didn’t want to socialise; they didn’t want to like what they had spent a lifetime loathing. They were content with the status quo that Liverpool and United despised each other and wouldn’t have it any other way: happy to reinforce stereotypes, exaggerate prejudices, and ignore the evidence that the two clubs are almost too alike to admit it. United fans were the same, perpetuating the clichés of Scousers as employment-shy thieves and passing over the statistic that you are almost twice as likely to get your house burgled in Manchester (which has burglary rates three times the national average) than Liverpool.
It’s the same in the pub today but there are signs of grudging respect.
‘Is there anything you respect about Manchester United?’ I ask a table of hardcore Liverpool fans.
SIX CLASSIC GAMES
Liverpool 3 United 3
League, January 1994
After winning the league for the first time in twenty-six years, United went to Anfield and were 3–0 up in twenty-four minutes. But Liverpool refused to be humbled and Nigel Clough pulled two goals back before half-time. United searched for another goal, but Neil Ruddock equalised with eleven minutes left. A classic.
‘Paul Scholes’, comes one reply.
‘Ryan Giggs’, another.
‘I don’t like Gary Neville, but I respect the way he signs contract after contract at United. We’d love a player who celebrated a goal so passionately against his main rivals.’
‘Why are United fans obsessed with Liverpool?’ asks another. ‘All your songs are about Liverpool. Ours are too, but we support Liverpool.’
One thing we do all agree on is a decline in the atmosphere inside both grounds. Sampson is now behind a campaign to ‘Reclaim the Kop’. In October 2006, he wrote an impassioned plea on a Liverpool website regarding his club’s support. It came after Liverpool had played Bordeaux, when sections of the Anfield crowd taunted 3,000 Frenchmen with chants of ‘Who are ya?’, ‘Eas-eh’ and ‘You’re not singing anymore’.
‘Seasoned heads were shook,’ reads the website. ‘It was embarrassing. These fans had welcomed travelling Reds for our away game, and here, at Anfield, we were ridiculing them. This is NOT the Liverpool Way. We led from the front. We never followed. Be it pop music, terrace chanting, fashions; we were pioneers in the British game. The “Reclaim the Kop” aims are to promote The Kop’s traditional values, its behaviour, and its songs. It aims to encourage fair play and respect towards the opposition; to promote The Kop’s traditional songs and chants; to encourage wit and creativity; and it aims to rebuild the camaraderie and individuality of football’s greatest terrace.’
‘Our support needs sorting out before the quilts [the antithesis of the streetwise fan] have watered us down to nothing,’ added Sampson.
It would be easy to attempt to score cheap points at the very idea of organised spontaneity, but United fans have gone through exactly the same. Despite great success on the pitch, the atmosphere inside an increasingly commercialised Old Trafford withered throughout the 1990s. The ‘singing section’ in Old Trafford’s Stretford End is contrived, but it was needed to kick-start a lame atmosphere which still pales alongside past decades.
Like Liverpool fans, long-standing United fans cringe at elements of the club’s glory-hunting support. There is tension and in-fighting within both fan bases – hardly surprising given that they are so big. Like Liverpool fans, United fans hate the way opposing clubs bump up the price of tickets for away fans – a rich club doesn’t mean rich fans. Both sets of fans are regular visitors to Europe and have similar tales of police brutality. Many on both sides are indifferent to the fortunes of the England national team, preferring pride in their own city and team. The laddish fan elements dress in a similar way, listen to the same music, and note the same cultural influences. When news filtered through recently that the Salfordian ‘Mr Madchester’ Anthony H Wilson had cancer, there was as much respect on Liverpool websites as on any United one – despite Wilson once presenting Granada’s regional news wearing an FC Bruges rosette on the eve of Liverpool’s 1978 European Cup Final against the Belgians.
Both fans talk with pride about the renaissance brought by new developments in their cities after decades of decline. Yet for all the similarities, there are stark differences between Liverpool and Manchester.
‘Liverpool has a very small middle class,’ explains one Anfield season-ticket holder who lives in Manchester. ‘As soon as people get money they leave, moving to the north of the city or to the Wirral. Or else they move to Manchester or London to further their professional ambitions.’
SIX CLASSIC GAMES
United 2 Liverpool 1
FA Cup, 1999
The treble seemed a long way off as Liverpool led an off-the-boil United with barely a minute to go. Then Dwight Yorke equalised and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the winner in injury-time. In an uncanny rehearsal of what would follow in Barcelona, a gleeful Stretford End demanded to know: ‘Who put the ball in the Scousers’ net?’
Several Liverpool and Everton players live in Manchester’s suburbs and regularly shop and socialise in the city, no United players live near Merseyside. You don’t see neon signs offering ‘quality perms’ in Manchester.
Liverpudlians seem more maudlin, with the popularity of the deceased measured by the number of tributes taken out in the bulging obituary column of the Liverpool Echo. Mancunians are more inclined to adopt a harder exterior – and not just to the thousands of Scousers who flood the incongruous Trafford Centre, Manchester’s superior concert venues (the Liverpool team booked their Take That tickets for the Manchester Evening News Arena on the day they came out) or Manchester Airport, now that Scousers look beyond North Wales for their holidays.
Three days after the game at Anfield I received a text from the Liverpool fan who sorted me with a ticket for the Kop.
‘The lad next to you knew who you were,’ he writes. ‘He couldn’t think where he had seen you but he clicked after the game. He’d seen you covering the Wrexham vs Chester game for FourFourTwo last year and knew you were a Manc. He told the others after you had gone.’
It wasn’t just Manchester United who got lucky.
‘Get Ready for a War’ River Plate v Boca Juniors, April 2001
They know each other as ‘the chickens’ and ‘the shits’. Seventy-nine arrests is considered a quiet day at the office. River Plate v Boca Juniors is more than just another game…
Autumn in Argentina and it’s warm and sunny without being uncomfortably hot, but in Buenos Aires the mercury is beginning to rise. It’s midday and around 2,000 fans are gathered outside El Monumental (‘the Monument’), the 70,000 capacity home of reigning Argentine champions River Plate, and the stadium which witnessed Argentina lifting the World Cup in 1978 beneath a shower of ticker tape and toilet roll. Suited and booted middle-aged men, briefcases in hand, stand toe to toe with the young, replica shirt-wearing riffraff, a stark contrast in their scuffed trainers and ripped jeans as they queue
