When Alexis Mac Allister struck the goal that made Liverpool’s title feel that bit more secure, the noise that followed prompted principal owner John W. Henry to adjust his hearing aid.
Yes, this isn’t baseball, John. This is football and this is Liverpool, where Henry and an entire generation of Liverpool supporters were experiencing something for the first time. It felt like the roof on the new Anfield Road stand was about to fly off. The boom at the other end seemed to rumble from the bowels of the Kop.
All day long in the city there was a sense that the place was going to go up, and at the moment of reckoning the detonation was even louder.
The central figure in this scene was the referee, Tom Bramall. For four minutes of stoppage time, the focus of the crowd fell on him. With a blow of his whistle, all sorts of words applied: pandemonium, euphoria, mania. Scouse men, old enough to have been around when this club became relevant under Bill Shankly, were hugging one another. “Finally,” one said, though he did not seem to be talking about this game, but a much longer story.
It is easy to frown at such language and descriptions. After all, Liverpool emerged as champions elect some time ago. All they needed to do was get a point against opposition that had not won at this venue in 14 years. Their football now is methodical rather than thrilling, not the type to stimulate enthusiasm among neutrals — if they exist.None of that matters to Liverpudlians who, it is fair to say, do not really care for the impressions of others anyway. This team has created its own mini-jeopardies along the way, adding to the suspense, and that included Spurs taking the lead via a former Liverpool player in Dominic Solanke. Yet inside 22 minutes of that goal, Liverpool were 3-1 up. And that was very much that.
It was tempting to look at the pitch during the celebrations, examining the reactions of the players. But the real stuff was in the stands. And by that, I don’t mean Henry and Mike Gordon, the man previously tasked with the running of Liverpool, high-fiving one another, or Richard Hughes, the sporting director less than a year into the job, earnestly shaking the hand of anyone congratulating him.
Nearby, the legendary defender Alan Hansen, having recovered from a health scare a year ago, was raising his fists. Hansen was the last Liverpool captain to lift the title in front of fans at Anfield. The tale after that achievement is well-told. Here are your medals. A few beers shared by the players. Enjoy the summer. See you in a few weeks’ time for pre-season training. We’ll be doing this again.
Except that did not happen. And even when it did, nobody was around to really share it. It explains why this meant everything.
To understand the scenes inside Anfield, you have to take a walk through the city and you have to wind back in time, stopping first at 2020. You have to stand at the Pier Head, overlooking the River Mersey, and remember the strangeness of the 24 hours after Liverpool secured their first title in 30 years.
(Drew Jordan / The Athletic)
On the night that happened, crowds descended onto the streets around the stadium despite restrictions on mass gatherings owing to the spread of Covid-19. Dusk was settling and, within an hour, it was difficult to tell how many were there. Amid a whiff of cordite and the light of flares, shadows were everywhere. Everybody seemed faceless. There was energy and joy but the mood was thick with desperation and laced with danger.
It was a carnal reaction, but it felt synthetic and, in pursuit of the real, the party trudged on. There was no official organiser for the Pier Head, but everyone seemed to know where to go. Local match-goers hung around chatting, reaching into plastic bags for warming bottles of beer. Songs went up and, eventually, a teenager from Southport attempted to change the pace by directing a couple of fireworks at offices owned by rivals, Everton. His mates cheered. Not many others did. After thousands of pounds worth of damage to the Royal Liver Building, an arson conviction followed. Liverpool had won the league but the response, in very unusual circumstances, felt a bit tryhard.
On a glorious Sunday morning nearly five years later, with Liverpool hours away from becoming champions again, it is easier to draw distinctions from the same, albeit quieter, setting about what the achievement means for club and place. Much can be gleaned from the Pier Head because of its connection to brown, scudding waters and the riches the river brought through shipping and trades as grim as slavery, which helped finance the resplendence of the civic structures marking its frontage.
The spread of wealth in Liverpool, however, was spectacularly uneven. By the 1840s, as its port grew to become the second largest in the British empire behind London, life expectancy on the shores of the Mersey fell to just below 26. Seventy-five per cent of young men who volunteered for military service were turned away for being unfit and many headed for the docks, where the work was casual. Unlike in the manufacturing towns of England’s north west, where shifts were brutal but income was steady, dockers from Liverpool would assemble at the gates of the shipyards twice a day not knowing whether they were going to be allowed in and ultimately get paid. On top of that, clocking-on times were determined by the unpredictable tides of the Mersey. Liverpool’s geography therefore contributed as much towards a less structured way of life as an overriding employment culture without contracts or certainty.
