By R.W. Johnson
We are, once again, at the start of the English soccer season. To a degree which is in many ways surprising, this has become not just a national but an international ritual, because the English Premier League has a massive following around the globe. Indeed, it has become to soccer what Wimbledon is to tennis. This is surprising because England is hardly the top soccer nation – Brazil, Germany, France and Spain are normally better. But the Premier League has the largest international following by far.
One reason is that its sheer commercial success means that it attracts the top players of every country so that the overall standard of the soccer played is extremely high. The top teams feature a varied selection of international players, all of whom represent their countries. A second reason is that it is more competitive. Most leagues are dominated by just one or two top teams – Celtic and Rangers, Real Madrid and Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and so on. The Premier League has its Top Six – already a lot – but it also still has its surprises: Leicester winning the league in 2016, Nottingham Forest shooting up the table last year. And, crucially, the games are fair. Far too many leagues are plagued by corruption and match-fixing but no one doubts that English referees are straight, as are most of the club managers.
The English game is still strongly marked by its origins. As professional soccer first took root in the late 19th century, the first great bastion of the game were the Lancashire mill towns where the teams attracted a huge popular following. As the game evolved there was a natural tendency in most countries for the wealthiest cities to have the top clubs – they could afford the top players and managers and the best grounds and facilities. Hence the dominance today of the Milan teams in Italy, the Glasgow teams in Scotland, Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, PSG in Paris, and Ajax Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
This would suggest that London clubs should dominate the English league – and indeed, Arsenal, Chelsea and sometimes Spurs are near the top. But in terms of championships won they are still far surpassed by the Lancashire teams – Manchester City and Manchester United, Liverpool and Everton – despite the fact that Lancashire is one of the poorer parts of England. True, a number of great Lancashire teams have fallen on relatively hard times – Burnley, Preston, Bolton, Blackpool and Blackburn – but each still has its dedicated fans, its old historic ground and none of them have given up hope of retrieving their earlier glories. Indeed, Burnley are back in the Premier League this year and Blackburn actually won that league in 1995.
A view over Liverpool from the Anfield stadium, with the dockyards in the distance.
The current dominance of Liverpool – always an overwhelmingly working class city – is particularly gravity-defying, for it is a great port city whose port has pretty much died. The city’s population fell from 852,000 in 1937 to 494,000 in 2020. Even its whole surrounding region of Merseyside has a population of only 1.55 million. This contrasts poorly with Manchester, let alone London – Greater Manchester has a population of 2.7 million, and 6.55 million people live within 30 miles of its town hall.
I spent the first 13 years of my life on Merseyside, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. It was a tough environment, full of bombed buildings – it had had a hard war – large slum areas, and often miserable weather. Liverpool tried to attract new industries, but its rebellious working class culture meant that there were far too many stoppages and strikes. The people had two passions, soccer and rock music. Even today Liverpool musicians have had more Number One hits on world hit parades than any other city on the planet. Given that Liverpool is only the 12th biggest city in Britain, that’s a remarkable record.
My father was one of those rare men who are good at everything. Although strikingly able at science and engineering, he also had a voluminous knowledge of English literature, was a passionate devotee of Mozart and Beethoven – and was good at every sport. He had been a notably good tennis player, a scratch golfer and I couldn’t beat him at table tennis until he was over 70. At cricket he was a solid opening batsman and a demon fast bowler. He seldom played but whenever he did he skittled the opposition and was often the top scorer. But most of all he, a typical Lancastrian, had been outstanding at soccer, a traditional English centre forward.
He’d had a hard life. His mother had died when he was three and his father, a narrow, bigoted Orangeman, was a disciplinarian who beat him and his brother with an iron bar. Ultimately my father had run away from home and had to fend for himself in the midst of the Depression, doing whatever jobs he could. But he kept playing soccer. Apart from its league clubs, Lancashire also has a highly competitive Lancashire Combination League, and he played for a well-known club, Prescot Cables. Indeed, he led them to their championship in a 40-game season in which he scored 120 goals. Three goals a game – but he was quick to minimise the achievement. “Eleven of those were penalties, and you can’t really count them.” When I said, “They all count” he would look stern: “No footballer who’s any good will ever miss a penalty. Not ever.” He never did.
At any event, that was when Liverpool signed him. Like most new signings he played in the Reserves – then, as now, a very good team. But these were Depression times and soccer players were miserably paid. He was paid just 30 shillings a week and, lacking a home to fall back on, he simply couldn’t afford to continue and had to drop out after an initial season. As a boy I felt keenly how heart-breaking that must have been, but for him the Depression was a time of one hard choice after another, so he never complained.
Nonetheless, there was never any doubt that I would be a Liverpool supporter. In those days the team was bobbing around in the upper reaches of the Second Division, always hoping for promotion, but never quite making it. Then, soon after the family had moved to South Africa – Mobil Oil had made my father their Marine Superintendent for the Pacific/Indian Oceans in Durban – I heard that Liverpool had appointed someone called Bill Shankly as their manager.
A Shankley collage outside the Anfield stadium.
