The following is an extract from the book Girls Allowed by Nick Brown and published by Halcyon Publishing. It is available for purchase here.

The first official women’s football game in Britain, played using Football Association rules, took place on 7 May 1881. It was staged at Hibernian Park, now the site of Easter Road, the home of Hibernian. How seriously was the game taken? Both sides, you assume, wanted to win, but perhaps — in the context of public perception — it is more telling to examine how the game actually came about.

Local theatrical agent Alec Gordon, along with colleagues Charles Scholes of Blackburn and George Imbert from London, put together teams to represent Scotland and England. Aside from drumming up a bit of publicity for the organisers and the chance for each of them to form new contacts, it is also possible that the match was put on merely as a money raiser, considering that Scholes’ theatre chain had collapsed the previous year. I’m not saying that was definitively the case of course, I’m sure the gentlemen involved were all for promoting the women’s game and getting it into the public’s subconscious ...

The players that day were not, of course, actual footballers. Theatre houses and ballet schools provided the participants. The game ended in a 3-0 victory for Scotland, Lily St Clair becoming the first official goal scorer in women’s football with the other two goals added by Louise Cole and Maud Rimeford. Considering the kits that we use today — shirts, shorts, socks and boots — it is a wonder that any of the players were actually able to move, let alone play a game of football in the outfits they were given. The Scottish team were attired in blue jerseys, white knickerbockers, red stockings, red belts and high-heeled boots. They also wore blue and white cowls.

On 9 May 1881, the Glasgow Herald reported on the match, stating that there was “a considerable amount of curiosity” and that “upwards of a thousand persons watched it”. The line-ups that day were, as reproduced in the Herald: Scotland: Ethel Hay (goalkeeper), Bella Osborne, Georgina Wright (backs); Rose Rayman, Isa Stevenson (half backs); Emma Wright, Louise Cole, Lily St Clair, Maud Rimeford, Carrie Balliol, Millie Brymner (forwards).

England: May Goodwin (goalkeeper); Mabel Hopewell, Maud Hopewell (backs); Maud Starling, Ada Everston (half backs); Geraldine Vintner, Mabel Vance, Eva Davenport, Minnie Hopewell, Kate Mellon, Nelly Sherwood (forwards).

A tour was arranged for these exhibition matches, with the return match being played the following week, on 16 May 1881.

This time the venue was Shawfield Ground, Glasgow, and things did not exactly go as planned. After nearly an hour’s play, with the score still 0-0, the game had to be abandoned. The reason? A report in the Nottinghamshire Guardian told the story:

“What will probably be the first and last exhibition of a female football match in Glasgow took place on Monday evening at Shawfield Grounds. Upwards of 5,000 spectators were present, and the absence of the fair sex was specially noticeable. The teams were supposed to be representative of England and Scotland, and as the Scotch team had won the recent match in Edinburgh, much excitement was thereby caused as to the result of the encounter.”

“The meagre training of the teams did not augur much for proficiency of play, and if the display of football tactics was a sorry description, it was only what might have been expected, and not much worse than some of the early efforts of our noted football clubs. The costume was suitable and at a distance the players could scarcely have been distinguished from those in ordinary football matches. The game was continued without interruption till the ends were changed but the chaff of the spectators was anything but complimentary. Cries of ‘go it Fanny’ and ‘well done Nelly’ resounded from all parts of the field, but the players went on the even tenor of their way regardless of interruptions. At last a few roughs broke into the enclosure, and as these were followed by hundreds soon after, the players were roughly jostled and had prematurely to take refuge in the omnibus which had conveyed them to the ground. Their troubles were not, however, yet ended for the crowd tore up the stakes and threw them at the departing vehicle, and but for the presence of the police, some bodily injury to the females might have occurred. The team of four grey horses was driven rapidly from the ground amid the jeers of the crowd and the players escaped with, let us hope, nothing worse than a serious fright.” It didn’t take long for crowd trouble to begin, did it?

You would have thought that that would have been the end of the ladies’ football matches, but no such thing. There is a saying that all publicity is good publicity — was that on the minds of the theatre impresario organisers? Despite the abandonment, they pressed on with their plans and headed south of the border. Just four days after being forced off and having makeshift weapons hurled at their getaway car, the players took to the field again — the show must go on, after all. This time it went on at the superbly named Hole-i’th-Wall Ground, the home of Blackburn Olympic. The match passed without incident and a 1-0 victory was had by the English.

The tour continued. Scotland secured a 2-1 win in Sheffield, there was a 1-1 draw in Liverpool followed by another Scottish victory, 3-2 in Bradford. All seemed to be going well until the touring party arrived in Manchester for a game at Cheetham Football Club on 20 June. The Manchester Evening News takes up the story:

“Last evening the female football players who, it will be remembered, were playing in Scotland a short while ago, put in an appearance on the ground of the Cheetham Football Club, Tetlow Fold, Great Cheetham Street. The time announced for commencement of proceedings was 7:30, but it was fully half an hour after that time before the players arrived on the ground. A large number of spectators were present, and although entrance money was charged the greater proportion of those in attendance managed to elude the vigilance of the gatekeepers. The match was announced as one between eleven of England and eleven of Scotland, and after some indifferent play, which lasted something like half an hour, the ring was broken into and the wildest confusion prevailed, with the players having to make good their escape.”

Another pitch invasion. At least there seemed not to have been too much violence this time.

Not to be deterred, the players returned to the ground the following evening to play the game. The next day, the Manchester Guardian printed the following report. I cannot help thinking by the opening remarks that the reporter was secretly amused, dare I say delighted, by the outcome:

“The score or so of young women who do not hesitate to gratify vulgar curiosity by taking part in what is termed a ‘ladies’ football match appeared last evening for the second time this week on the ground of the Cheetham Football Club, Tetlow Fold, Great Cheetham Street. The club however had nothing to do with the affair. The public had been invited by placard to witness a match between eleven of England and eleven of Scotland, the kick-off to take place at half past seven pm. The players, attired in a costume which is neither graceful nor very becoming, were driven to the ground in a waggonette and, as was to be expected, were followed by a crowd largely composed of youths eager to avail themselves of the opportunity presented for a little boisterous amusement.”

“Play — if kicking the ball about the field can be so described — was convinced pretty punctually. Very few persons paid for admission to the ground but a great multitude assembled in the road and struggled for a sight of what was going on within the enclosure, whilst an equally large number gathered on the higher ground on the other side of the field for a similar purpose. A number of police constables were present to maintain order and prevent anyone entering without paying, and for about an hour whilst this so-called match was being played, they succeeded. There were frequent attempts, however, to elude the constables. At length a great rush was made by those occupying the higher land and the football ground was speedily taken possession of by the mob.”

“Apprehending a repetition of the rough treatment they have met with in other parts of the country the women no sooner heard the clamour which accompanied the rush then they also took to the hills and ran to where their waggonette was standing. This they reached before the crowd could overtake them, and amid the jeers of the multitude and much disorder they were immediately driven away.”

About the Book: Girls Allowed traces the hard-won fight for women’s football in Britain, from dismissal and bans to its current status as the fastest-growing sport, while refusing to gloss over what remains unresolved. Celebratory yet cautionary, it highlights how progress in England contrasts sharply with Scotland, where only a handful of teams are fully professional and many players juggle jobs alongside football.

About the Author: Based in Cambridge, Nick Brown is the author of a number of football and travel books as well as and magazine articles. He has also presented sports programmes on local radio stations as well as being a football commentator.

Each week, Cultured Football picks five stories that inform, surprise, and remind you why the game matters, sharing football writing worth your time.

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The following is an extract from the book Dreams and Songs to Sing: A People’s History of Liverpool FC From Shankly to Klopp by Alan McDougall and published by Cambridge University Press. It is available for purchase in Australia, Canada, Germany, Liverpool, New Zealand, Norway, the UK, the United States, & around the world.

It’s a routine tackle in 1981. Call it, if you’re being kind, a forward’s challenge. Bayern Munich winger Karl Del’Haye has just hacked down Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s best attacker. We’re five minutes into the second leg of the European Cup semi-final in Bayern’s Olympic Stadium. It’s 0–0 on aggregate. Dalglish hobbles around for a few minutes on a sore ankle but can’t continue. Liverpool are already short-handed. Half the back four, Colin Irwin and Richard Money, are reserves. Could they throw another inexperienced player into the mix?

As Dalglish tries to run off his injury, Liverpool’s subs warm up. Jimmy Case is the old hand. The others are young. Israeli defender Avi Cohen, striker Ian Rush, and twenty-two-year-old Howard Gayle, a winger from Toxteth, who made his debut the previous October. Liverpool had existed for eighty-five years when Gayle signed a professional contract in 1977. He was the club’s first Black player. As he stretches by the running track on a warm night, Gayle hears familiar sounds from the stands. Monkey noises. He sees ‘a few grown men making Nazi salutes’.1 Ronnie Moran calls the subs back to the bench. Bob Paisley has decided. Gayle will replace Dalglish.

