Red on Red: Liverpool, Manchester United and the fiercest rivalry in world football

By Phil McNulty and Jim White

The untold story of the most contested fixture in world football

‘A must read.’ Henry Winter

'Superb.' Daniel Taylor

Liverpool and Manchester. Two gloriously independent-minded, eclectic, culturally vibrant places. Yet the inhabitants dislike each other with a passion that is visceral. It is a divide that spans generations, across class, gender and ethnicity. And it has grown over the years, largely driven by one thing: football.

The dark, malignant loathing shared by the followers of Liverpool and Manchester United has seeped into every aspect of life in the two cities. Football is not a barometer of disdain, as it is in places like Glasgow or Istanbul or Moscow. In northwest England, it is the engine of animosity.

How did it come to this? Why did things turn so nasty? And what does it say about the two cities in which the clubs are based?

Written by a Scouser and a Manc in a rare collaboration, Red on Red addresses the divide by talking to those involved in ten seminal football matches. It speaks to the characters who patrolled and provoked the rivalry: Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish, Steven Gerrard and Gary Neville, among many others. Also questioned are the fans, the administrators, the referees, the police, and politicians. And through each legendary game, its authors tell the full story of the most extraordinary division not just in football, but in modern Britain.

This is Red on Red, a rivalry like no other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Aug 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008489175

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Source ISBN: 9780008489199

Ebook Edition © August 2022 ISBN: 9780008489175

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Dedication

To Bols, the best supporter.

Jim

To Lynne. For everything.

None of it would have happened without you.

Phil

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction – Who Cares About the Canal?

1 Treble Busters, 21 May 1977

2 I Call It Feral Football, 13 April 1985

3 It’s Like Vietnam Out There, 9 February 1986

4 Off Their Perch, 4 April 1988

5 It’s Still 18–7, 26 April 1992

6 Suits You, Sir, 11 May 1996

7 Who Put the Ball in the Scousers’ Net?, 24 January 1999

8 ‘Facts’ or Fiction: Did Rafa’s ‘Rant’ Cost Liverpool the Title?, 14 March 2009

9 When Luis Met Patrice, 15 October 2011

10 Ole’s at the Wheel, 19 January 2020

Epilogue – This Is the One

Acknowledgements

The Rivalry in Numbers

Picture Section

Book Credits

About the Publisher

Introduction

Who Cares About the Canal?

On the afternoon of 10 May 2021, the whiff of cordite in the air around Old Trafford football ground was so strong it was like the entire firework supply for Guy Fawkes Night, New Year’s Eve and Diwali had been set off at once.

Manchester United were due to play Liverpool in a pandemic-restricted, behind-closed-doors Premier League fixture, and since the early morning thousands of United fans had been gathering outside the stadium to protest against the club owners, the Glazer family, and their part in the attempted imposition of a European Super League.

The proposal had collapsed in disarray only the week before, but the fans were still furious at the contemptuous manner in which the Glazers had sought to impose a concept that nobody wanted. It was, those congregating on the Old Trafford forecourt reckoned, symptomatic of a bunch who treated the club as a personal cash machine. Flares were being lit, and the coloured smoke billowed so profusely that the statue of Denis Law, George Best and Sir Bobby Charlton around which the protest was gathering became lost in the choking pall. Placards and banners were flourished, and the message was clear and very loud: nobody wanted the Super League. More to the point, nobody wanted its architects, the Glazers.

‘Get them tossers out of our club,’ one protestor told a news crew. Nobody there was inclined to argue.

Ninety minutes before the match was due to kick off, a group of about a hundred managed to circumvent a half-hearted police cordon and find their way into a stadium that, because of anti-Covid measures, was empty apart from a few television technicians and members of the media. Thanks to the pandemic, fans hadn’t been inside this place for over a year, and the invasion force looked delighted to be renewing acquaintances. It was clear, even as they gained admission, that they did not have a plan as to what they should do next, other than to hurl a flare up at the platform serving as an outdoor Sky studio. So they wandered around on the pitch for a few minutes, staged an impromptu kickabout and took selfies as they cavorted on the sacred turf. Then they filed out. After all, they knew there wasn’t going to be much to see. Because by then the game had been called off by the authorities, who were fearful of further disruption.

