It’s time to tell a story—a retrospective that has been circling in my head constantly these last few days. Essentially, it is my answer to a “why”: an attempt to trace the cause behind the birth of feelings I had never known before, after events that perhaps shouldn’t carry such weight in my everyday life.
I’m living through the fourth decade of my life. I keep feeling more and more mature—not in the sense of the “seriousness” that comes with adding candles to a birthday cake, but in the sense of the importance I give to life itself, to its meaning. The changes of recent years show me that we never truly stop changing; on the contrary, as we grow older we change more, and faster—and that is, in fact, quite an optimistic process. And yet, there are some things that remain stable and never leave our lives; it’s just that their quality changes, along with us, or alongside us.
One of the things that follows us through life is that strange “love” for a football team. It is strange because it doesn’t come from any objective criteria. When it comes to teams that win trophies, or that have countless supporters where you grow up, there is an obvious explanation. But there is another phenomenon—one not traditional to football, because it counts only a few decades—the phenomenon of supporting a team that plays in another country, in a city you’ve never visited and don’t plan to visit any time soon. What can make you support such a club with passion, without having even caught the smell of its stadium, without knowing the traits of its supporters? Why choose to pledge yourself to it?
These are questions some people answer “easily”. They find all of this fake and hypocritical. But if we set aside the need to convince them—which is not a real need at all—the question remains: why support a team so far away, and so often identify with it? Why feel sad, anxious, and in the end shed tears?
That is what I want to answer with this story. So I will tell it exactly as it is, without caring about proving myself on some imaginary “supporter-meter”. After all, each person’s relationship with the team they support is a matter strictly for two: the supporter and the team.
1996
In the 1990s we didn’t have the ability to watch matches from all over Europe. At least not to the extent we do today—and certainly anyone who didn’t have the newly arrived Filmnet had to settle for highlights shown by sports programmes on state or private free-to-air television. That’s how the Premier League entered our homes too, alongside a few recorded matches.
So it was 11 May 1996, when I was getting ready to go to the party for my 9th birthday—which had been two days earlier, but because it fell on a weekday the party couldn’t happen on Thursday and was moved to Saturday. That Saturday, however, was also the FA Cup final: a classic derby between Liverpool and Manchester United, at the legendary old Wembley.
It was the era of Ferguson’s United, at its peak, with Cantona as leader—trademark collar turned up. And in Greece, foreign team shirts and player shirts had already begun to appear little by little; most of them were, of course, knock-offs, because buying the authentic kit was far beyond the economic reality of that Greek society. If there was one shirt you could see easily and often on the street, it was definitely Cantona’s: Manchester United’s number 7.
And yet, in that final, something told me I didn’t want to support the Frenchman’s team. I liked the opponents more. One could say it was partly a matter of sound, even of the name: Liverpool always felt more majestic to me. I had, of course, no idea who this team was, how many titles it had won, and I gave little importance to the Champions League—where Panathinaikos had reached the semi-finals by beating Legia Warsaw in a swamp of a pitch.
Liverpool eventually lost the final, 1–0, with a goal by Cantona in the 87th minute. I didn’t manage to see the goal live, but I watched it that night when we came back, because I had recorded the match on VHS. I didn’t like the result, but it didn’t make me withdraw my support—my utterly metaphysical support—for this team called Liverpool. From that day on, whenever someone spoke about Cantona and United, I replied that I was Liverpool.
Very quickly I found my own hero too: a player I liked far more than the angry Frenchman. An unbelievable, almost mad striker—not with the Mediterranean kind of madness, but the British kind—scored goals as if he were at the playground pulling pranks on his friends. How could I have known then that the man who became the reason I found my first football idol would become one of the most cult-beloved figures of the football decades I grew up in?
His name was Robbie Fowler—and even the fact that his surname sounded a bit like foul to me set off lights in my head, making me want him to score his crazy goals that I watched on Athlitiki Kyriaki or some other highlights show from England.
As for the league title—no chance. Obviously Manchester would always win it. They were the best team then, but who cares? Besides, in Greece, was I supporting the team that won the league? Thankfully I grew up in a city where we learned not to support teams for trophies; and that may have been another reason to support Liverpool, finding a kind of correspondence.
Another reason may have been that, that same year, my team in Greece—PAOK—had its worst season in its history, finishing 14th. Inevitably, that pushed me to look elsewhere for the thrills football was no longer giving me. At that age, such a bad and indifferent season matters a lot: you’ve only been watching football for four or five years, and even fewer years actually understanding it—so one year feels like an endless stretch of time, almost permanence.