Howard Gayle’s Liverpool career was short – five games and one goal, from October 1980 to May 1981 – but it can be condensed into the sixty-one minutes he played in Munich on 22 April 1981. On the left, Gayle is almost unplayable. He’s cleaned out by Wolfgang Dremmler on the half-hour mark, a blatant penalty that referee António Garrido doesn’t give. He’s hacked down again after a surging run early in the second half. Every time Gayle’s on the ball, the monkey chants can be heard. He gets a yellow card for what the Echo called ‘a wild tackle’ on Dremmler (‘really a silly lad’, is Barry Davies’ school- masterly commentary). It looks, to my eyes, innocuous. Paisley decides to sub the sub, and, after seventy minutes, Jimmy Case replaces Gayle. With seven minutes left, Ray Kennedy gets the decisive away goal. Karl- Heinz Rummenigge’s equaliser four minutes later is meaningless. Liverpool are through to a third European Cup final in five years. It doesn’t happen without Howard Gayle. ‘He ran Bayern ragged with his pace’, Paisley reflected. ‘Howard’s performance was outstanding’, said teammate David Johnson. ‘It was gritty, it was hard and it was courageous’.2

***

There was a shadow on Gayle’s great night. He wasn’t trusted to see the game out. Paisley substituted Gayle partly because he was tiring but mostly because he feared Gayle would ‘retaliate’ against Bayern’s provocations and get a red card. The consensus around Anfield, where Gayle graduated from a brilliant reserve team, was that ‘Howard had a chip on his shoulder’. He was bitter, impatient, ‘a bit, you know, black power’. Gayle was once sent off for punching a player who called him a ‘n*****’. More Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, he didn’t turn the other cheek. Subconsciously at least, all this played into the decision to substitute Gayle. The odds were stacked against him, as they were against most Black players in the 70s, who, to list a few stereotypes, didn’t like cold weather, got easily discouraged, and could be hot- headed. Gayle never got the chance to build on Munich, or on his first Liverpool goal, at home to Spurs a few days later.

Temperament, that chip on the shoulder, was often cited as a reason for Gayle’s failure to make the grade. So was quality. ‘He really wasn’t up to the standard that we required’, said Peter Robinson. This of a player who outscored Ian Rush in the reserves, was highly regarded by Graeme Souness, and of whom Brian Glanville wrote after the Spurs game: ‘I do strongly believe that this fast, brave, skilled player with the telescopic legs can do a great deal for the club’. Bruce Grobbelaar’s temperament was forged in the jungles of white supremacist Rhodesia, where he fought for Ian Smith’s minority rule government against the Black revolutionaries of ZANU and ZAPU.

Mistakes littered Grobbelaar’s early Liverpool career, which began, like Gayle’s, in 1981. Grobbelaar got time to develop. Gayle, whose early appearances were so promising, didn’t.

Bill Shankly’s welcome for new Liverpool players, 1968: ‘Here we have no interest in politics or religion. It doesn’t matter what you are so long as you can play football’. It’s a nice idea. That where you come from doesn’t matter, that football’s blind to anything but ability and application. But it’s not true. Liverpool in the late 70s had one of the oldest, most integrated Black communities in Britain. But the Black population, in historian Ray Costello’s words, was ‘an invisible people’. And the city’s top football club wasn’t a bastion of racial tolerance. Ronnie Hughes remembers sitting in the Paddock in the late 60s, hearing abuse of West Ham’s Black striker, Clyde Best. Ian Callaghan, ever the gentleman, came over and told the offending fans to shut up. The Liverpool crowd wasn’t immune to making the monkey noises Howard Gayle heard in Munich. Calling an opposition player a ‘black bastard’. Chanting ‘Coco Pops’, ‘Day-O’, or worse. All part of the terrain, part of the times. Like hiring a comedian for the players’ Christmas party, who approached Liverpool’s only Black player, poured a bowl of flour over his head, and said, ‘now try walking into fucking Toxteth’. Gayle and his peers were meant to shrug it off. Thick skin. Strong shoulders. Get rid of that chip.

***

Though he grew up in the mostly white suburb of Norris Green, Howard Gayle was born in 1958 in Toxteth. Better put, he was born in Liverpool 8. Just south of the city centre, the district commonly called Toxteth was, in Gayle’s day, two neighbourhoods. The nicer bits, close to Sefton Park and Princes Park. And the more ethnically diverse area south of Upper Parliament Street, home to much of Liverpool’s Black population. Known to locals not as Toxteth, but as Liverpool 8 or Granby, after its main thoroughfare, Granby Street.

Chris and Eddie Amoo, founder members of Liverpool’s greatest Black pop band, the Real Thing, grew up on the (slightly) posher northern side of the Toxteth tracks, on Tennyson Street, long since bulldozed, and then at their grandmother’s flat in Myrtle Gardens, where they were the only Black family. Like many 80s kids, I knew the Real Thing from their 1976 UK number one, ‘You to Me Are Everything’, an irresistibly catchy song, re-released in 1986, to which my sister could never remember the words. But the band’s second album featured work a far cry from ‘You to Me’ or the equally infectious ‘Can’t Get By Without You’. Channeling 70s Stevie Wonder, 4 From 8 finished with a song cycle, ‘Liverpool 8’, about the area where the band grew up, from Stanhope Street down to the docks. The centre point was ‘Children of the Ghetto’:

Children of the ghetto

Running wild and free

In the concrete jungle

Filled with misery

There’s no inspiration

To brighten up their day

So out of desperation

I would like to say

Children of the ghetto

Keep your head

To the sky.

The song, recalled journalist Ed Vulliamy, was the soundtrack to Liverpool’s summer of 1981, ‘blaring out the windows of Liverpool 8’, including his bedroom window on Catharine Street.

Less than three months after Howard Gayle’s finest hour, Liverpool 8 went up in flames. At 9.30 p.m. on Friday 3 July 1981, an unmarked police car stopped a young Black man on a motorbike at the corner of Granby Street and Selbourne Street. As in the LA district of Watts in 1965, a ‘routine’ police check – the ‘stop and search’ that disproportionately targeted young Black men – sparked an uprising. A crowd gathered to protest. One man, Leroy Alphonse Cooper, was arrested. Stones struck police vehicles. Howard Gayle called what happened next ‘simply an event where black communities stood up against the police after years of mistreatment’. Granby ward councillor Margaret Simey told Radio Merseyside things were so bad people ‘ought to riot’.

Over the weekend, protest became insurrection. Buildings were set ablaze, including the Rialto, once a dancehall that refused admission to ‘coloureds’ and later a factory that refused to employ them. Shops were looted. On 6 July, for the first time outside Northern Ireland, police used CS gas on protestors. There were further confrontations at the end of the month, when the police response – this time, also imported from Northern Ireland, driving Land Rovers into crowds to disperse them – killed a disabled man, David Moore. Police and protestors clashed at Moore’s funeral on 11 August. An anti-police march four days later demanded the resignation of the Chief Constable of Merseyside, Kenneth Oxford, who’d blamed unrest on ‘a crowd of black hooligans intent on making life unbearable and indulging in criminal activities’ Oxford was knighted in 1988.

One fatality, 150 buildings burnt to the ground, £11 million of damage, 462 arrests, and 781 police officers injured. The Toxteth riots, as they quickly came to be known, were part of a year of protest against racist policing, youth unemployment, and economic deprivation in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It began with the Brixton riots in April. Confrontations followed in July, in London again (Southall), Birmingham (Handsworth), Leeds (Chapeltown), Manchester (Moss Side), and other cities. ‘A riot is the language of the unheard’, said Martin Luther King in 1968. King was speaking after a spate of ‘riots’, or risings, across American cities in 1967, notably in Detroit, like Liverpool a one-industry city with a brilliant music scene and a large, disenfranchised Black population. Viewing Detroit from a helicopter after the violence there in July (forty- three deaths), Michigan governor George Romney said it ‘looks like a city that has been bombed’. One eyewitness in Toxteth fourteen years later called the scene on the night of 3 July ‘a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell’.

In Liverpool, like Detroit, unrest triggered enquiries. The Kerner Report (1968) warned that the United States was ‘moving towards two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal’, as if it had ever been anything else. The Scarman Report, a government enquiry into the Brixton riots, extended nationwide after the events of the summer, blamed ‘racial disadvantage’ and heavy-handed policing for unrest, but refuted the idea of institutional racism. Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, dispatched her Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, to Liverpool. As ‘Minister for Merseyside’, he promised market-driven solutions to the city’s problems. Heseltine’s largesse grabbed headlines, particularly the refashioning of the Albert Dock as a tourist venue. But money and jobs didn’t reach residents of L8, where not much changed for the better. In Liverpool, as in Detroit, the biggest takeaways from the riots were punitive. Tougher policing, the creation of no-go areas, and inner-city reputations of decline and criminality that took decades to shake off.

***

‘The End hopes to try to get Liverpool out of its rut’. That’s the opening line of the editorial in Issue 1 of a new magazine for ‘the youth of Liverpool’, published in October 1981. Issue 1 reviewed the Specials’ recent concert at the Royal Court in Liverpool. The band’s summer number one, ‘Ghost Town’ – a sparse, brooding anthem about unemployment, violence, and urban decay – could have hardly felt more relevant. Jerry Dammers wrote it after touring the UK and seeing the impact of Thatcher’s monetarist revolution: ‘in Liverpool all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down’.

The End was founded by two white Scousers from Cantril Farm, Phil Jones and Peter Hooton. The pair never claimed to speak for the city’s Black youth but were alive to the despair they saw around them, in Liverpool 8 and in the sink estate where they lived, a place that, like Netherley, where the poet Paul Farley grew up, ‘feels like the end of the line’. Among The End’s readers and writers, as in many reports on the Toxteth riots, Liverpool’s problems were tied to class as well as race. As one poem from July 1982 put it: ‘Black boy, white boy/All in the same boat/Dole drums, no joy/Didn’t bother to vote’.

John Peel, Radio 1 DJ and LFC fan, had no doubt: ‘My favourite magazine of all is The End from Liverpool which concerns itself with music, beer and football. The very stuff of life itself’. It’s a bit of a misleading description. The End was more about music than football. Hooton, like Peel, was a Liverpool fan. He wanted to create something funny and provocative, something you could sell at the match and at concerts. Previous music fanzines took themselves very seriously and didn’t talk about football at all, just as nobody talked about the game at Eric’s, Liverpool’s coolest music venue from 1976 to 1980. The End would at least broach that taboo subject. ‘I had a gut feeling’, Hooton told me in 2016, ‘it might work’.