In truth there was no real harm caused, no violence evident, nothing beyond some trespassing and breaking of the Covid restrictions. In many ways the response by Greater Manchester Police – who six months later instigated a series of noisy dawn raids on the homes of those involved – was laughable in its overreaction.

Meanwhile, as those outside the stadium were still absorbing the news of the abandonment of the match, a group of United followers started up a chant. It was nothing to do with the Glazers, the Super League or the remorseless way in which a cabal of wealthy football club owners were hauling the English game ever further from its working-class moorings. No, this was a song about Liverpool supporters and their relationship with work. A parody of the Anfield anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, it instructed the Merseyside fans to ‘sign on, sign on, with a pen in your hand, cos you’ll never get a job’.

To many observers it seemed a tin-eared intervention. Here was a swell of righteous anger about the way money was increasingly dominating football’s processes that had descended into boasting about the relative economic positions of the two cities of Manchester and Liverpool. But Peter Boyle, who, along with his son George, was there at the protest, understands why the chant was voiced.

Talking to us in a pub in south Manchester a few weeks later, Boyle, who has been watching United matches – and starting up United songs – for more than 40 years, says: ‘Listen, it wasn’t the brightest of things to do given the circumstances, I admit. But this was us against Liverpool. For them lads, no matter what’s going on in the rest of football, Liverpool will always be the number one enemy.’

Number one, top of the charts, the thing that matters. And it is an enmity that cuts both ways. When we contact the novelist, scriptwriter and Liverpool fan Kevin Sampson to gauge his reaction to the chant and those who sang it, the disdain is evident even in his emailed reply. ‘Honestly, I don’t expect anything more from them,’ he writes. ‘I fucking hate Man United.’

Sampson is a man in tune with the feelings of Liverpool supporters, so his words carry real resonance. He wrote the acclaimed ITV series Anne, based on the life of Anne Williams, who devoted her life to exposing the truth and delivering justice after the Hillsborough disaster at the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989 that eventually claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool fans. Anne’s 15-year-old son Kevin died in the disaster.

Indeed, on Merseyside there was little surprise such United sentiments had been voiced, whatever the circumstances. ‘The amount of times I’ve been in Manchester, they’ve heard my accent and it’s all watch your handbags, watch your wallets, the Scousers are here,’ says Brendan Wyatt, who was a leading member of Liverpool’s hooligan fraternity in the 1980s and these days runs the fashionable Transalpino retail outlet in the city’s Bold Street. ‘They call us all sorts. They call us bin-dippers, don’t they?’ He pauses for a moment and smiles. ‘Mind, I have to take that one on the chin, because I am an ex-professional shoplifter.’

The one thing the followers of both clubs share is that part of their identity is to loathe supporters of their red rivals above all others. On each side of the divide there are thousands like Wyatt, Sampson and Boyle who reserve maximum opprobrium for the other lot. And, as they scramble to occupy the moral high ground, all of them seem to relish the mutuality of contempt.

‘What I really love about the United–Liverpool thing,’ says Nooruddean Choudry, author of Inshallah United, a memoir of growing up a Muslim red, ‘is the fact they hate us as much as we hate them.’

Yet here is the oddity. This might be a loathing as profound as any in football, but there are none of the standard ingredients that generally underpin such antagonism.

There is, for instance, no history of religious divide, nothing of the sort that informs so much of Glasgow’s footballing hostilities. Or the one that festered in the early days of professional football on Merseyside, when the city of Liverpool was riven with sectarianism imported by Irish immigrants, and the Catholic north favoured Everton, while the Protestant areas in the south rallied to Liverpool.

Nor is there the whiff of historic – and current – politics at play, as when Barcelona and Real Madrid meet. And there is none of the simmering ethnic tension like when Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb used to battle in the old Yugoslav league.

There is not even any of the geographic claustrophobia of a local derby, of Spurs against Arsenal, or Aston Villa against Birmingham, or Sheffield United against Sheffield Wednesday, when rivalries marinade in the school playground and the workplace. These are two clubs, separated by 35 miles of the Mersey plain, whose followers cannot stand each other.