1997…
Fortunately, PAOK returned to normal the following season, earning a European ticket in 1997—UEFA Cup football. There couldn’t have been a better development. If United “permanently” won the league in England, then beloved Liverpool were a UEFA Cup team, and there was a chance they might come to play at Toumba. Sadly—or perhaps happily—another English team came to Toumba and PAOK wrote one of its most special European stories; but Liverpool remained something beloved yet distant—so distant that I couldn’t even watch them.
The next year, alongside Fowler and in front of McManaman—whom I had also seen at the Euros with England for the first time, since they were absent from the 1994 World Cup—another striker appeared: Owen. Three Liverpool players with distinct characteristics had already won my affection, and I can say I knew more Liverpool players I never actually watched than the names on shirts going around school and beyond: Cantona, Bergkamp, Beckham later on.
The Champions League was growing in those years, preparing to include more teams from the football “developed” countries. But Liverpool were always absent. I had to search for them in the UEFA Cup, where many matches were played in the middle of the day. Back then, to watch the Cup Winners’ Cup or the UEFA Cup you had to be lucky: your team needed to be playing a Greek side, or at least to have reached the semi-finals. In 1998 and 1999 Liverpool weren’t in that bracket—and in 2000 they didn’t even play in Europe.
2001…
In 2001, another European team had started to gather a lot of my sympathy and eventually became yet another club I support: Cúper’s Valencia reached a second consecutive Champions League final with an incredible Latin team that ended empty-handed both times. Thankfully, that year I finally got to see Liverpool in Europe—and learn their players.
Long before the final, in the third round, they had drawn Olympiacos. But because UEFA Cup matches happened at all sorts of hours and often overlapped, the only match I remember watching in that round was PAOK against PSV. I have no clear memories of the later rounds, but I do remember that in the final I knew quite a few Liverpool players—without remembering exactly how and why. In any case, five years after that first contact, with the club having a stronger European run and with me now fourteen, I could understand much more.
The night of 16 May 2001 was exactly one week after my birthday. I don’t remember my birthday well—actually, not at all—but I remember that night perfectly. I locked myself in my room with a small 14-inch TV to watch the final at the Westfalenstadion, against the season’s great surprise, Alavés, whose only player I knew was Jordi Cruyff.
I clearly remember several players from that Liverpool side: Babbel, Hyypiä, Carragher, McAllister, Gerrard, Heskey, Owen, Šmicer, Berger, and Fowler. Gerrard was a little devil who seemed destined to win my admiration—after McManaman’s departure and at a time when Fowler wasn’t in the form he’d been in five years earlier.
What happened in that incredible final—decided by a golden goal after a mad 4–4 in regular time—many people remember. What I certainly couldn’t understand back then, with my limited football experiences (as a TV viewer, of course), was that there would truly be a reason to write about it eighteen years later. If in 1996 I had made a random choice of team, then in 2001 I sealed it by watching that match.
The Champions League final that followed a week later felt like a small event compared to Liverpool’s triumph, with that Geli own goal in extra time. It was also the first European trophy won by a team I loved. Yes—I wasn’t supporting them for trophies, but surely such images help the idea of supporting a great club lodge itself in a still almost-childish, at least early-teen mind.
In those years, entering adolescence and… the internet, I began to understand more about the club I supported anyway—things that made me like it more, even love it. I began to understand that Liverpool aren’t simply a big English team: they are the team of the working class in an industrial city with a hugely important port. I learned about the hero of my childhood, Robbie Fowler, who lifted up his shirt in support of the dockers’ strike—and got fined for it, because modern football is “no politica”.
That’s when I understood that in England, club colours are not random. The shipowners of London had blue Chelsea; the workers in that same city, employed in arms production, created Arsenal’s “Gunners”. An illustrated book a friend gave me, titled Dirty Football, taught me that the original name of Manchester’s red club was Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company of Newton Heath—founded by the workers who built that railway. That same book (which I wholeheartedly recommend to younger and older readers alike) also taught me very basic things about the homeland of football, England, and the sport’s evolution: from its split with medieval football and rugby, to the birth of association football (or soccer) and the development of its rules—things many of today’s supposed “experts” otherwise ignore.