Initially mistaken for a student mag, The End soon did lively business in pubs around Anfield and Goodison, outside Dead Kennedys gigs, and at Probe Records and HMV. Its reputation spread beyond Liverpool. Paul Du Noyer and Stuart Maconie championed The End at New Musical Express, the UK’s most important music paper. The editors made their television bow in 1983, on the BBC’s Oxford Road Show, a music programme from Manchester. John Peel, in a Liverpool tracksuit top, asked them about ‘professional Liverpudlians’ (an ironic question, perhaps, for a privately educated bloke from Heswall), the magazine’s origins, and its attitude to hooligans. By this point The End was, in Hooton’s words, ‘a phenomenon’, a cult magazine with a national following. People wanted to be in it. Among the luminaries interviewed between 1981 and 1988 were Peel, the Clash, Billy Bragg, Alan Bleasdale, Alexei Sayle, and Derek Hatton.

Anarchic humour, anger, music, politics, fashion, and football. The End messily captured the spirit of 1981 in Liverpool. Perhaps that’s why football, and LFC in particular – the city’s biggest success story – took a back seat to more urgent topics. The game comes up quite rarely, especially in the early years, unless it’s to take the piss out of hooligans. There’s discussion of Liverpool’s ‘minge-bag’ owners selling Kop tickets to Man United fans in 1982. A close-to-the-bone Munich spoof on the ‘Warsaw air disaster’, following a rocky flight to Poland for Liverpool’s game against Widzew Łódźin 1983. Later, there’s staunch defence of Liverpool fans at Heysel. And condemnation of Scousers who threw bananas at John Barnes: ‘if both sets of fans can’t applaud probably the most skillful player in Britain .. . then there’s nothing down for any of us’. The End is a barometer of Liverpool in the 80s, a decade of laughter in the dark.

***

In the summer of 1979, Liverpool completed an unlikely transfer, paying Maccabi Tel Aviv £200,000 for Israeli centre back Avi Cohen. Cohen’s wife Dorit felt the scale of the culture shock in their new home. ‘The beginning was hard .. . and the local accent was hard. [Liverpool] was grey and depressing, the winter harsh’. Torbjørn Flatin, a Liverpool fan from Norway, had similar impressions when he arrived in the city in 1980. ‘It was very bleak, a lot of unemployment, a lot of wasteland ... very grey’.

The Toxteth riots prompted lurid headlines about Liverpool’s inner-city crisis. A concerned Bob Paisley encouraged Howard Gayle to leave L8. He reluctantly complied, buying a place a few miles away in Mossley Hill. For the law-and-order camp, Gayle’s birthplace was a war zone, ‘the sort of area’, sniffed the Sunday Telegraph, ‘where it is hard to tell the riot damage from the urban decay’. Even the more sympathetic Daily Mirror described Liverpool 8 as ‘virtually a black ghetto’, a place of ‘savage rioting’, squalor, and desolation. In 1981, between 70 and 80 per cent of people were out of work there. The figure was higher for the group facing the most hostile labour market, young Black men. Derek Murray worked in the early 80s at the Merseyside Caribbean Centre on Upper Parliament Street. The situation for Black kids, he recalled, ‘was absolutely shameful’.

Unemployment was coming to dominate life on Merseyside. It was a long-term trend, dating back to Liverpool’s post-war decline as a seaport and its lack of other focal points in a deindustrialising world of global capital and consumer goods. Containerisation required far fewer dock workers and rendered many of Liverpool’s docks obsolete as commercial centres. The UK’s entry into the Common Market in 1973 benefitted eastern ports like Felixstowe and Grimsby, closer to Europe than Atlantic-facing Liverpool. Liverpool’s share of ship arrivals in the UK halved from 1966 to 1994. Unemployment in the port districts was nearly 30 per cent in the late 70s. In 1977, half of the city’s unemployed were aged between sixteen and twenty-four. It could take two or three years to find your first job, if you could find one at all.

With the city’s most reliable source of employment no longer reliable, people, especially young people, left in droves. Liverpool’s population declined faster than that of any other British city, from 856,000 in 1931 to 510,000 in 1981. Inner-city areas like Toxteth were rapidly depopulated. Some people were relocated to new council estates in outlying areas like Kirkby, Cantril Farm, Netherley, or, like Howard Gayle’s family, Norris Green. Many went further afield, creating a huge Scouse diaspora. Letters and poems to The End suggest the pain this exodus caused. Here’s ‘Brighton Blues’ from Michelle in 1983: ‘Sitting here swigging a cheap bottle of wine/Kidding everyone at home I’m having a good time’. Along the south coast in Bournemouth, the 5,000 Scousers became a local byword for crime.

For most of its inhabitants, Liverpool had always been a place of precarity, of casual labour on the docks and the kind of urban squalor documented in James Samuelson’s The Children of Our Slums, published in 1911, when the seaport was at its commercial peak and Walter Aubrey Thomas’ Royal Liver Building opened for business. The city’s decline in the 80s was as much reputational as economic. A national narrative about Liverpool and its bolshie, whiny population hardened. Scallies stealing your hub caps while you parked outside the ground. Yosser Hughes intoning ‘Gizza job’ in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff. And a football chant everyone was singing by the mid-80s: ‘In your Liverpool slums’.

Liverpool’s economic decline began long before 1979 but Margaret Thatcher’s government accelerated the process. Patrick Minford, professor of applied economics at Liverpool University, was one of the British monetarists captivated by the free-market ideas of American economist Milton Friedman. Friedman’s obsession was curbing inflation through controlling the amount of money in circulation and cutting public spending. In the early 80s, Minford found ‘a case study on [his] doorstep’. His ‘Liverpool model’, according to ‘The problem of unemployment’ (1981), predicted a 15 per cent cut in social security benefits plus a return to wage levels of the mid-60s would cut UK unemployment by 1.5 million.

‘Unemployment’, Minford wrote in his 1981 essay, ‘is ... unlikely to cause major social unrest’. A few weeks later, the Toxteth riots, around the corner from his office on the Liverpool University campus, dynamited this argument. Racist policing was the spark, but unemployment – officially 39.6 per cent in the Granby ward in 1981, but much higher for certain groups in certain neighbourhoods – contributed to the conflagration. The ‘Liverpool model’, it transpired, underestimated how big a spoonful of unemployment medicine was needed to get the British economy ‘on track’. The national jobless figure was 2.24 million in 1980, 2.9 million in 1981, and over three million in 1983 – hardly a recipe for slashing benefits. Liverpool became the poster child for the devastation of mass unemployment, the opposite of what Minford’s computer programme had envisaged. While Michael Heseltine’s spending spree suggested a government commitment to regenerating Liverpool (if not Liverpool 8), less wet colleagues objected to throwing money at a troublesome city. Responding to Heseltine’s request for £100 million for Liverpool over the next two years, the Chancellor Geoffrey Howe asked in 1981: ‘Isn’t this pumping water uphill? Should we go rather for “managed decline”? This is not a term for use, even privately. It is much too negative, when it must imply a sustained effort to absorb Liverpool manpower elsewhere’.

One side of the battlelines was drawn. In 1983, the other side took firmer shape, when Derek Hatton, flashy alumnus of the Liverpool Institute and Everton supporter, became Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council. Hatton represented Militant, the far-left Trotskyist wing of the Labour Party. He became the public face of Liverpool’s effective civil war with the Thatcher government, furthering the city’s perceived isolation from the rest of the country (in fact, Liverpool’s difficulties weren’t so different from those of Glasgow or Tyneside) and from much of Hatton’s party. As Labour under Neil Kinnock quietly dropped socialism, Militant pushed a radical socialist agenda in Liverpool. The Tory government, meanwhile, privately at least, left the city to its post- industrial devices. The resulting conflicts – between Whitehall and Liverpool City Council, and between Labour and Liverpool City Council – took a toll locally. Julian Buchanan, working as a probation officer, remembers ‘a hugely painful time’. Critical of Thatcherism and a man of the left, Buchanan wasn’t enamoured either with the grand- standing Hatton, ‘a businessman up his own arse’. He felt isolated and alienated, both from Thatcher’s monetarist revolution and the Militant faction running Liverpool into the ground. In 80s Liverpool, Buchanan concluded, ‘self-respect became replaced with aggression and violence basically, and hate and fights’. To Peter Furmedge, ‘Liverpool became a harder place’, a hardness embodied by Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff. His default response to the despair of unemployment is the headbutt. ‘Is this all there is?’

What remains when everything falls apart? The answer, in Liverpool in the 80s, was football. Merseyside still produced successful musicians, many of them – from the Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and OMD – crossbred and connected at Eric’s, the post-punk club on Mathew Street. Through soap operas (Brookside), writers like Alan Bleasdale (Blackstuff, Scully) and Carla Lane (Bread), and 60s holdouts like Cilla Black, the city’s presence on British television was stronger than ever. But football, more than anything else, polished Liverpool’s tarnished civic identity. Liverpool and Everton won eight of the ten championships contested between 1980 and 1990, plus three European trophies, four League Cups, and three FA Cups. The Mighty Wah’s Pete Wylie wondered in 1984 if ‘sometimes people attach too much importance to football’. But he was in the minority. When the Sunday Times asked Derek Hatton a similar question a year later, Hatton’s reply was ‘as snappy as his suit’: ‘That’s like asking if mice care too much about cheese. Football has always been at the heart of this city’.

***

Between Howard Gayle’s Munich cameo and Liverpool 8 going up in flames, Liverpool FC won a third European Cup in five seasons, defeating Real Madrid 1–0 in Paris, thanks to Alan Kennedy’s late goal. Gayle stayed on the bench at the Parc des Princes on 27 May. He’d already played his last game for the club. Paisley’s team had endured a rare poor league campaign, but in Europe, reported David Lacey, they were old hands. ‘Pacing their game carefully, reluctant to waste possession with ambitious passes .. . they always kept their movements wide and always the man with the ball had good support as colleagues ran intelligently into space’. Phil Thompson, Kirkby lad and club captain, lifted the trophy, and took it back to his local pub, The Falcon. Big Ears sat on a shelf behind the bar, alongside pub team trophies. ‘We all got a bit plastered’.

