David Connon Liverpool's American owners and the surreal protest they have provoked

A couple of years into the Premier League's brave new billionaire owners adventure and we have now seen the most surreal protest movement ever: Liverpool fans so rooted in tradition that their rallying call is Reclaim The Kop, chanting for their club to be taken over by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, dynastic ruler of Dubai.

Yet while the Anfield mood was summarised gruffly by some on the great former terrace this week as, "Get the Yanks out, get the Arabs in," Liverpool's current owners and their proposed bankers are adamant they are not departing the gold rush just yet.

Sources close to the refinancing Tom Hicks and George Gillett have been negotiating with Royal Bank of Scotland and the US bank Wachovia insisted yesterday that the £350-million loan remains on track and they expect to complete it by the end of this week. Similar deadlines have been cited and missed before but Hicks has persistently said, despite the fan protests and re-emergence of Dubai International Capital as a potential buyer, that he has no intention of selling the club.

The figures, from Liverpool's present and future earnings, are said to have been inspected and, from the banks' point of view, show that Liverpool will be good for repayment of the hefty interest on that new loan.

Liverpool fans should perhaps have been a little more questioning 11 months ago when Hicks and Gillett gazumped DIC to buy the prize club, then talked seductively about upholding Liverpool's "cherished traditions" and "enhancing its reputation". There was remarkably little Scouse scepticism then about the men wearing scarves; the pair were presented as billionaires who would take Liverpool into their new stadium, girdled by all the banqueting required to finance competing with Manchester United, Arsenal and Roman Abramovich.

The fact that Hicks and Gillett had not spent one cent of their own money buying the club, but had borrowed fully £298 million to do so, was there in the black and white of their official offer document, but few pointed it out as the men were embraced.

The document itemised how the loan was split: £174.1 million to buy the club itself, at £5,000 per share - top dollar - which meant David Moores, for selling his 51.5 per cent shareholding, was paid almost £90 million. A further £11 million was borrowed to pay banks and other advisers their fees. The loan also absorbed Liverpool's own debt, then £44.8 million. The rest, £70 million, was borrowed to keep the stadium project alive and "provide working capital".

That means money for the club to spend, so last summer, when Hicks and Gillett were again praised for "putting their hands in their pockets" to back Rafael Benitez with £26.5 million to buy Fernando Torres and £11.5 million for Ryan Babel, that was, in fact, also borrowed money. Interest was payable at 1.5 per cent above banks' standard rate, which has been over 5 per cent, and the £185 million to buy the club and pay the fees is formally repayable by February 5th, a week on Tuesday.

Hence the moves to replace the 12-month £298 million with a new loan, of up to £350 million, with interest and additional money for the stadium. Arguments began within Anfield about whether Hicks and Gillett were about to "do a Glazer" and load that debt, their own, on to the club itself. In their offer document, they said they had personally guaranteed the loan, and payment of the interest "will not depend to any significant extent on the business of Liverpool." But then, in an interview with Lawrence Donegan for the Guardian last May, Hicks said for the first time the pair would indeed use the profits made by the club itself - from the fans, essentially - to pay their interest.

"Hopefully the club will have extra cash flow so they can pay us a dividend to do that," Hicks said. "If they don't, then it will come from our pockets. But the club will have to have profits sufficient to pay those dividends."

As negotiations began with Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia, Gillett and Hicks are understood to have intended the full new £350-million loan, to fall on the club. The chief executive, Rick Parry, and Moores, the former majority shareholder, argued vehemently it should not.

Hicks and Gillett are understood to have agreed with that finally, and the proposed new deal will see the cost of buying the club and the fees, £185 million, secured on the holding company. Called Kop Investment, with a nod to the tradition Hicks has so lauded, the company is registered in the US State of Delaware and owns the great football club via another Kop company, registered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

The banks sent accountants in to inspect Liverpool's projected future earnings from tickets at 45,362-capacity Anfield, from the Premier League's bulging TV deal, which so attracted Hicks in the first place, Champions League revenue, sponsorship and merchandising - and the banks are understood to have been satisfied the club will make enough to service a £350-million loan. So despite the furore inflamed by Hicks's glaring admission that he and Gillett talked to Jürgen Klinsmann about the not-vacant manager's job, and DIC's interest in taking the club over, the banks and Hicks are maintaining that the refinancing will happen.

Gillett and Hicks are believed to have committed to putting in around £40 million cash between them - their first actual spending on buying Liverpool - and providing substantial personal guarantees to secure the lending. But the fact the £185 million will be secured on their Kop group does not mean the club itself will not pay the interest. It could still be required to pay a dividend out of its profits - as Manchester United are to the Glazers' holding company to service £525 million of debt taken on to buy the club.

Hicks is, as he has stressed, a businessman, and it has seemed inconceivable that he would willingly sell now to DIC without a huge profit, which the Sheikh's private equity investment corporation is not prepared to pay. If the refinancing does go through, Liverpool will walk on, to a further £400 million it will cost to build the dream new home on Stanley Park. A large proportion of that, possibly £300 million, will need to be borrowed, secured on naming rights, sponsorship, Emirates-style entertaining and keenly judged ticket-price increases, added to the £350 million already loaned. That all adds up to a lot of debt, to finance an ambitious future.

Everton, meanwhile, are planning their move to a new stadium in Kirkby part-financed by Tesco, a cut-price deal backed by a majority of fans but about which nobody seems overjoyed.

Liverpool City Council would like all this instability to open up renewed discussions about a shared stadium, for which the costs could be divided up, but in bloody-minded L4, that remains way out of the question.

Such are football's mad loyalties in the 21st century, with Liverpool fans calling on Dubai International Capital, about whose plans little is known, to buy their club, but unwilling to countenance sharing a ground with their grand old neighbours from across the park.