Mad for it: From Blackpool to Barcelona: Football’s Greatest Rivalries

United fans: ‘Gary Neville is a red, he hates Scousers.’

Liverpool: ‘USA! USA!’

United: ‘Michael Shields gets bummed by queers.’ (Referencing Liverpool fan Shields, who was jailed in Bulgaria for an attack on a waiter before Liverpool’s 2005 European Cup victory, a charge which he denies.)

Liverpool: ‘Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, you’ll never walk alone.’

United: ‘Sign on, sign on, with hope in your heart, you’ll never get a job.’

Liverpool: ‘We won it five times in Istanbul, we won it five times.’ (Liverpool fans hold up placards bearing the number five.)

United: ‘Steve Gerrard, Gerrard, he kisses the badge on his chest…then puts in a transfer request, Steve Gerrard, Gerrard.’

Liverpool: ‘All around the fields of Anfield Road, where once we saw the king Kenny play – and could he play. Stevie Heighway on the wing, we have tales and songs to sing, now its glory around the fields of Anfield Road.’

United: ‘Murderers, murderers.’

Liverpool: ‘Shit on the Cockneys, shit on the Cockneys tonight.’ (A surprising reference to United’s perceived out of town support – United are usually loathed by Scousers precisely because they are Mancunian).

United: ‘If you all hate Scousers clap your hands.’ (More people join in this than any other chant.)

Liverpool: ‘We all hate Mancs and Mancs and Mancs.’

United: ‘Park, Park wherever you may be, you eat dog in your own country. But it could be worse, you could be Scouse, eating rat in your council house.’

Liverpool: ‘Once a blue, always a Manc.’ (For Wayne Rooney)

United: ‘Once a blue, always a Red.’ (For Rooney)

Liverpool: ‘You fat bastard.’ (To Rooney – a Scouser who has contributed financially to the ‘Free Michael Shields’ campaign).

United: ‘City of culture, you’re having a laugh.’

Liverpool: ‘Oh Manchester, is full of shit…’

United: ‘Does the social know you’re here?’

Like all the greatest rivalries, it’s the common ground that divides the most. Manchester United and Liverpool both hail from largely working-class, immigrant cities with huge Irish populations. Just thirty-five miles apart in England’s North West, both were economic powerhouses that enjoyed a friend/foe relationship by the 19th century. Liverpool considered itself the greatest port in the world, gateway to North America for millions, and a key trading post for the Empire. Manchester was ‘Cottonopolis’, the first city of the industrial revolution – hence the phrase ‘Manchester made and Liverpool trade’.

SIX CLASSIC GAMES

Liverpool 2 United 1

Milk Cup Final, 1983

An Alan Kennedy equaliser ten minutes from time cancelled out Norman Whiteside’s twelfth minute opener and extra-time followed. With 100 minutes played, Ronnie Whelan curled a shot around the United defence to score the winner and seal Liverpool’s third consecutive League Cup.

Civic co-operation in anticipation of greater wealth ensured that the world’s first passenger railway was opened between the cities in 1830, but by late 1878, the year Manchester United were formed as Newton Heath, a worldwide trade depression left Manchester grappling with economic stagnation and labour migration. Liverpool was blamed for charging excessively high rates for importing the raw cotton spun in Lancastrian mills and Manchester’s solution was to give the city direct access to the sea to export its manufactured goods, thus cutting out the middle man of Liverpool.

A canal big enough to carry ships was proposed, which infuriated Liverpudlians. They tried to ridicule the plans out of existence and Liverpool-based backlash against the ship canal ranged from music hall songs and pantomime references to reasoned economic argument. None of it prevented the Manchester Ship Canal being built and the city became Britain’s third busiest port, despite being forty miles inland. This is why the United crest has a ship on it. But this was only a temporary respite for Manchester.

With the end of the British colonies and the introduction of container ships, Liverpool’s port became less viable, while the disintegration of the textile industry hit Manchester and both cities suffered generations of economic decline and depopulation. Extreme deindustrialisation and suburbanisation was coupled with growing unemployment and poverty among the proletariat. The nadir was marked in 1981 by violent riots in Manchester’s Moss Side and Liverpool’s Toxteth districts.

Yet when it came to football and music, both cities punched well above their respective demographic weights, making them special to millions around the globe, but also reinforcing and extending the rivalry.

On the pitch, enmities were not clear cut. Manchester City were the bigger Mancunian club until World War Two, while Everton were often the pre-eminent Merseyside force. Indeed, the rivalry between United and Liverpool was respectful until the 1960s with some Manchester United players even going to watch Liverpool when United didn’t have a game.