Half a million people welcomed LFC home on 28 May, a world away from the crowds that would gather in Liverpool 8 five weeks later. Jacqui and Stephen Small show off their ‘Barney’ mascot, presented to Alan ‘Barney Rubble’ Kennedy. Three-year-old Julie Cresby celebrates with an ice-cream, Kopite Alan Bowyer with a beer, in his Liverbird- crested stovepipe hat. This is the public face that Liverpool (well, the red half at least) liked to present to the world. The football team as civic ambassadors. ‘Goodness knows Merseyside needs something to shout about and the Reds have supplied that much-needed tonic’, said an Echo editorial. ‘Liverpool F.C. have demonstrated that in one sphere at least we can do something superbly well’.

On the day of the parade, two front page Echo headlines: ‘Welcome home, you super Reds!’ and ‘Gloom as more join Mersey dole queue’. As the city of Liverpool was buffeted by political and economic turmoil, LFC sailed serenely towards trophy-laden horizons, using the template, and many of the personnel, Bill Shankly had installed two decades earlier. Under Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan, it was business as usual between 1981 and 1984. Two European Cups, four League Cups, and three championships. A ridiculous record that impressed observers even as they got bored by it and struggled to find metaphors for Liverpool’s dominance. Steamroller. Juggernaut. Red machine.

‘The club has a touch of communism – in the strictly non- political sense’, wrote Bob Paisley in 1983. Craig Johnston, who joined Liverpool in 1981 from Middlesbrough, remembered his first training session in freezing conditions. He dressed in full training gear, including tracksuit bottoms. Everyone else had bare legs, including Paisley, who waddled onto the pitch at Melwood in ‘baggy shorts’, blue veins bulging on his white and ‘ancient’ pins. Johnston couldn’t believe one of the world’s best teams could be this spartan. He soon learned it was ‘the Liverpool way’. No tall poppies (Johnston’s Porsche, registration plate ‘Roo 1’, didn’t go down well). Train as you play (i.e., in shorts). Simplicity and continuity. When Paisley retired in 1983, after Liverpool won the league so easily their mostly drunk players took two points from the final seven matches, assistant manager Joe Fagan replaced him. Why change a winning formula?

***

Watching from the stands in 1983/84, journalist Brian Reade had an uncomfortable feeling. ‘I wasn’t getting the same kick out of it as I used to’. Too often, Liverpool games were ‘Lord Mayor’s processions’. ‘Disgustingly, I was bored with success’. The average crowd in 1978/79, when one of the great Liverpool teams conceded four goals at Anfield all season, was 46,510, a shade behind Manchester United as the league’s best. Two years later, the Anfield average fell to 37,646, almost 8,000 behind Old Trafford. It bottomed out at 32,022 in 1983/ 84, when Joe Fagan’s side won a treble of European Cup, league, and League Cup.

Apathy wasn’t the only reason for the drop-off. You could factor in inner-city depopulation, alternative leisure options, increased ticket prices, and violence – or the threat of it. A Daily Post survey from 1977 revealed 40 per cent of respondents had stopped going to matches because of hooliganism. Often these were aways, with Old Trafford viewed as especially dangerous. But one supporter recounted bricks being thrown at Anfield: ‘This has deterred me taking children in future’.

Heysel caused dismay and denial in Liverpool because LFC supporters weren’t seen as the worst hooligan offenders. Liverpool didn’t have large ‘crews’ who wrecked stadiums and fought at home and abroad. Troublemakers were more into drinking, fashion, thieving, fare-dodging, and bunking into games for free. Fighting too, yes, but only when unavoidable. As Nicky Allt’s account of life with the Anfield Road Crew suggests, there’s an element of having your cake and eating it about the ‘distinctiveness’ of scally fan culture. How big is the difference between ‘a nailed-on hooligan’ and, as Allt describes his younger self, ‘a little football hooligan’? A photo from 1980 shows a Spurs fan being led away from Anfield by policemen, holding his hand to his neck, a victim of the ‘Anny Road Darts Team’.

One factor bigger than hooliganism kept people away. Large numbers of people couldn’t afford to go any more. By far the biggest single-season drop in average attendance at Anfield occurred between 1979/80 (44,758), when the Thatcher government had just come to power, and 1980/81 (37,646), when its monetarist revolution began to bite, causing a recession and mass unemployment. In the early 80s, remembered Adrian Killen, people sold season tickets because they were out of work. Julian Buchanan recalled the stark realisation from this time: ‘people were gobsmacked to discover that you couldn’t have a job for life anymore’. The certainties of the post-war consensus, from steady employment to the welfare state, were crumbling. Buchanan wasn’t the only one who kept his head down and ‘move[d] away from football’.

There was, by the mid-80s, a growing disconnect between the club and local supporters. For William Twentyman, son of the club’s chief scout Geoff, the family club he grew up around became an increasingly commercial entity, ‘a closed shop’ that kept supporters distant. The End was scathing about the LFC top brass. Seats on the Kop, the editors predicted in 1982, were ‘only a matter of time because Liverpool think only in money terms’. A year later, the magazine published a poem by Fred Quimby, ‘a true Kopite who doesn’t like being shat on’: ‘Isn’t that a dolites luck/John Smith you couldn’t give a fuck .. . You keep throwing shit in the Kops face/You shitbag Smith get out of this place/ Go back to Lower Heswall you fucking Tory/Cos I don’t want your fucking glory’.

The End was intensely local. Its writers felt humorously protective about Liverpool and often distrusted people from elsewhere (they also, to be fair, didn’t think much of people from Liverpool either, e.g., Beatles nostalgists, politicians, and ‘professional Scousers’ like Jimmy Tarbuck). Pretty much anyone outside the city, bar John Peel, was a ‘wool’, an outsider. Runcorn was as bad as Reykjavik in this regard; in fact, it was worse, as wools generally lived nearby, ‘in the Pennine regions and some parts of Lancashire’. Will Sergeant, who grew up, like my cousins, in Melling, eight miles from the city centre, got called a ‘woolly back’. Prime areas for sightings were the Wirral, Wigan, Widnes, and Warrington. ‘Wool Central’ was Leeds, whose fans were mercilessly mocked.

‘Wools’ weren’t the same as ‘out-of-towners’, but scally culture had little time for either. Liverpool’s a proudly international city, but it also has a proudly piss-taking local identity, which sometimes defaults to viewing non-Liverpudlians as less authentic, less cool supporters (and people). Tensions between the club’s local support and its wider fan bases sharpened in the 80s. As local crowds fell away, supporters from elsewhere took up some of the slack. The End complained in 1983 about LFC ‘selling the club like a big business and wooing all sorts of wools. The Kop’s all Welsh now’. Around the same time, Adrian Killen noticed people from outside the city standing on the Kop. Success brought in fans from ‘here, there, and everywhere’.

Carsten Nippert’s first match was the European Cup semi-final vs. Bayern in the Olympic Stadium in April 1981. He and his Mum gave their spare ticket to a ticketless Scouser. In the same year, a group of Icelandic LFC supporters from Akureyri, including Gunnar Sveinarsson, Oskar Gudmundsson, and Sigurdur Jonsson, travelled to London for the League Cup final vs. West Ham and to Paris for the European Cup final vs. Real Madrid. Stuck behind the Iron Curtain in Chorzów, Poland, twenty-three-year-old Damien Garczorz listened to commentaries on the BBC World Service and collected LFC cuttings, photos, and programmes. After Liverpool lost to Widzew Łódźin the 1982/83 European Cup, ‘I was crying! For about three days I could not recover from depression’. Wojtek Kaminski, from Kędzierzyn-Koźle, a small town an hour west of Katowice, was more ambitious. He founded a supporters’ club at the University of Silesia, organised a welcome parade for the Liverpool team that played Lech Poznańin 1984 and, in the same year, made his first visit to Anfield.

***

After Bob Paisley’s retirement, the Boot Room succession was strictly observed, as it had been in 1974. On 1 July 1983, Paisley’s assistant Joe Fagan – a Litherland lad who played 168 times for the club before joining Phil Taylor’s staff in 1958 – took the managerial reins. The quietest of the coaches, and the man closest to the players (hence ‘Uncle Joe’), Fagan was the most low-key man in a low-key set-up. He lived around the corner from Anfield in a modest semi-detached house.

When Watford owner Elton John visited the Boot Room for the trad- itional post-match drink, he asked Fagan for a pink gin. ‘You can have a brown ale, a Guiness or a scotch and that’s your lot’, was the reply. Unpretentious, almost parodically modest. That was Joe Fagan. Like Paisley, he took the job because he was supposed to, not because he wanted it. ‘I was in a rut when they offered it to me. Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans were doing the training and I was just helping Bob, putting in my two pennyworth’. Unlike Paisley, he was immediately successful. In his first season, Joe Fagan won three trophies.

In 1984, Granada TV made a documentary about football in Liverpool called Home and Away. Its centrepiece was the Milk (League) Cup final between Liverpool and Everton on 25 March, the first time the two clubs had met in a major cup final. Fans of bigger clubs, including Liverpool, now tend to dismiss English football’s third trophy, but the 1984 final was huge. One third of the men in the city, claimed the documentary, left Liverpool to be at the match, including eighteen- year-old Everton fan Keith Cliffe: ‘a gang of us, Red and Blue ... absolutely fantastic’.