That meant nothing to me, but Shankly quickly changed everything. He got rid of most of the team, saying they weren’t fit enough, recruited some new faces, and infused a more aggressive, ambitious spirit. Before long Liverpool had been promoted to the First Division, and then won its championship. The key players that Shankly brought in were Ron Yeats, Ian St John and Roger Hunt, but Shankly was not a man to sit on his laurels. After Liverpool had won the championship a second time, he told a journalist that he faced “a sad task”. This was to dismantle his winning team before it started to go downhill, and bring on another one. And so he did.
Shankly used to boast that the city of Liverpool had two great teams, Liverpool and Liverpool Reserves, which regularly won the Central League. When the first team played away, his first words on returning to Anfield would be to ask how had the Reserves fared. Typically, they had won heavily but one day the answer was: lost 1-3. Shankly was beside himself and demanded that the Reserves captain see him in his office on Sunday morning. How could you possibly lose at home, he asked?
The poor young man explained that there had been a high wind and bright sunshine. It was obvious that the team that won the toss would choose to play against the wind with the sun in their eyes in the first half, and that was what their opponents did. The Reserves were 1-0 up at half-time, but as they tired in the second half the visitors scored three. But it could have been six, he said. It was just a freakish day. “As soon as I lost the toss, I knew I’d lost the game.” Shankly grimaced. “What did you call ?” he demanded. “Heads”, the captain replied. “You should have called tails!” Shankly roared.
Shankly is still revered at Liverpool – the supporters’ association is called The Spirit of Shankly. He made Liverpool the top team in England and Europe. He was a humble man who declined all honours and was an outspoken socialist, in harmony with Liverpool’s working class following. To his players he always insisted that the most important people were the fans, and he was as straight as a die. He simply cared passionately about the club and the team.
He and his wife lived throughout in an extremely modest little house a stone’s throw from the ground, for the club was his life. Indeed, he was fond of telling fans: “You needn’t just support Liverpool while you are alive. You can still do it when you’re dead.” And sure enough, there was a steady stream of widows coming to Anfield with their late husband’s ashes for burial under the hallowed turf. Shankly’s own ashes are there too.
The words of Liverpool’s famous anthem above the Shankly Gate.
Shankly was followed by his friend, Ron Paisley, an immensely shrewd man who had advised Shankly on strategy and tactics. Paisley won more cups and titles than anyone else – an unbeatable record. Like Shankly he had a sly sense of humour. On quitting he talked of how “The club has had its ups and downs. There were one or two years when we came second.”
The Hillsborough Memorial outside the Anfield stadium. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
After Paisley, the club was hit by the Heysel Stadium disaster in which 39 fans died in 1985, and then the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in which a further 97 Liverpool fans died. The singing of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” became a funeral dirge. Other less successful managers followed, although the club always remained competitive near the top of the league. But it was not until the arrival of Jürgen Klopp as manager that Liverpool regained the championship and its full fighting spirit, which seems to have been retained under the new manager, Arne Slot, who won the championship again – Liverpool’s 20th – in his first year.
Liverpool players with the Premier League cup after drawing against Crystal Palace at Anfield, 25 May 2025.
Many Liverpool fans have lived through these dramas as the great theme of their lives. There is a wondrous solidarity about them which has effortlessly surmounted the fact that once the team was full of local boys, but now such boys are a rarity. Of the 15 players and substitutes who made up the team for the first match of this season, only two were English and two each came from Italy, the Netherlands and Hungary. The remainder came from Brazil, Japan, France, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Argentina and Germany. Despite that, team members almost invariably say that they are happy in Liverpool, that they love the city, and that the club is like a family.
Part of the secret is that the club is extremely well run. At every level there is a smooth professionalism. Liverpool never exhibits the frenetic raggedness that has characterised Manchester United, with an endless parade of short-lived managers and players. United has had two great managers – Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson – but apart from that it’s been a circus, with a hugely wasteful expenditure on this merry-go-round of hopefuls who don’t come up to par.
A giant supporters’ flag is unfurled in the Anfield stadium.
Similarly, Tottenham Hotspur have performed way below their potential in large part because they are utterly dominated by an iron chairman, Daniel Levy, who has already been in that post for over 24 years. In that time Levy – who is by far the top paid chairman in the league – has got through 17 managers. Chelsea was long dominated by a Russian oligarch who was similarly impatient with what he regarded as failure, and is now run by Americans who have massively overspent on new players.
Football management isn’t easy, and there are many examples of it being done badly. Part of the problem is that there is now so much money in Premier League football that those who have laid out hundreds of millions of pounds expect not just success but instant success. This is not really possible. Teams are made up of extremely wealthy young men who are just beginning their lives, who can take their pick among attractive young women, get into all manner of marital adventures, buy super-fast cars and spend a good deal of time in night clubs. It takes time for them to mature, and not all do so. George Best, the supreme soccer talent of his generation, was asked in his retirement what had become of the many millions he had earned. “I spent a lot on booze and women,” he said. “The rest I wasted.”
But here we go again, a new season. The Liverpool ground at Anfield will be packed again, the crowd will sing and roar and cry. Let the games begin.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Anfield Kop, the famous single-tiered stand at Anfield Stadium, renowned for its passionate atmosphere and historical significance. The name “Kop” is derived from Spion Kop, the site of a major battle in the Anglo-Boer War in which many soldiers from Liverpool were involved. All images: Creative Commons.