‘We’d stand on the Kop,’ recalls Pat Crerand, a former hard-tackling United midfielder turned pundit. ‘The Scousers would have a word with us, but it was good humoured.’ Bill Shankly used to call Crerand at home every Sunday morning for a friendly football chat. Shankly and the United manager Matt Busby, who both hailed from Lanarkshire mining stock in Scotland, were also close and Busby had played for Liverpool.

‘I always had great respect for Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly,’ adds Crerand (though that didn’t stop him, in his early-’70s role as United’s assistant manager, from snaring Lou Macari in the Anfield main stand just as he was about to sign for Liverpool). ‘When I go to Anfield now, I speak to long-standing Liverpool fans who can’t put up with what the rivalry has become, with the hooliganism and the nastiness between the fans. Liverpool and Manchester are both working-class cities that have produced two of the greatest football clubs in the world. People should be proud of that, but they’re not.’

United had the hegemony in the 1960s – twice league champions and the first English team to win the European Cup. Not since that decade has a player left United for Liverpool or vice-versa (Phil Chisnall was the last, in April 1964). Liverpool were far superior to United in the 1970s and ’80s, winning four European Cups and eleven league titles as United endured twenty-six title-free years, but United were usually the better supported club and matched Liverpool in head-to-head encounters. And even as Liverpool had the success, United enjoyed a reputation and allure which rankled Liverpool supporters who thought it undeserved.

By the 1980s, the rivalry had become vicious, with United’s Scouse manager Ron Atkinson describing a trip to Anfield as like going into Vietnam. Big Ron’s experience fighting the Viet Cong has not been fully substantiated, but he can be forgiven for exaggerating – he had just been tear gassed.

‘We got off the coach and all of a sudden something hit us and everyone’s eyes went,’ Atkinson recalls. ‘I thought it was fumes off new paint or something, but it was tear gas. In our dressing room before the game there were a lot of fans, Liverpool fans too, kids, all sorts, eyes streaming. Clayton Blackmore was so bad he wasn’t able to play. I was in an awful state. I’d run in and there’d been two blokes standing in front of the dressing room door and I couldn’t see who they were. I was blinded and I’d pushed one of them up against the wall. Afterwards, [assistant manager] Mick Brown said, “What you done to Johnny Sivebaek?” I said, “What are you on about?” It turned out that Sivebaek, who we’d signed the week before, didn’t speak much English and in his first game, against the European champions, he was gassed as he got off the coach and then got hurled against the wall by his new team manager. No wonder he didn’t perform that day!’

Liverpool fans frequently sang songs about the 1958 Munich air crash, but stopped for a time after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. United fans barely sang about Hillsborough until a minority changed that in recent years. Yet for every United fan who stoops so low, you’ll find one who respects the continued boycott of The Sun on Merseyside and the continuing campaign for justice for the ninety-six who perished.

SIX CLASSIC GAMES

Liverpool 3 United 3

League, April 1988

First v Second, but Liverpool’s substantial lead made them clear title favourites. Reduced to ten men and trailing 3–1 with thirty minutes left, United were on the ropes until goals from Bryan Robson and Gordon Stra-chan levelled the scores. The latter celebrated by smoking an imaginary cigar in front of an outraged Kop.

For United fans, no matter how dangerous the trip to Anfield became, it remained one of the most eagerly-awaited of the season because it contained all the edge, passion, and vitriol that you’d expect from a long-standing cultural and social enmity between two teams whose cultural influence extends far beyond their city boundaries.

In the 1990s, Liverpool’s demise coincided with United’s ascendancy under Alex Ferguson. Asked to list his greatest achievement at United, Fergie once replied: ‘Knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch. And you can print that.’ That wasn’t quite how Scousers intended it to be when they unleashed their ‘Form is temporary, class is permanent’ banner in 1992 as United squandered a league title at Anfield.

In contrast to the hooligan-blighted ’70s and ’80s when Liverpool were on top, the Sky-led football boom allowed United to capitalise on their success and the Mancunians accelerated into a different financial league by regularly expanding Old Trafford; meanwhile Liverpool were hampered by Anfield’s limited capacity. United were so commercially successful that many fans objected to the 2005 Glazer takeover principally on the grounds that they were not needed, while Liverpool fans welcomed their new American owners in 2007 because they are.

Both clubs fill their grounds but Old Trafford has over 30,000 more seats than Anfield, allowing United to make more than £1.4 million per home match than Liverpool. Liverpool only have to look east for the justification for building a new stadium.

It’s three hours before kick-off at Anfield and I’m sitting in a pub full of Liverpool fans in Liverpool city centre. Among them is the novelist Kevin Sampson, author of seminal tomes like Away Days and Powder. Reading Powder and knowing that Sampson was a Liverpool fan, I interviewed him for the United We Stand fanzine in 1999.