2004
From then on, I had a small fetish: I wanted to find that red shirt with Carlsberg. I didn’t know what Carlsberg meant; I thought it was something Liverpool-related. Later I learned it was beer—one that isn’t even English. As an aside: when I want a light beer, usually while watching matches, Carlsberg is the best choice. I don’t know whether the sponsor on the red shirt played a role, but it became so classic on it that it passed into legend in the history of football images.
Unfortunately, even though authentic shirts began to flood sports shops in the 2000s, I couldn’t find Liverpool’s anywhere. It was neither Nike nor Adidas, and a Reebok kit was hard to push. Who could have known that fifteen-plus years later there would be exactly the same problems with that shirt, now a hard-to-find treasure? But finally, summer 2004 came and I found it. It was the kit from the season that had just finished, but it didn’t matter. I now had a red shirt sponsored by Carlsberg, a little too big for me—but we wore shirts big back then—ready for European nights, because Liverpool were… in the Champions League!
The year everyone bought the Greece national team shirt, I was looking for Valencia’s shirt, Rafa Benítez’s Valencia that was sweeping everything in Spain and Europe—and I ended up finding Liverpool’s shirt of… Rafa Benítez. His path from one of my beloved teams to another was one of the strangest things that happened to me, because I didn’t know whether I should be sad or celebrating. In any case, he was among the managers who had won a European match inside Anfield, and that meant something. I don’t know how many more like that there have been in recent decades.
That season I had to wait until December to watch my first match on TV from Anfield. I had heard of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, but I didn’t know the song at all. I saw it on the crest as a slogan; I printed it and stuck it on notebooks and books; but I imagined it as a deafening chant inside the stadium. That day I heard it for the first time, from the Kop.
On the pitch that night was a Greek team—the team that “had” to lose so Liverpool could qualify (and so Olympiacos could be eliminated). And the script arrived in the most… Liverpool way. Olympiacos scored the necessary goal, so Liverpool needed three to go through; and then the bombardment began. That day I understood, for the first time, what Anfield’s downhill slope means. Gerrard’s goal is one of the most moving moments of my life: I remember celebrating it wildly with my brother in our living room.
2005
It was the year of the Panhellenic exams, and for that reason I couldn’t watch every match. Not because I was studying, but because I was going to cram school. If I knew how much time I lost at cram school I would never have gone—but that’s another story.
That year the match I remember most among those I never actually watched took place—one of the funniest stories. I had managed to watch matches from the Champions League knockouts, and the most interesting of all was the semi-final second leg at Anfield against Chelsea. Abramovich had bought the London club a few years earlier and turned it into the new nouveau-riche armada, bringing in as manager the winner of the previous Champions League, José Mourinho—then considered the lord of tactics and modern football.
But “modern” and nouveau-riche football was beaten by a Luis García goal, and Liverpool were finally heading to a final in the great competition. Perhaps it was then that I learned Liverpool had already won the European Cup four times, although I did know that “back in the day” they had won many English league titles.
To tell the truth, the dates were terrible. The final was at the newly built Atatürk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul on Wednesday night, 25 May—and on Thursday morning, 26 May, I had my General Biology exam a few hundred kilometres to the west. If I say I was studying during the match, I would be lying; but I decided to avoid watching, because it would completely throw me off the mood and focus I needed to write… terribly. I remember going to the living room at some point and seeing Milan leading 3–0. It was deeply awkward, because I felt as if it were happening for me, so I wouldn’t pay attention and would focus on my own “finals”. Still, when the score began to change, my family kept informing me.
I have no idea what exactly happened that night; I barely lived it in the way every supporter of this club has lived it. And yet I remember every moment and the way I learned each swing of the score—those scenes are carved into my mind in a way I doubt I’ll ever forget. When I heard the penalties were over, I turned on the small TV in my room to watch the trophy presentation. I needed to see that moment, because for the first time a team I supported was lifting the big cup.
The scene of United in 1999 lifting the trophy had stayed with me since childhood as something like an unreachable dream. The scene of Gerrard lifting the same cup—after an even greater comeback, with far more passion—crumpled the very idea of “unreachable” in my head. Liverpool had already given me a huge lesson, one I wouldn’t write in the exams, but one I would need to relearn many times later—and that inspiration was enough.
2006…
After winning the big cup came a major change in my life: the shift from school years to student years. Watching football dropped drastically, because suddenly I could do so many more things each day that I had never been able to do within the school routine. The football madness that used to be central stepped a little aside, making room for other interests and for equally interesting people I met in the new reservoir of personalities called university.