What divides them is something different, something other, something unique. This is an enmity that finds cause in fashion, music, nightlife, commerce and claims of wider cultural superiority. Even in mutual mockery of pronunciation.

‘I remember once, when I was reporting on a derby match in Serbia, I happened to meet up with half a dozen proper Scouse lads who were there for the game,’ recalls Andy Mitten, football writer and editor of the fanzine United We Stand. ‘We had a few drinks and I said, There’s something I’ve always wanted to know: why can’t you pronounce chicken right? Because they can’t, can they, Scousers?’

He makes an exaggerated glottal stop in an attempt to say the word like a Liverpudlian, rolling the ‘k’ round the back of his throat, hacking and hawking as he does so. ‘When I did that, they just came straight back at me, saying, Yeah, well why can’t you say the word yellow? What’s all this yell-oh?,’ he says, sounding like Liam Gallagher after a rough night out. ‘So it cuts both ways.’

It does. The actor Robbie O’Neill, who grew up in Halewood in the nineties, is a regular at Anfield. ‘I had a totally negative outlook on Manchester, particularly as a teenager,’ he tells us. ‘We used to sing Manchester is full of shit, so in my mind I genuinely thought it had sewage running down Deansgate. And the more United started to dominate then, you just assumed them to be arrogant. You just think anyone who is elite, in politics or anything, is arrogant. If you rule you are a snob. Snooty bastards: I hated them.’

David Scott, the poet and musician who performs under the very Mancunian name Argh Kid and is a regular at Old Trafford, grew up in Longsight, a no-nonsense inner-city Manchester quarter. He recalls being a boy and watching the television soap Brookside, set in a Merseyside cul-de-sac, with his United-supporting father. During every episode he would routinely be informed that everyone in Liverpool was a thief and a wastrel, lazy and untrustworthy. In short, a bin-dipper. So significant a place did the rivalry have in the Scott household that, for his fourteenth birthday present in 1995, David’s dad bought him a ticket for United’s fixture at Anfield and sent him off there on his own.

‘I’d never been to the city before, never met a Scouser,’ he says. ‘I genuinely thought I was going to alien territory. And I remember arriving at Lime Street station thinking I was Frodo in Lord of the Rings, running across Stanley Park being chased by Orcs. I still call Anfield Mordor. When I got back home my dad was like, You’re a man now, son. It was almost a Manc rite of passage.’

Andy Mitten has been to Liverpool’s stadium dozens of times over the years to follow United; he would undoubtedly have been there on the day of Scott’s initiation. He too has many a tale of the hostility that fizzes whenever the two clubs meet: verbal and physical, relentless and unyielding. He has experienced little to match it throughout his extensive football travels. ‘I stood outside Liverpool’s main stand before the 2016 Europa League game with United, which was probably the best atmosphere I’ve ever seen at Anfield,’ he recalls. ‘And I went up to a lad and said, Can I ask you a few questions for a United fan podcast? He just looked at me and said, I’d rather cut my liver out. There was no friendliness, there was no joke; he meant it.

‘And I respect that.’

Not that respect is often to the fore in this inter-city dispute. Or even in much of Mitten’s own approach to the divide. ‘I cringe when somebody passes away and all these Liverpool fans put tweets out saying You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ he says. ‘I kid you not, there was a bloke who had trekked solo to the South Pole who was a Liverpool fan and died, and there were loads of tweets ending in YNWA. But he fucking did. He literally walked there alone.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Brendan Wyatt when such assumptions of self-absorption are put to him. ‘All that a pigeon dies in Stanley Park and the Scousers make a banner in its memory bollocks. That’s what they call us, isn’t it? Self-pity City.’

And so it goes on. On the pitch it can be no less fraught. For the players involved when Liverpool play United, there is not just a deeper meaning to the fixture than when they play Crystal Palace or Aston Villa: this is a game more significant even than meeting Everton or Manchester City respectively.

‘It just felt that my whole childhood was ruined by Liverpool, consumed by Liverpool,’ Gary Neville, who never played club football for anyone other than Manchester United, tells us. ‘I went to United from the age of five with my dad in K Stand and we were always the nearly team. We were always last piece of the jigsaw this summer and we’re nearly there. But we were really nowhere near. Liverpool won everything. You become quite bitter. You have thoughts which are nasty and beyond what you should have.’