I met him at Lime Street and it went well – it remains the most popular interview in the fanzine’s eighteen-year history, although we received three letters from readers appalled about ‘fraternising with the enemy’. Our conversation should have been over a lunchtime pint, but extended to an overnight stay as Sampson introduced me as a curiosity figure to assorted Liverpool characters who claimed they’d never met a Mancunian United fan before.

Some 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 along the edge of the stadium’s perimeter fence.

As the queue bottlenecks towards the pitifully inadequate number of open ticket booths, the crowd surges forward en masse, forcing dozens of armed police into action with their shields. As the jubilant River fans emerge from the scrum, one by one they kiss their tickets before holding them aloft like trophies and exchanging high fives and celebratory hugs with others. It’s as though they’ve already won the match in question, even though it’s still two days away and it’s not being played here but at on the other side of town at La Bombonera (‘the Chocolate Box’), home of River’s bitter rivals Boca Juniors. But this, you see, is no ordinary match. This is El Superclassico (‘the super derby’) and River’s allocation of 11,000 tickets will be snapped up in next to no time.

So big is El Superclassico that to the media this week’s anti-capitalist demonstrations in Buenos Aires, sparked by an impending free-trade convention in the city, is a mere side show in comparison to the main event. Television chat shows and radio phone-ins are dominated by Boca-River this week and for the next few days, Argentina’s top sports newspaper Olé will dedicate ten pages of editorial to the clash each day. Also, on every wall around the city is a poster published by Argentina’s weekly football magazine El Graphico bearing the red and white shirt of River, the yellow and blue shirt of Boca, and the words Se Viene – ‘It’s Coming.’

Argentina’s two biggest and most successful clubs have met 166 times before this week – Boca winning sixty-one, River fifty-five – and have been fierce rivals since 1923 when River moved from La Boca, a cosmopolitan, working-class neighbourhood where both teams then resided. Since 1944, River have played in Nuñez, also known as Barrio River (‘Neighbourhood River’), a middle-class neighbourhood some ten kilometres north west of La Boca, up the River Plate from which the club takes its name. They have since been dubbed the middle-class team.

Although most people will tell you this class divide no longer applies, the rivalry remains just as intense. For example, River’s kit manufacturers are sportswear giants Adidas, with their biggest rivals Nike doing the honours for Boca, so you’ll rarely see River fans wearing Nike gear, nor Boca fans donning the Adidas logo. As for wearing the colours of your rival team, well that’s totally out of the question. The only apparent contradiction in the rivalry is the fact that both teams are sponsored by Quilmes, Argentina’s most popular beer.

So deep do emotions run between these two that we’ve barely stepped off the plane when my translator Pablo, an ardent River fan, greets us with some words of warning: ‘Get ready for a war.’ Sadly, ‘war’ is an all too accurate description of some of the scenes that have marred Boca–River fixtures in the past. In June 1968, seventy-four fans were killed at El Monumental when Boca supporters caused panic by throwing burning paper onto the home fans beneath them. More recently, in 1994, a busload of River fans was ambushed several miles away from the ground, resulting in two of them being shot dead. River had won the game 2–0 and for days afterwards graffiti appeared around Buenos Aires reading ‘River 2 Boca 2.’

These crimes of passion are committed by the Barra Bravas (‘tough gangs’), Argentina’s notorious hooligan groups. River’s Barras, Los Borrachos del Tablón (‘The Drunks from the Board,’ a name derived from the days when the terraces were wooden planks on which the fans bounced up and down), have succeeded the Boca hooligans, La Doce (‘The Twelve’, so called because the fans believe they are the team’s 12th player), as Argentina’s most feared gang.

For both sets of Barras, El Superclassico is the season’s most important game. ‘On balance, most fans would rather beat La Boca than win the championship,’ says Matias, a 24-year-old River Barra, motorcycle courier, and trainee lawyer, who was brought up in Palermo, a middle-class neighbourhood not far from El Monumental. ‘It is more important to beat Boca on their own turf,’ he explains. And this week, they’ll get the chance.

Down at La Bombonera in the newly opened Boca Juniors museum I ask an assistant whether Boca fans share the same sentiments when it comes to beating River. ‘Are you kidding?’ he replies. ‘There was a party round here when River lost on Wednesday [in the Copa de Libertores to Uruguayan side The Strongest]. I’d rather Boca beat River and ruin their chances of winning the championship than Boca lose to River and win the championship ourselves.’ With River five points clear at the top of the table and Boca loitering near the bottom, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

As the fans gear themselves up for what is their cup final the players are trying to keep some sense of perspective. The River players, in particular, are doing their level best not to get caught up in the hysteria. ‘I know this game means a lot to both the fans and the players,’ says River’s diminutive playmaker Ariel Ortega, known as El Burrito (‘the Little Donkey, because he hails from Ledesma in the north of Argentina where there are no horses, only donkeys). ‘But I want to make it clear that I would never trade a championship for a single victory against Boca.’