At the same time, European football gained another layer of interest for me: a third club I loved beyond Greece’s borders—Napoli. I wished them the best because they were Maradona’s team, but I couldn’t follow them in the lower divisions of Italian football. My engagement with topics around Latin culture and geography led me to follow the football with a clear home base: Spain. A trip to Latin America, my passion for the history and culture of Argentina—those factors pushed English football into the background, as it went through the childhood illness of “Portuguese-itis”, with Mourinho and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Around that time even Liverpool turned into a small Spanish colony, yet they still excelled in Europe and reached the Athens final. The opponent again: Milan. I remember that match very well, and I remember the sense of emptiness when it ended—as if we never truly fought it, perhaps only in the last minutes when we nearly pulled off another epic comeback. But Spanish Liverpool couldn’t repeat, in Attica, the epic of the City.
That was when the decline began. I remember Kyrgiakos as a starting defender, even wearing the captain’s armband in one match—moments you think must be temporary, because you know the size of the club, but which also keep you from going completely mad, because they are so tragicomic they can’t possibly be real. I would check the English table with bitterness, often searching for my beloved team in the middle of the standings. As we approached 2010 things got worse and worse. That may not be fully captured by final league positions, but the reasons this club could move you were missing—and disappearing fast.
That’s when I sat down to find the reason why this great club of the past couldn’t return to the top of the domestic league—overtaking the strong Manchester United and Arsenal of the time, the nouveau-riche Chelsea, and the even more nouveau-riche Man City. I understood that the person who had destroyed Liverpool had a name and a surname; that behind footballing decline there was political background and confrontation. If there is one human being I learned to hate through supporting Liverpool, it is Thatcher—and I always enjoyed the chant “we’re gonna have a party when Maggie …”. Of course I celebrated in April 2013.
I learned about Heysel and Hillsborough, with as much detail as I could, and I understood to some degree what was really going on behind those tragedies—both of which Liverpool paid for more than anyone, as a scapegoat, while in truth being the victim of both circumstances.
2013…
In 2013 I discovered another sport. I had already been in France for a few years and finally had the luck to learn what rugby is. I obviously knew it wasn’t American football—something I still can’t believe most Greeks refuse to understand, especially film subtitle translators—but I didn’t know the sport’s characteristics or the culture around it. Learning rugby helped me understand football better too. The predictable English Premier League game of those years made sense in light of its failure to stand out beyond its borders, where the also predictable but technical game of Spanish teams dominated on one side, and the cynical football of the Germans on the other.
I can say rugby appeals to me more as an athletic phenomenon, but football remains more interesting as a social phenomenon—and therefore can deliver greater emotion. Many people think that when they deal with football, they deal with sport. In my view, that is a serious mistake. Beyond the fact that they have no idea about training, work, team organisation, and all the things that form the iceberg’s base while we only see the tip on the grass on matchday, they imagine that focusing on administration, players’ psychology, and “talent” is what makes a team stand out.
Active involvement with a sport that shares the same roots as football—and is in fact closer to those roots (medieval English football)—helps one understand why, in the modern era, the Latin American model of pure magic and talent cannot stand on its own. That model could exist as long as it was combined with immense mental reserves and players who carried social origins onto the pitch. Once footballers became professional millionaires, what you need is a footballing-athletic plan, enormous work, absolute commitment to individual and collective goals, and minds capable of organising this, above all, as a sporting project.
2015…
In 2015 came the answer I needed, to regain faith in a vision that this time was deep, deep red: a team unlike any other, capable of expressing on the pitch all the traits the club carries in its culture, and building an athletic plan that would lead the beloved club back to the top—not as a firework, but this time to stay there, the way their eternal rival United did in the Ferguson era.
The embodiment of that plan has a name: Jürgen Klopp. I always admired Klopp—and if there was one thing I didn’t like, it was only that he coached German teams, which I cannot support under any circumstances, though I respect the culture of that great footballing school.
Klopp was (and is) the right man to make Liverpool Liverpool again: a threat in England and Europe; a passionate team; an Anfield “downhill slope” where no one can feel comfortable. The fact that even today Klopp’s Liverpool have not been eliminated in the European competitions they have played—making it 3 out of 3 final appearances—says everything.
2016
There are moments, however, when the quality of things changes. The vision takes flesh again, and optimism leads you to follow a path that can deliver emotion. Such a turning point was the meeting with Dortmund that spring, in the Europa League. In the second leg, I still firmly believe the most perfect execution of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” ever heard inside Anfield took place.
