airport for Montreal for a five-week trip on May 16 it was just three months after the Fab Four had taken the country by storm on their first visit and curiosity about all things Scouse was running at remarkable levels.

Not that Shankly was impressed. When the newly crowned League champions arrived in New York for their prestige appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Shankly was missing from the publicity photographs. He simply could not adjust to a long period away from home. Throughout the trip he refused to change his watch to American time. “No Yank is going to tell me what the time is,” he spat back at Bob Paisley, his assistant, as he prepared to go to bed at 9.30 in the evening yet again.

Shankly had a lifelong love affair with the gangsters of America’s prohibition years, but most aspects of American culture baffled him. “He could not understand a country in which nobody had heard of Tom Finney,” a journalist assigned to the trip said.

American owners, a Spanish manager, an all-seat Kop, players from all corners of the globe — modern football would have baffled Shankly.