Its geography also accounted for enormous challenges after the heavy bombing of the Second World War, including the rise of containerisation, because the Mersey simply wasn’t big enough to accommodate ships increasing in size. By the end of the 1970s, Liverpool’s social and economic struggle was visible inside the stadiums of Liverpool and Everton, where attendances slumped despite a period of unprecedented success on the pitch for both clubs. In 12 of the 15 seasons between 1975 and 1990, the old First Division title was won by a team from Merseyside. Football offered salvation, but sites such as the disused Albert Dock, crumbling beside the Pier Head, became a symbol of decay.
In 1981, prime minister Margaret Thatcher had received a memo from her chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, which proposed the abandonment of Liverpool through a process called “managed decline”. With Conservative popularity in the city collapsing as fast as living standards, her many critics in Liverpool believe that Howe’s recommendation was carried out. By the time Liverpool’s dominance of English football ended in 1990, you only needed to look around for proof.
That achievement came 12 months after Hillsborough, where 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death. Though authorities in South Yorkshire and centrally were to blame for the disaster, some of the deceased were still fighting for their lives when those responsible started shifting the focus away from their own failings, buttressed by support from craven sections of the media.
The subsequent fight for justice ran parallel with the story of the city’s football clubs trying to get back on track. In 2020, Liverpool’s younger supporters were close to experiencing something for the first time in their lives when events way beyond anyone’s control altered what felt right. It’s strange how moments you have rehearsed in your mind for so long end up with a very different script.
It was once claimed that the steel birds sitting on top of the Liver Building would fly away if Liverpool won the FA Cup but after that happened in 1965 for the first time, they remained and the team marked the achievement with a civic reception on the balcony of the town hall.
There were huge crowds in all directions, choking Water Street, Dale Street and Castle Street. You would have thought that such a scene would be regarded as one of the most famous in Liverpool’s history. Perhaps that would have been the case had it not been for a reaction to a loss to Arsenal in the final of the same competition six years later.
On this occasion, when the squad returned from London, they assembled on the steps of St George’s Hall, a mile or so inland from the Pier Head. Shankly turned to the 100,000 people in front of him, telling them that he’d “drummed it into our players, time and again, that they are privileged to play for you. And if they didn’t believe me, they believe me now.”
Secretary Peter Robinson concluded the Liverpool manager’s power was total; that if he told supporters to “storm through the Mersey tunnel and seize Birkenhead, they’d have done it”. Yet the imagery from that day had a more profound effect because the fortunes of the club Shankly and Robinson guided was connected to somewhere other than Anfield.In defeat, the matrimony between manager, club and city had never been more visible. Shankly could say anything and his followers would believe it. You can imagine, then, the effect of his belief that the league title was the club’s “bread and butter — that’s what we want to win, all the time”.
Except for 30 years, Liverpool did not get there. Maybe that explains why, even with a 12-point lead at the top of the table and needing only one more, there remained some sense of caution in the city on Sunday morning. The “Liverpool Champions 2024-25” season t-shirts being flogged on the steps of St George’s were not exactly flying out. Liverpool had a slightly occupied feel to it. Everyone knew something was happening but until you got closer to the ground, it wasn’t clear exactly what that was.
The quickest route from the centre of the city to Anfield takes you via Scotland Road and through Everton, a district that defined the foundations of both of the city’s football clubs, as well as preconceptions nationally about Liverpool as a place. Everton has had several identities, but crucially in 1878, when the club that takes its name was founded, it was a desirable suburb for wealthy merchants who built mansions on the hillside and enjoyed the views. It was therefore more practical to build a stadium in the neighbouring borough of Anfield, but after a rent dispute 14 years later, Liverpool FC came along, pushing Everton further away from its roots and into Walton.More development introduced a mass of terraced housing for working-class Catholic and Protestant communities and Everton became one of the biggest hubs of Irish immigration outside of Ireland. The influx contributed greatly to the way Liverpool feels about itself and how the rest of Britain tends to feel about Liverpool. A sense of otherness is at play on both sides. Some Liverpudlians do not think very highly of the rest of England and that augments the desire for its football team to prove itself as the best in the country.
From St Domingo Road, you can’t see Anfield, but on this day you knew exactly where it was because of the red cloud hanging over it. Ninety minutes before kick off, Liverpool’s squad had arrived.
Closer more, in pubs like the Mere, the Grove and the Salisbury, it was impossible to avoid the chants of “We’re gonna win the league…” They were not quite saying they were champions yet. It was still too early. But a few hours later, it wasn’t.
Liverpool were champions. Liverpool are champions. In the traditions of the past, it is now their job to keep it that way.
(Top photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