Danny Murphy felt it from the other direction. Brought up in Chester, as a boy he was a regular on The Kop, long before he was signed from Crewe by the club he loved. ‘When I started going to the games against United, you’d hear the horrible songs that were sung about Munich and Shankly,’ he says. ‘Those songs, that animosity, that hatred was always there. And when I became a player, United were the be-all and end-all. I remember the first game I played against them at Old Trafford. I was only told I was playing at the last minute, after Karl-Heinz Riedle did his back in getting his bag off the coach, so you can imagine how I felt. I was sick in the toilet at half-time. I remember our coach Ronnie Moran knocking on the door, asking if I was all right, but I couldn’t speak because I was being sick. Maybe it was nervous energy. Who knows? That’s what it meant to me.’

Liverpool and Manchester are both independently minded, eclectic, culturally vibrant places – two cities far more alike than they might care to admit. And they have many shared principles, of radical politics and collectivism, of trade unionism and community values. Someone in Manchester is as likely to enjoy The Beatles as a Liverpudlian will Oasis.

Liverpool’s defensive titan Virgil van Dijk is serenaded by fans in a chant that adapts the tune of the great Manchester hymn Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. Yet ask a Liverpudlian what they reckon of the other lot and words like swanky, snooty, superior will be used. While Mancunians stereotype Scousers as work-shy, self-righteous, self-mythologising criminals.

It is a divide that persists across generations, across class and ethnicity. You are as likely to be told by a Mancunian high court judge to watch your car when in Liverpool as you are to be warned by a Liverpool bus driver to mind your accent when you go to Harvey Nichols in Manchester or they’ll accuse you of shoplifting.

But the thing is, it is a societal split driven by one thing: football. And not just football, but football played by two clubs: Manchester United and Liverpool. There is no such loathing visible between the other football entities in the region. Everton and United fans don’t hate each other in this way; nor do Liverpool and Manchester City fans, despite the growing competition on the pitch in recent years. In fact, as was evidenced when their managers Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp embraced after a riveting 2022 league fixture, when both clubs were pursuing a treble, the feeling is one of mutual respect: a love-in rather than a scrap. Both rather enjoy having a mutual enemy in the Old Trafford club.

But Liverpool and United is different. It is the dark, malignant loathing shared by the followers of the two red teams that has seeped into every aspect of life in the two conurbations. In north-west England football is not a barometer of disdain, as it is in places like Glasgow, Istanbul or Moscow. It is the engine of animosity.

There are those who suggest the rivalry is rooted in history, that it is just the modern expression of the fact that these are two cities forever absorbed in reciprocal suspicion. Liverpool was the first to prominence, the glorious Georgian architecture that blooms across its centre an illustration of the wealth it derived from trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of that trade, though, involved human cargo. It was a business many in Manchester found distasteful.

The anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson gained much support in Manchester, amassing the biggest collection of signatures for a petition supporting a ban on the slave trade, which he was planning to present to Parliament. But when, in 1787, he turned up to speak in Liverpool, hoping to gather more signatories, an angry mob of locals almost killed him. As he hurried from the city’s boundaries he was informed that no one in Liverpool was keen on being lectured to by supercilious Mancunian interlopers.

If he had waited another 40-odd years, Clarkson could at least have returned home by train. By 1830 the two cities were linked by the world’s first public railway, built and run by George Stephenson. The great engineer’s idea was revolutionary: he hoped that Manchester and Liverpool would, driven by steam-powered connectivity, eventually merge into a single economic engine, one whose combined wealth-creation would easily match that of London. This was the Northern Powerhouse 190 years before the austerity-loving chancellor George Osborne claimed to have invented the term.

Sadly, riding the line now it barely seems to have been improved since 1830, a dismal reminder of the chronic underfunding in the public infrastructure of the north. And Stephenson’s concept of one giant city long ago drifted into obscurity. Partly because there was no desire in either place to come together: local pride insisted they would be better off alone. The local burghers preferred to invest their money in grandstanding architectural statements like Liverpool’s glorious riverside Liver Building and Manchester’s spectacular Town Hall, structures intended to offer bragging rights about local municipal superiority.