Home and Away is a brilliant social history of ‘the giro cup final’. Unemployed men talk about football as the only escape from life on the dole. A Goodison vicar jokes to his sparse congregation about the Christian virtues of an Everton win. Liverpool and Everton fans share a bus south, drinking lager, playing cards, and singing along as someone plays ‘Help’ by the Beatles on his guitar. There are cruel jokes about Jimmy McInnes’s 1965 suicide (‘cut him down, he’s turning blue’) and the Munich disaster, some talk about what ‘the Wembley widows’ are doing back home (Answer: a night out at Flames in Bootle), and some horrific 80s chat up lines in London boozers (‘did you bring your rape insurance policy?’). There’s nostalgia for a lost Liverpool – the 60s folk song ‘In My Liverpool Home’ gets regular airings – and understanding that the city’s reputation is on display. The final was a chance to show Liverpudlians as ‘human beings .. . not a load of scroungers and dogs- bodies’, said Graham Eggerton, an unemployed electrician. If people see supporters together, ‘it can’t all be bad, can it?’

It pays not to get too misty-eyed about the ‘friendly rivalry’ between Liverpool and Everton in the 80s. Chris Wood remembers the November 1982 derby at Goodison not only because of Ian Rush’s four goals in a 5–0 drubbing, but because it was the first time he saw ‘proper fighting’ between Reds and Blues, in the Bullens Road Paddock. Still. It’s hard not to be moved by Wembley Stadium on 25 March 1984. Not by the game, a goalless draw on a rain-soaked pitch. By the fans, who chanted ‘Merseyside, Merseyside’ and ‘Scousers here, Scousers there, Scousers every everywhere’. This was a civic occasion and, The Guardian reported, ‘Merseyside [took] its opportunity for self- advertisement with a flourish’. Stephen Kelly recalled ‘absolutely no hint of violence’. After the final whistle, rival fans hugged and argued over contentious decisions. A group of three Reds and three Blues pushed their broken-down silver Cortina, with red and blue balloons hanging from the aerial, out of the Wembley car park. It was a moment, I think, for those who didn’t want to choose sides, for Liverpudlians like my granddad or Ken, barman at The Vernon on Dale Street, who wore blue socks and a red shirt to serve punters on Cup final weekend. And it was a moment of community solidarity, when the political and economic backdrop – Hatton vs. Thatcher, unemployment – was never far off. Most of the twenty-seven men interviewed in Home and Away were jobless. In 1984, some things were bigger than football. After Everton beat Liverpool at Anfield that October, supporters of both teams sang ‘Arthur Scargill, we’ll support you ever more’ in Yates’s Wine Lodge on Moorfield Street.

Liverpool won the replay at Maine Road 1–0, thanks to Graeme Souness’ twenty-first-minute strike, a left-foot volley after he miscontrolled Phil Neal’s pass. This was Liverpool’s fourth consecutive League Cup and Joe Fagan’s first trophy as manager. Two more were around the corner. After a slow start, Liverpool had the league in hand by late March. Though the lead over Manchester United was just two points, this was Ron Atkinson’s United not Alex Ferguson’s. Liverpool only had to win four of their last ten games to keep United at bay and win a third straight championship. Graeme Souness was blunt: ‘By our own standards, we didn’t deserve to win the title, but by everyone else’s we did’. David Lacey praised the excellence of Souness, Rush, Dalglish, et al., but pondered the ‘scrappy mediocrity’ of the 0–0 draw with Notts County that confirmed the title. What value is a competition, he asked, that prized ‘pace and commitment’ over ‘skill and imagination’? A competition one team dominated in second gear? Liverpool, Lacey concluded, ‘on occasions seemed to be deliberately slowing the pace in order to keep the race alive’.

In 1983/84, Liverpool saved their best for the European Cup. After an easy first-round win over Danish champions Odense, Liverpool drew Spain’s Athletic Bilbao. The 0–0 in the first leg, wrote Stuart Jones in The Times, was like ‘Liverpool lying in the arms of Morpheus. No one could recall a more subdued performance at Anfield’. The second leg was a different story. In a raucous San Mames Stadium, on a pitch that cut up badly, the hosts barely laid a glove on Liverpool, who won thanks to Ian Rush’s sixty-sixth minute header. Fagan called it ‘a magnificent performance’, Souness a better win than Bayern Munich in 1981.

Four days before the Milk Cup final, Liverpool went to the Stadio da Luz in Lisbon and eviscerated Benfica 4–1 to reach the European Cup semi-final. Liverpool’s high-tempo approach after a narrow first-leg victory, so different from the cautious away tactics often deployed by Shankly and Paisley, surprised the hosts. Aided by some bad goalkeeping from Bento, Liverpool cruised into the last four, where Romania’s secret police team, Dinamo Bucharest, awaited. A few fans made their way behind the Iron Curtain for the second leg, as Liverpool again defended a 1–0 lead. Keith Stanton was shocked by the capital’s ‘primitive sights’, proof of the economic catastrophe inflicted by Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship: ‘horse-drawn carts, women cleaning the roads and plenty of empty shops’. The match was primitive too. Rain poured down on the roofless 23 August Stadium. So did vitriol from 60,000 supporters, most of it aimed at Souness, who’d broken the jaw of Dinamo’s Lică Movilăduring a tetchy first leg. ‘The Romanians kicked mercilessly’, reported Patrick Barclay, but Liverpool were ‘outstanding’ again. Two left-footed finishes from Rush, the first set up by Souness, sent Liverpool to their fourth European Cup final in eight years.

Liverpool now returned to the scene of their greatest triumph, Rome. This time to play the team whose home ground was the Stadio Olimpico, AS Roma. The carnival atmosphere of ’77 was replaced by something edgier. European awareness of the ‘English disease’ had heightened in the intervening years, fed by the press, who loved a hooligan story, by a UK government that saw supporters as a security problem, and by fan misbehaviour. A few weeks before the European Cup final, a young Spurs supporter, Brian Flanagan, was shot dead in a Brussels bar before the UEFA Cup final vs. Anderlecht. More than one hundred Spurs and Anderlecht supporters were arrested, two policemen stabbed, and cars set on fire. Thatcher’s government feared the worst, as did the nervous Italian authorities. ‘There could be trouble at the match in Rome tonight’, read one Whitehall memo from 30 May.

The Minister of Sport, Neil Macfarlane predicted an ‘intense’ atmosphere. Liverpool supporters might face danger, ‘however well behaved themselves’.

In May 1977, Liverpool supporters took over the Stadio Olimpico and Rome. In May 1984, a smaller contingent travelled to the Eternal City, proof of the impact of Thatcherism. Liverpool fans were hemmed in at one end of the ground, surrounded by riot police and their dogs, plus ‘60,000 mad Italians smelling blood’. Marco Catena, a Liverpool fan from Switzerland, at his first European Cup final, remembered the Roma end being full hours before kick-off, ‘flares, noise, songs, drums, smoke, bounce, fuck me they were up for this’.29 Even Bruce Grobbelaar, not the most flappable of men, called the atmosphere ‘frightening’. But Liverpool, who’d won every away game in Europe in 83/84, settled quickly. Souness, in his final game for the club, was dominant, ‘a deliciously phlegmatic performance’ wrote David Lacey. Liverpool took the lead through Phil Neal in the thirteenth minute; Roma equalised just before half-time through Roberto Pruzzo. It was a finely balanced game, absorbing rather than entertaining, and there were no further goals. For the first time, the European Cup final went to penalties. You might know the rest. Stevie Nicol blasting over the bar. Grobbelaar’s spaghetti legs. Misses from Conti and Graziani. Alan Kennedy, a ‘shocking’ penalty taker at Melwood, sending Franco Tancredi the wrong way. Liverpool’s fourth European Cup. ‘Thoroughly deserved’, reckoned The Guardian. Souness, the man of the hour, called it ‘possibly the greatest result ever achieved by a club side’.

National headlines on 31 May focused on violence at home: another pitched battle between police and striking miners at the Orgreave coking pit in South Yorkshire. A burned Portakabin, riot gear, police dogs, mounted police injuries, and arrests, including that of NUM President Arthur Scargill. Echoes of Brixton and Toxteth in 1981. Desperate protestors, stigmatised as ‘rioters’, taking a stand against an unsympathetic state and its repressive, mendacious enforcers. We’ll be hearing again, of course, from South Yorkshire Police.

Tucked on the inside pages, a tale of violence abroad didn’t get the same coverage. Perhaps because it was committed against, rather than by, English supporters, which didn’t fit the hooligan narratives of the day. There were nasty scenes in Rome after Liverpool’s victory. David Pye, a graduate student at the University of Brighton, recalled being ambushed by Roma ultras armed with ‘baseball bats, clubs, chair legs, pool cues, chains and knives’.31 Bricks were thrown at Liverpool coaches from moving Fiats, supporters on foot were slashed in the buttocks by masked men on Vespas. Stephen Monaghan remembered ‘everyone was getting attacked, women, children, the elderly’. The police were little help. As many as ninety Liverpool fans required hospital treatment, many for knife wounds. George Sharp, forty- seven, from Halewood, was stabbed in the kidneys. He needed four hours of emergency surgery to save his life.

The British Embassy reported that Liverpool supporters ‘behaved just as we expected – in an exemplary manner’. Walking away from the stadium after the game, Marco Catena and his mates (two Scousers, an Austrian, and a German) helped an Italian push his broken-down Fiat 500 off the road. Stuck in the one-horse town of Ladispoli for a week before the final, Stephen Monaghan and his mates befriended the local policeman, Angelo, and some of the hooligans who’d initially wanted to fight their Scouse visitors. He ended up having dinner at the hooligan leader’s house. Mono brought flowers for the guy’s Mum and tasted his first spaghetti bolognaise. Liverpool fans and locals then played a ‘peace match’: ‘[they] loved us in the end’. Sadly, it was memories of the violence – frightening, humiliating, and under- reported – not the friendships and celebrations that predominated when Liverpool travelled to Belgium to meet another Italian club, Juventus, in the 1985 European Cup final. ‘In the minds of the worst affected’, wrote Brian Reade, ‘someone had to pay’.

