Sir Martin Broughton has lifted the lid on Rafael Benitez’s Liverpool departure.
Benitez left the Reds by mutual consent in summer 2010 amid as Anfield endured financial turmoil under erstwhile owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
The Spaniard, currently at Newcastle United, expressed his sadness at leaving Anfield following a six-year spell in which he had won the Champions League.
But Broughton, who was appointed chairman to oversee Liverpool’s eventual sale, insists that he had no personal intentions of sacking Benitez.
“I think he’d probably already decided he’d had enough before I got there,” he told the Liverpool Echo.
“The atmosphere was pretty awful, and I think he’d seen the opportunity to maybe get out with a new person coming in.
“I didn’t want to get distracted by all of this. And it was very interesting that the fan input to me personally, a bit face to face but usually via e-mail, was about 50-50.
“There was no moderate – it was totally polarised. It was [from] ‘do not get rid of Rafa’ to ‘this club will never go forward unless Rafa goes’.
“It was about 50-50, but they were total polar opposites. My idea was still that he would stay.
“Rafa basically pulled out of the whole thing and said ‘I’m going to leave this to my lawyers to negotiate’.
“He didn’t say he was leaving, and I never told him he was leaving. It was ‘I’ll leave this to my lawyer’ and his lawyer’s stance was ‘what are the terms for Rafa going?’”
Roy Hodgson succeeded Benitez as Liverpool manager that summer, just three months before the club was sold to current custodians Fenway Sports Group.
Broughton however revealed that the former Real Madrid boss could have conceivably stayed on and worked under the erstwhile incoming Americans.
He added: “I don’t think I saw [Benitez leaving] as making the process easier.
“I found having to deal with the exit of the manager a distraction, and getting in the way of what I was trying to do. I would have preferred he stayed.
“Did it have the impact of having one less problem to deal with? Yes.
“But had he stayed and not been a problem, that would have been better still!”