The increased connectivity that followed the railway did little to suppress animosity. There was a snobbery among Liverpool’s merchant classes about Manchester’s grubby new way to make money in its industrialised cotton mills. And the feeling was mutual: Mancunians sneered about Liverpudlians’ suspicion of getting their hands dirty.

What really ripened the division between the cities, however, was the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894. Ordered by Manchester cotton merchants fed up with the duties they had to pay to use Liverpool port, it was a pointed and deliberate attempt to circumvent their rivals. When the canal was opened, the Liverpool Daily Post mocked: ‘Manchester is going to throw £10 million into a big ditch.’

But it was a successful – albeit enormously costly – manoeuvre, one that changed the relative economic positions of the two urban areas, and one celebrated still in Manchester’s coat of arms, the reason why both the city’s football clubs have a ship on their crest.

Not that the canal worried the seven Liverpool and United players on Good Friday 1915. Sensing that the war was about to curtail competitive football, they got together ahead of a league fixture and conspired to fix the result. United, facing relegation, were to win against the odds. Liverpool, comfortable in mid table, had nothing to lose. The seven – with the encouragement of gangland figures in both cities – backed United heavily at the bookies and cleaned up when they won. Not that they had much long-term enjoyment of their winnings: all seven were banned for life when their plot was exposed.

By the 1930s, though, as the depression undermined northern economies equally, mutual decline in both places brought about far more mixing of the populations. Every Saturday night, Cross Lane in Salford, a street lined with some 18 bars, would welcome specially chartered charabancs filled with Liverpudlians making the 35-mile trip because Manchester licensing rules allowed pubs to stay open half an hour later than on Merseyside. And in the 1960s, Mancunians would regularly head in the opposite direction to enjoy the burgeoning Liverpool music scene.

By the 1980s, as post-industrial recession took hold, both cities set themselves up in opposition to London rather than each other, convinced the Westminster government of Margaret Thatcher had deliberately starved them of resources. Manchester supported Liverpool’s bid to become European Capital of Culture; Liverpool was right behind Manchester hosting the Commonwealth Games. It was us against them. Citizens of both places came to regard themselves as different and detached; among United and Liverpool fans alike there remains a sizable proportion who regard the England national team as something to be disparaged.

This is not an unusual similarity of approach. The population of the two cities is more alike than they would care to admit: proud, belligerent, imaginative, there is far more that unites them than divides. Both cities have significant Irish immigrant communities, both have jarring internal divisions between rich and poor; they both have huge potential. Both cities have been at the creative heartbeat of the nation: their music, their art, their industrial inventiveness renowned across the globe.

The history of both cities is equally rich, equally bold, equally individual. However, Dave Scott has a swift retort to any suggestion that such history lies behind the mutual loathing of the two football clubs. ‘All this stuff regarding canals and that – nobody gives a shit about that nowadays,’ he says. ‘It’s great for a story, but nobody really cares. This rivalry, it’s much, much more recent than that.’

Phil Chisnall is not a name that figures high in the history of Manchester United and Liverpool.

As resonance goes, his moniker offers little in comparison to names like Cantona or Dalglish, Gerrard or Scholes, Ronaldo, Van Dijk, Salah or Rashford. Yet Chisnall, who died in March 2021, took to the grave with him a unique distinction in the history of the two clubs.

In August 1964, the 22-year-old inside forward was transferred from Old Trafford to Anfield. The deal was sorted in a quick phone call between the two club managers, Matt Busby of United and Liverpool’s Bill Shankly. Shankly was in need of a recruit in Chisnall’s position and his close friend Busby was only too happy to help. At £25,000 it was a routine transfer, not one to hold the back page for. This, after all, was not Best on the move.

Nor, as it turned out, were Liverpool buying the new Ian St John: in his three seasons on Merseyside, Chisnall made eight first-team outings and scored just the one goal, before moving on to Southend United and finally winding up his career at Stockport County.

More than five decades later, however, someone who should be no more than a footnote in the history of both clubs stands alone. Because this man – who, after he retired, earned his living doing shifts at the Soreen malt loaf bakery in the Manchester suburb of Urmston – was the last player to be transferred directly between the two clubs.