***

In the summer of 1987, after spells at five clubs, Howard Gayle joined Blackburn Rovers. Rovers hadn’t had a Black player in its ninety-nine- year history. Hardly an ideal move, but Gayle didn’t have many options. He spent five years at the club, scoring twenty-nine goals in 116 games. The flame was still bright. One fan remembers Gayle clambering into the Nuttall Street Paddock to challenge someone who said something as he warmed up. As Tommy Smith could testify, Gayle confronted racism whenever and wherever he found it. Which, in English football in the 70s and 80s, meant often and everywhere.

The same summer, Liverpool FC signed their second Black player. Watford winger John Barnes was a different character to Gayle – and a better player. There’s a picture of Barnes and fellow new signing Peter Beardsley outside Anfield. On the ‘No ball games allowed’ sign above them, you can see ‘NF’, the insignia of the far-right National Front. I first saw that photo in Dave Hill’s Out of His Skin, which has other shots of racist graffiti on the Kop’s brick walls in the mid-80s. ‘White power’. ‘There’s no black in the Union Jack’. ‘Liverpool are white’. John Barnes saw all this. He got letters. ‘You are crap, go back to Africa and swing from the trees’. The club got many more.

Peter Furmedge felt attitudes changed on the Kop before John Barnes arrived. A younger, more politicised generation – that read The End, supported Rock against Racism, and loved the Specials – ‘kicked back against the racism’. Barnes, in Furmedge’s view, ‘tipped the bal- ance’. His brilliance brought the silent majority into the anti-racist camp. Performance was key, as Barnes understood. ‘The Kop would have slaughtered me with racial abuse if I had faltered on the field’. It also helped that Barnes, the son of a Jamaican colonel, was less confrontational than Gayle. He was seen as a more acceptable Black footballer, someone who could take, and make, a joke. Racists bemused rather than angered Barnes. He came to his first players’ Christmas party dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman. Bob Thomas’ photo from the Merseyside derby at Goodison in February 1988 shows Barnes back- heeling off the pitch one of the bananas thrown at him that day. For Emy Onuora, a Black Everton supporter, it was an awkward time: ‘I knew the abuse he was going to get was just going to be something that .. . I was just going to remove myself from’.

By 1988, The End was nearing the end. The twentieth and final issue came out shortly after the February game vs. Everton, an FA Cup tie watched by millions on BBC Television. In one of its best pieces, the magazine condemned not only the Goodison racists who chanted ‘N*****pool’, but the Liverpool fans who’d brought bananas to Arsenal for Barnes’ LFC debut. The silence of local media about ‘prob- ably the worst incidents of racial bigotry ever seen at a football ground’. The reluctance of players, managers, and chairmen to publicly condemn racism, often downplayed as the work of a ‘lunatic fringe’. All the structures and institutions that enabled racism on Merseyside, a place where, as the Community Relations Council despaired in 1986, ‘there was an almost total exclusion of black people from most job opportun- ities’. Where, claimed local magazine Black Linx in the same year, there was ‘a more subtle form of apartheid than Johannesburg’.35

A comforting story can take you from Liverpool ’81 to Liverpool ’88. It emphasises transformation, in the city’s attitudes to race and in the city’s economic fortunes. From the ostracised Howard Gayle to the feted John Barnes, from Anfield monkey chants to ‘The Anfield Rap’ (‘I come from Jamaica/My name is John Barn-es/When I do my thing/The crowd go bananas’), from the Toxteth riots to the reopen- ing of the Albert Dock as a tourist attraction, home to the Tate Liverpool and The Beatles Story.

Liverpool returned to Goodison a month after the poisonous match in February 1988. Already, Barnes recalled, things were better. No bananas, little overt racism. Rogan Taylor, meanwhile, saw the Kop re-educated before his eyes. Evertonian racism towards Liverpool’s best player made Kopites protective of Barnes and more aware of the absurd- ity of booing other teams’ Black players. As Rainer Werner Fassbinder shows in Fear Eats the Soul, his great film about racism in 70s West

Germany, prejudice is often overcome through self-interest not ideal- ism. So it was with John Barnes at LFC. The ‘sudden saintliness’ of Main Stand season ticket holders, who’d once screamed at ‘black bastards’ and now embraced one, struck Stephen Kelly as funny. But it was a transformation nonetheless, one that diversified Liverpool’s fan base. Emy Onuora’s brother was living in London. ‘A lot of his Black friends were Liverpool fans because of John Barnes’.

John Barnes doubted how much had changed. ‘It’s easy to love John Barnes, but people must love the black guy without the fame, money or special skill’.36 Some Liverpool fans, he noticed, still booed opposition Black players, like Norwich’s Ruel Fox. The Gifford Report (1989) would have confirmed Barnes’, and The End’s, scepticism. It called race relations in Liverpool ‘uniquely horrific’. Black people faced disproportionately high rates of unemployment and ‘a devastating lack of mobility’. Like many L8 residents, Gifford felt not enough had changed since 1981. Regeneration projects like the Albert Dock didn’t benefit the city’s Black communities. Like the figure of John Barnes, the new or reclaimed buildings gave an impression of change not matched by reality.

Though L8 was on Anfield’s doorstep, there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that young players from the area ‘don’t get any- where near Liverpool’.37 Nor did many Black supporters. Steve Skeete, who once had a trial at Melwood alongside Howard Gayle, remembered going to Anfield, red scarf around his neck, and being chased out of the ground all the way to Hall Lane in Kensington by a hundred fellow supporters yelling ‘get the n*****’. Liverpool FC, like most Division One clubs at the end of the 80s, remained a predominantly white club with a predominantly white fan base. Peter Robinson felt it was ‘strange’ LFC had never had ‘a large Black following’: ‘And that hasn’t increased much with the coming of John Barnes’.38 But it wasn’t strange, given the experiences of Skeete, Onuora at Everton, or Spurs fan Paul Duhaney, too ‘shit scared’ to go to away games until the 90s. Even in the Premier League era, when the English game diversified, it was still often the case that ‘Black people play, they don’t go’.39

Liverpool FC didn’t seek change in the Boot Room era. The club’s run of success was based, to an almost superstitious degree, on repetition in training and matchday routines and the timely turnover of players and staff, all of whom became versed in ‘the Liverpool way’. But change has a way of finding you anyway. On the surface, LFC in the

80s – John Smith’s humblebrag ‘modest club’– was a shining example of the virtues of continuity. Three managers, all promoted from within. Six leagues, two European Cups, four League Cups, two FA Cups. But two events drove fault lines through this success story, changing the direction of LFC and English football. We need to talk about Heysel. And we need to talk about Hillsborough. Because, on and off the field after 1989, Liverpool FC would be – for the longest time, and for the first time in a long time – on the wrong side of history.

About the Book: Dreams and Songs to Sing is a global, people’s history of Liverpool FC, told through the voices of its supporters. Blending interviews, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Alan McDougall captures the club’s emotional, cultural, and social journey from Shankly to Klopp.

About the Author: Alan McDougall is a historian and lifelong Liverpool supporter whose work explores the intersections of sport, culture, and society. A professor of history at the University of Guelph in Canada, he has written widely on football, politics, and popular culture. Dreams and Songs to Sing combines his academic insight with a fan’s passion, offering a deeply human portrait of the game and the people who make it matter.

Each week, Cultured Football picks five stories that inform, surprise, and remind you why the game matters, sharing football writing worth your time.

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The following is an extract from the book Standing on the Shoulders of Titans by Mat Guy and published by 1889. It is available for purchase here and here.

San Marino Stadium is bustling expectantly. Outside, people queue to pick up tickets. A couple of young children wearing San Marino shirts so big they completely consume them, stumble on the hems as parents lead them by the hand inside.

Music plays across the PA system. A small trestle table that is the official San Marino FA shop is doing a roaring trade in scarves – a thoroughly unsuitable option for such a balmy June afternoon as this. Footballing tourists also consider the beautiful San Marino home shirt, sporting the three towers of Guaita, Cesta, and Montale from the capital that hangs in the hazy, rippling sky beyond.

And in the shadow of the main stand sporting beautiful wooden vaulted beams, the bar is doing great business in beer and hotdogs. Forty or so Malta fans who have made the trip drink and sing in the sunshine, many wearing home-made tabards like Templar Knights. The symbols of their religious order carefully stitched, drawn, painted across them being the Maltese cross, club badges from Maltese teams, images of footballing heroes old and new.

A singing, drinking, laughing, walking Bayeux tapestry of devotion to their homeland, their football history, their identity - life down among the minnows of world football does not exclude one from this. If anything, it magnifies such passion, devoid mostly of tangible, statistical successes.

But something is in the air, and beer, today, that suggests that for these travelling Maltese knights, they are in for the most-rare of treats – a win, and a win away from home. And armed with that belief, their battle dress, and a good helping of beer, they take to the stands in expectation.

Taking up a position closest to the steps back down to the bar, in preparation for that all-important half-time dash, the Malta fans sing and dance, applaud as the teams come out.

At the other end of the main stand, the Brigata Mai Una Gioia clap their heroes out onto the pitch too. Stood among their blue and white San Marino flags and banners draped across empty seats, tied to railings, this small group of 15, 20 stand with hope rather than expectation filling their hearts. After all, even in this lowly Nations League, League D clash in front of a little under 600 supporters, Malta are still 35 places higher in the FIFA rankings.

Hope. Always hope. But never any joy.

San Marino Stadium is not only the home of football in the country, but also athletics. A running track encircles the pitch, and on the far side, long jump sand pits, throwing circles, high jump mats stand in front of a small stand used to house away support when some of Europe’s big hitters come to town. Today we just need the main stand.