To put Chisnall’s record into perspective, in the fifty-eight years since he moved, ten players have moved directly between arch-rivals Barcelona and Real Madrid, five have jumped the chasm-like Glasgow divide between Celtic and Rangers, and five men have been manager of both of Istanbul’s bitter rivals Besiktas and Galatasaray. Yet nobody else has made the journey between United and Liverpool since he did. Phil Chisnall was the last.

‘I really couldn’t see it ever happening,’ says Mitten. ‘And actually I love the fact it will never happen. Everything seems to have a price in football these days. But there are some things that can’t ever be bought, that won’t ever be bought.’

The Chisnall stat indicates that this is less the routine collision between successful footballing entities, and more a complete loathing, one that stretches from the stands, through the dressing rooms and dugouts, right up to the boardrooms. And it is a loathing that has grown over the years, marinating in spite.

In 1964, when Chisnall swapped clubs, there was none of the institutionalised antagonism that characterises meetings today. Police leave wasn’t cancelled on match days back then.

And, while policing has become more alert to the issues over the years and those attending such fixtures can, in the 2020s, enter the stadium without the same fear as was current in the eighties, the feeling engendered when Liverpool take on Manchester United has only grown more tense, more febrile, more vitriolic. True, these days much of the rivalry is conducted on social media. But for the fans there is little in football that can match the mutual disdain on show on the days when Old Trafford or Anfield are surrounded with a ring of security.

Each side of the divide has its rituals, its mockery; each side considers itself to occupy the moral high ground. When, during United’s woeful visit to Anfield in April 2022, the home crowd joined in warm sympathetic applause for the visiting Cristiano Ronaldo, who had just lost his infant son, for a moment it seemed mutual respect had broken out. But it didn’t last. Moments later, after the Liverpool fans had chanted the dismissive Fergie’s right your fans are shite United’s responded with The Sun was right, you’re murderers, an ugly reference to the newspaper’s scandalous reporting of the Hillsborough disaster. It was an intervention for which the United hierarchy felt obliged to apologise.

Respect is an entirely absent concept. And tellingly, while fans of other clubs routinely disparage United and Liverpool’s historically diverse geographical support, when the two teams in red meet it is wholly a matter of Scouse vs Manc.

On the pitch and off it, pride prickles, boots fly, tempers break. The tension grips, the atmosphere intoxicates. Like a prize fight between two heavyweights, the air crackles with meaning. This is a fixture that matters.

How did it come to this? How did such dislike spread beyond the confines of the football pitch into society at large? What lies behind the fury? Over the course of this book, we intend to find out.

Phil’s Story

If you are fortunate enough, as I was, to be born in Liverpool, the strength of feeling between your birthplace and the city located 35 miles to the east is inescapable. Like the iconic Liver Birds that tower over the waterfront and nod towards the River Mersey as a reminder of its rich maritime history, it cannot be ignored.

Liverpool and Manchester may be separated only by a stretch of the M62, but measured in football context that length of tarmac might as well be the Atlantic Ocean.

If you have covered that rivalry as a football reporter, as I have since 1987, it becomes a constant in your life. It provides an endlessly rich seam of drama and storylines that live permanently near the top of the sport’s agenda and pretty much daily in your professional thought processes.

One of my earliest assignments as a sports journalist, as ‘interim’ chief football writer for the great Liverpool Daily Post morning newspaper, was being dispatched to Old Trafford on Easter Monday 1987 for the meeting between Manchester United and Liverpool.

Liverpool were fighting for the title with neighbours Everton, who had established a small but significant advantage.

United won a largely undistinguished game with a late, very late, Peter Davenport goal. The roars around ‘The Theatre of Dreams’ in those formative days of the Alex Ferguson era were loud enough at the final whistle.

And yet, driving at this intense, bitter rivalry, the Stretford End’s predictable gloat-fest was but a whisper compared to the explosion of sound that greeted news from Goodison Park that Everton had beaten Newcastle United 3–0, meaning events at Old Trafford had effectively killed Liverpool’s title aspirations.

United’s fans celebrated as if sabotaging