Behind the right-hand goal more equipment for converting one sport into another lays in wait. While behind the other end a sea of trees rise like a rich, lush, natural Kop, Curva Sud, Gallowgate End. Over its shoulder, the capital, Monte Titano looming in the haze. Indistinct. Like a dream.

It is time.

Elia Benedettini stands, arms locked around the shoulders of his teammates either side of him, beneath the hot sun.

Backs straighten, heads look up into the stand, beyond the stand, as the opening chords of ‘Inno Nazionale’ ring out.

A row of Sammarinese, lost for a moment, in the moment, eyes glassy, distant, focusing on a place very few of us ever reach, where the pride, meaning, belonging felt in representing your nation lives.

A place, in the middle-distance, rippling between the heat haze – neither here nor there – a place of sacrifice. Hour upon hour, day after day, year on year of training, from a very young age, in all weather. A place of lost income from work to travel to games. A place of heavy defeats, sometime ridicule from opposing fans. A place of overcoming injury, clawing your way back to fitness, to take your place in the firing line once more. A place where everything else has to come second, in order for you to play, and come second.

We can only imagine - that place that they go. But Elia knows. It is, after all, not his first experience of this moment, shared this time with these 600 spectators.

He has experienced it many times in his international career.

He has experienced it in front of 85,000 at Wembley. He has experienced it lining up against Pirlo’s Italy, twice. He has faced down the then world champions in Germany. He has travelled the continent in the name of San Marino, in the name of football.

And here he is, once more, in the slightly more-humble surroundings of a Nations League Group D fixture against Malta, at that place again.

A line of proud chests, seemingly pulled up toward the sky by the music, and what it symbolises, like a row of marionettes, manipulated by the thought of those that have gone before them, those that they do it for in the present, those they hope to inspire in the future.

And as the national anthem ends, the line of Sammarinese breaks out in animation - applause, fist bumps, and hugs.

It is a moment loaded with raw emotion. The passion, meaning, and belonging. A celebration of place and people, no matter how few. No matter how small.

You can’t help but feel it too. And understand that it matters. So much.

It is that understanding that has kept UEFA doggedly sticking to their belief that all nations are equal. That all nations should be afforded the same opportunity to qualify for World Cups and European Championships. That a basic respect demands this.

But also, another tournament that promotes more competitive fixtures between nations, played across international dates in the football calendar that had been traditionally used for friendlies, could only ever be a positive.

It was a moment of inspired thinking, the creation of the Nations League, having an almost immediate positive knock-on effect in performance and results of lower ranked nations.

It is rare for one institution to create such a visionary concept. Rarer even still for another to buy in to it so whole-heartedly.

It took a doubletake in the newsagents at the airport. My killing time before my flight had found me aimlessly leafing through magazines. Any magazine. It didn’t matter. And there it was. A sticker album – Topps’ ‘The Road to UEFA Nations League 2022’.

Inside were blank spaces for the badges of every competing nation, the shirts of every competing nation, followed by pages showcasing goalkeepers, strikers, defenders, those with the ‘x-factor’, playmakers, veteran players – at least two from each country. San Marino, Liechtenstein, every country.

I bought the album, as many packets of stickers as I thought I could get away with without looking completely deranged with excitement and set about discovering who had been immortalised.

As a child the Panini World Cup sticker albums had been a necessary rite of passage, collecting the stickers of the great Brazilian team of Spain ’82, the Argentinians in Mexico ’86. But just as captivating to me were the also rans – El Salvador, Cameroon, Kuwait, Canada. Exotic sounding player names, wearing never before seen shirts, pictured in faraway, exotic stadiums. They held me with as much awe and wonder as Zico, Socrates, Tardelli, Maradona. Their stories, played out via cramped statistics beneath their sticker - how many times they had played for their country, the wild and wonderful names of the club sides they represented. I would wonder at what lay beyond the edges of each sticker. What the rest of the far-flung stadium in the background looked like. What their club team’s shirt, badge looked like.

These early exposures fired a life-long interest in football off the beaten path. Seeing the value, the magic in places visited not nearly enough.

And here, all these years later, an album that chose to focus as much on them as anyone from the more successful nations.

Opened packet after opened packet revealed Azerbaijan’s Ramil Sheydayev, Arber Zeneli of Kosovo, Noah Frick from Liechtenstein, Malta’s Teddy Teuma, Vadim Rata from Moldova, Vadislavs Gutkovskis of Latvia, Kazakhstan’s Baktiyar Zaynutdinov, Roy Chipolina from Gibraltar, Laifis Konstantinos of Cyprus, and one Elia Benedettini of San Marino.

A sticker album of such striking vision a perfect companion to a football tournament aimed at benefiting all.

And as both teams broke from their huddles before kick-off to take up their formations, Elia Benedettini (sticker number 35) jogged into his goal, while Malta’s Joseph Mbong (number 72) stretched his hamstrings by the centre-circle.

Adolfo Hirsch, San Marino substitute, sticker number 169, took his place on the bench. Then, when the whistle went, leant in. Looked on.

About the Book: Where is the joy in supporting or playing for a team that never wins? Mat Guy joins the Brigata Mai Uno Gioia (Never Any Joy Brigade) - San Marino’s ever faithful supporters - to explore the passion, pride and dedication of following their team, to places like Malta, Liechtenstein, Latvia and Moldova.

About the Author: Mat Guy lives in Southampton and writes non-fiction books about football far from the bright lights of the English Premier league, and fiction books of adventure and mystery. He can be found on X.

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What’s It About?

An immersive exploration of Spanish football, Pasión delves into the sport’s vibrant diversity and its unifying power across Spain’s many regions. Blending road-trip storytelling with interviews, Pereira uncovers how football reflects and shapes Spain’s complex cultural, political, and social identity. From the legendary successes of its big clubs to clubs that represent local barrios, it reveals why Spain has become a continental football powerhouse and how the beautiful game is woven into the nation’s very soul

Sounds Good. Tell Me More!

“Football is not just a game in Spain—it’s a tapestry woven into the very fabric of its cities, its people, its history.”

That idea pulses through every chapter of Pasión, Miguel Lourenço Pereira’s deeply felt and richly textured journey through Spanish football. It is also what elevates it beyond many other attempts to cover the Spanish game. Pasión is something more intimate, more layered; a travelogue through a country where football is culture, identity, memory, and defiance.

Pereira does something particularly effective: before introducing us to the clubs, he builds the social and historical backdrop of each region. You feel the Andalusian rhythm before Sevilla steps onto the page. You grasp the political weight behind the Basque clubs before a ball is kicked. This approach makes the club stories resonate more deeply. They’re not isolated tales, but threads in a larger, more meaningful tapestry.

The writing is smooth and never weighed down by over-explanation. Even when recounting complex histories, Pereira strikes a balance that is rich in detail but never dry. His enthusiasm is unmistakable, but never overbearing. You can tell he loves this subject, and that warmth flows through the pages. There is an eagerness there for others to appreciate it as much as he does.

Perhaps what’s most admirable is the breadth of his focus. The giants — Real Madrid and Barcelona — are here, of course, but Pasión takes equal care with clubs like Deportivo, Valencia, and even those in the lower leagues. It’s a book that will leave you appreciating the wholeness of Spanish football not just the glamour at the top, but the soul found in smaller towns and lesser-known grounds.

Even So…

Given how dominant Spain have been in recent years—particularly with the women’s national team winning the World Cup in 2023 and producing some of the most technically gifted players in the world—it is slightly disappointing that Pasión makes no mention whatsoever of the women’s game. At a time when Spanish women’s football is reshaping the global landscape and drawing unprecedented attention both domestically and abroad, its omission feels like a missed opportunity to explore one of the most transformative aspects of modern Spanish football.

Final Score

Pasión should come with a trigger warning: it will leave you yearning to book the next flight to Spain purely to immerse yourself in its football. Miguel Pereira captures the raw emotion of the Spanish game with such vivid detail that you can’t help but become emotionally involved. This is a great book - unapologetically passionate and deeply informed - the spiritual heir to Phil Ball’s classic history of the Spanish game Morbo. Like Ball, Pereira understands that football in Spain is never just about the game; it’s about identity, politics, pride, and poetry.

Pasión: A Journey to the Soul of Spanish Footbal by Miguel Lourenço Pereira is available from Pitch Publishing Ltd. A review copy was provided by the publisher

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What’s It About?

It is fair to say that Rodrigo Barneschi is fascinated by two things above all: his beloved Palmeiras and football fans, particularly those who opt to visit others’ stadia as opposing fans. The former feature heavily but, above all, this book is dedicated to the former.

Sounds Good. Tell Me More!

A chance childhood encounter with a bus full of singing fans rolling through enemy territory sparked a lifelong fascination in Barneschi. That fleeting moment of collective passion left such an impression that he has since spent much of his adult life chasing its echo.

In Outsiders, Barneschi documents that pursuit, devoting himself above all to Palmeiras, his beloved club, whose matches he never misses. But this book goes way beyond that, focusing on the broader obsession with being an outsider: the away supporter hoping to snatch three points on unfamiliar ground.

That obsession often demands long, grueling, and occasionally dangerous journeys. Sections of the book are dedicated to the elaborate tactics used to evade detection by hostile home fans, while others focus on the endless hours spent aboard buses snaking through the night.

Those journeys make for great experiences. They offer fleeting glimpses into unfamiliar towns, chance friendships forged in the haze of shared exhaustion, and moments of pure emotion that arise only when you're far from home, vastly outnumbered, and still singing louder than the rest. It's in these away days- half hardship, half adventure - that Barneschi finds meaning.

For him, the stature of the club being followed is irrelevant. What matters is the decision to show up, to take the risk, make the journey, and stand behind your team far from home. Even the defeats, he suggests, serve a purpose; they make the victories taste better.

What truly elevates Outsiders is Barneschi’s writing itself. He has a lyricist’s eye, capturing the poetry of even the most mundane moments. His gift lies in articulating thoughts and feelings that many football fans experience but few have ever managed to express.

Even So…

Although it is not an overt sentiment, there are moments when a subtle glorification of fan violence creeps in. Barneschi doesn't dwell on it, nor does he fully endorse it, but in recounting certain clashes and confrontations, there’s an undercurrent of admiration for the chaos and intensity that can erupt around the game. It’s a delicate line, and Outsiders occasionally walks it without fully interrogating the implications.

Final Score

Through Barneschi’s vivid storytelling and poetic eye, in Outsiders we’re given access to a world that many fans only glimpse from a distance: the packed buses, the whispered routes, the roar of the away end. Even if some aspects raise uncomfortable questions, the book’s honesty and passion are undeniable. For anyone who’s ever followed a team, stood in the rain with strangers, or felt that strange mix of pride and pain that only football can conjure, Outsiders gives life and meaning to those experiences.

Outsiders: A Football Fanatic’s South American Odyssey by Rodrigo Barneschi is available from Pitch Publishing Ltd. A review copy was provided by the publisher.

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What’s It About?

Dame Bola is an exploration of Argentina's unique relationship with football, examining how the sport’s language has deeply influenced everyday communication and identity. Readers gain an insight into how the game reflects and shapes life in Argentina, as they understand the cultural, historical, and linguistic significance of football terminology.

Sounds Good. Tell Me More!

There is a part in Nick Hornby’s iconic book Fever Pitch where he he muses on how fans often measure time not by calendar months but by the football season. That reflection has always stuck with me because how often I catch myself thinking purely in terms of season.

Football shapes how we think and talk. We say that we’ve scored an own goal when we do something foolish that comes back to bite us. Or tell our children that they need to keep their eyes on the ball when exams come around and they don’t feel like studying.

There are many more such instances where the English language has been shaped by football. But, it turns out, not as much as the impact that football has had on Argentine society and how they talk.

That notion certainly struck Christopher Hylland during his time living in South America where he found that not only was it much easier to use football as a way to start conversations but also that football sayings were much more commonly used even among those with little interest in the game.

It was that experience which inspired him to write Dame Bola which, at its heart is a phrasebook of all the most popular football based sayings and idioms that find their way in everyday language in Argentina. For each one there is an explanation of its origin along with the context in which it can be used.

Peppered in along the way are a series of anecdotes from Argentine football and the author's own experiences of living in Argentina. These stories infuse Dame Bola with character, adding vibrant color and playful charm that keep it from veering into the territory of an academic text.

Hylland also provides a rich historical backdrop, tracing the evolution of football in Argentina and illustrating how it has become a unifying force amid national triumphs and challenges.

Combined together, along with some later chapters looking at the origins of players’ nicknames as well as games that remain etched in the collective memory, these elements result in a thoroughly enjoyable book that offers valuable insights into both Argentine football fans - or hinchas - and the broader fabric of Argentinian society.

Even So…

The ease with which you can drop in and out of this book will appeal to many; this is not a book that has to be read in the order that it is written. Yet that might be off-putting for those looking for a continuous narrative about the Argentinian game. These would be better off checking out Jonathan Wilson’s masterful Angels With Dirty Faces or Hylland’s own Tears at La Bombonera.

Final Score

Dame Bola stands out as a thoughtful examination of how football transcends being just a sport in Argentina; it is a vital part of the national identity. Through its exploration of language, culture, and history, the book offers valuable insights into the heart of Argentine society, making it a thoroughly enjoyable read for anyone interested in understanding the deeper meanings behind the beautiful game.

Dame Bola: A Journey Through the Language of Argentinian Football by Christopher Hylland is available from Pitch Publishing Ltd. A review copy was provided by the publisher.

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What’s It About?

For over a decade, Dr Ian Graham led the data analysis team at Liverpool FC.  During that period the club was transformed into one where all decisions were data driven placing Graham at the heart of the action.  And, through this book, he shares how all of that was achieved.

Sounds Good.  Tell Me More!

It is not often that fans get to opportunity of a glimpse into what actually happens at a football club.  Player and manager biographies do occasionally offer some insight but often they try to focus on the more salacious stories that tend to boost sales.

This is different.  Ian Graham does not form part of the traditional football fraternity – indeed you get the distinct impression that even at a club like Liverpool data analysts are seen as something of an intruder – but he is definitely someone who has shaped the club’s trajectory.  It says much about how the game has evolved that he, like Michael Edwards and Barry Hunter, has become a familiar name among Liverpool fans.

That popularity is largely down to how the club went about building the squad that achieved such heights under Jurgen Klopp.  Sure, big money was spent on Alisson and Virgil Van Dyke, but the rest of the squad was put together by making bets that many others weren’t willing to take.  Andy Robertson and Gini Wijnaldum signed from a relegated side.  Sadio Mane bought from Southampton despite a supposedly problematic character.  And, of course, Mohammed Salah brought back to English football despite being a failure at Chelsea.

All of those signings went through the usual scouting sieve and made with Klopp’s blessing.  Yet, crucially, they were transfers approved by the data team that Graham led.  His work shaped the strategy and dictated which players were the best fit for Liverpool’s system.

That’s what makes this book particularly interesting.  Graham seems to have no qualms in describing both the circumstances and the reasoning behind most transfers.  Although most rumours had since filtered through, it is always pleasing to have them confirmed.

Not that How To Win The Premier League is missing the headline making titbits that push up sales.  Graham never speaks badly of Brendan Rodgers – in fact, he always provides some justification for his actions – yet the Northern Irishman’s strong headedness when it comes to signing players is clearly laid out in these pages.  From blindsiding those running the club by making it clear in his introductory press-conference that he wouldn’t work with a sporting director to his dogged pursuit of Christian Benteke, Graham shares the gossip that confirms what most fans had assumed about Rodgers.

Headline grabbing though such revelations might be, what’s more interesting are the titbits that reveal how Liverpool came to form their data theories.  Theirs was an iterative system where poor decisions were analysed and learned from.  The signing of Lazar Markovic taught them not to place to much weight on a league one which they didn’t have enough data.  Similarly, the failed signings of Iago Aspas and Luis Alberto showed that they needed to dig deeper into the character of the potential new players.

Reading of those mishaps it is easy to wonder whether Liverpool’s success was down to their reliance on data to confirm decisions are purely the presence of a coach of Jurgen Klopp’s calibre.  It is difficult to determine the weight of the data input had on those moves yet any club that keeps getting it right transfer window after transfer window – and Liverpool achieved precisely that – is bound to excel.

Data might not have been the only factor in their success but clearly it was an important one.  And, if others want to replicate it, they now have a manual on how to do so.

Even So…

Just like Liverpool’s defence in Klopp’s early years, this book would have benefited with some tightening albeit, in this case, of the narrative.  Far too often bits of the story are re-told at various points seemingly as if the author forgot that he had already mentioned them. 

There is also a fair bit disconnect from one chapter to another, particularly towards the end.  Some chapters – such as the debate about who is better between Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi – seem to be thrown in purely to add a bit of heft to the book.  I’m sure there are people out there for whom this debate is interesting but I’m not one of them.

I still enjoyed reading this quite a bit, but I have to admit that there were a couple of parts that I skipped over completely.

Final Score

Many have written about the data revolution that has washed over football in recent years.  None of those books, however, were penned by someone who was at the heart of one of the most admired data departments in the football world. 

Purely for that, this is worth reading. Yet this is not merely Graham’s way of patting his own back  whilst making some money off his experiences (although there is that as well); this is a genuine attempt to share what went on at Liverpool and educate the wider fan base on some of the finer points of data analysis.

What’s It About?

Net Gains explores how data analytics is transforming the world of football in much the same way it revolutionised baseball.  That might sound like a story you’ve heard before, but this book goes way deeper without ever decreasing the entertainment value.

Sounds Good.  Tell Me More!

There has been such an abundance of football books focusing on the emergence of data within the game that, after reading Rory Smith’s Expected Goals and Josh Williams’ Data Game (illuminating, particularly if you’re a Liverpool fan) I felt there wasn’t much to be gained from reading any more on the subject.

I was wrong.

Good as those books are (and, I repeat, they really are), the book on this topic that I’ve enjoyed the most was Ryan O’Hanlon’s Net Gains.

O'Hanlon dives into how clubs are increasingly relying on data to scout players, develop tactics, and make in-game decisions. The book also delves into the cultural resistance within the sport to adopting these methods and how the shift towards analytics is changing the game at every level.

He does so by talking to some of the pioneers of the use of data in the game, tracing the roots of various ideas and sharing the challenges those analysts faced to gain acceptance. 

And that is what makes Net Gains truly special.  It does not merely focus on the stars of the data revolution but also on the early evangelists and outsiders who pushed through their ideas.  More than that, it humanises those individuals and ensures that their role in data’s rise within football is not overlooked.

O’Hanlon even challenges the traditional view of the maligned Charles Reep, bringing to light just how brilliant some of his intuitions were, given the limited means that he had access to.

For all of that, O’Hanlon never allows himself to be so blinded by the subject that he errs into crediting it with powers it doesn’t have.  Data, whilst powerful and inevitable in the modern game, cannot be the answer to all problems and for all teams.

Not many authors can retain such lucidity.

Even So…

I got the feeling that Net Gains was published with the American market in mind which meant that certain aspects of the game were explained in detail that I don’t feel a football aware audience needs.  Also, I listened to this as an audio-book and the narrator clearly had no idea what he was speaking of, as evidenced by his butchering of some team and player names.

Final Score

If you’re going to read just one book about the rise in the use of data in football, then this is it.  Why you would limit yourself to just one book, I don’t know.  But it is my way of showing how much I liked Net Gains.