That match—where I didn’t even know Liverpool’s starting XI—was a landmark. It was the beginning of the new era, and a powerful shot at all the Klopp-outs. I don’t know how many people hurried to write off that team at 0–2 inside the first ten minutes, but what I’ve learned from football in general is that no team is written off in the first ten minutes—least of all Liverpool at Anfield. Even at 1–3 in the 57th minute, for some reason the conditions in the stadium felt such that I believed more firmly than ever that the game would turn.
It was a sweet spring afternoon (as cliché as that sounds), and in my small Paris apartment friends had gathered for the match. When Liverpool scored, our shouts surely echoed through the whole building—perhaps even the neighbouring ones—despite the street noise. It was the first time I believed we might tear down walls and smash furniture. I have never again experienced such psychological ecstasy in a match. The fourth goal, Lovren’s, sealed it: big Liverpool were back; Anfield was the ground no one gets through with qualification; and this team would go on to do great things in the years to come.
Eighth place in the league brought disappointment for the lost chance of European continuity, but it was a small price: the team needed time and calm to be built. The two lost finals that season bothered me very little. I knew something was finally being built on the right foundations, with a real coach and a real football plan.
2017–2018
The return to the Champions League is what changed midweek nights again. Finally, instead of turning on the TV just to “kill time”, I had a reason to watch a gigantic club, an incredible collective, with a wonderful attacking trio overflowing with inspiration rather than arrogance. The best news of that season was Coutinho’s departure. A player like that didn’t fit in this project. He ended up where he was supposed to—and got the footballing answer he needed a year and a bit later.
The Champions League knockouts were extraordinary. The football Liverpool played surprised even the team’s own protagonists. Goals poured in from players who had never before lived such moments. A dream took flesh—and in the same period, after Coutinho’s departure, Premier League performance skyrocketed, with the future champions Manchester City fishing the ball out of their net in all three meetings across league and Champions League. Porto and Roma looked like amateur teams, and if Alisson hadn’t been the opponent, reaching the Kyiv final would have seemed like an afternoon stroll.
There is one indicator of this team’s metal and the inspiration it gives: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at kick-off. I mentioned Dortmund earlier, but the way the song sounded in Kyiv also showed that everyone—players and supporters together—was ready to put Liverpool where they belong: at the top of Europe.
Sadly, things went as badly as possible on the pitch: the most in-form player got injured, solutions were not endless, and the goalkeeper was literally in another world. The cup was lost—but far more had been won that spring. The period when Liverpool stood one step below Europe’s giants was over. They were, once again, the sexiest club on the continent, giving hundreds of millions of fans worldwide a reason to follow them.
On the supporter level, the production of chants and songs broke every record. Few teams have a song for almost every starter. Elements of football culture that had perhaps faded since the 1980s reappeared: the Mane Mane song, “Allez Allez Allez”, Jamie Webster—an electrician who became the Kop’s “official” singer—and massive events everywhere the red armada travelled. Liverpool were once again giving dreams not only to their supporters, but to all football lovers—and that is exactly what their sworn enemies cannot stand.
2018–2019
After everything I described above, I can say that this was the first season I managed to follow Liverpool from start to finish. Subscription TV, the ability to access it in my thirties, social media that transmit every development moment by moment, easily and with rich material—none of this resembles the world of 1996 and that FA Cup final recorded on VHS.
Now the team’s targets sat only at the summit. But that summit is no longer so easy. Teams cannot play at the same intensity all year; they must choose where and when to dip, where to lose physical sharpness in order to peak at the critical moment. So if one target is Europe’s summit, the other can only be the league—a marathon not decided by a slip-up, especially in England, where cup competitions are single-match knockouts.
From the start it seemed Liverpool could chase both, essentially against the same opponents. The predictable English football of 2013 had become the fastest, most collective game by the end of the decade, with the plan starting from defence and reaching a many-bodied attacking creation. Tiki-taka became system football again, with distinct roles for defenders, midfielders, and forwards; roles tied to spaces on the pitch; attacking and defensive duties. A modern football in which one of the pioneers is Klopp.
Many may not see it the same way, but I firmly believe that season was the first of a new era for Liverpool—and the first of a new era for football in general. What we saw in the English league hardly has a precedent. Mourinho’s failure is telling: perhaps the embodiment of what had become outdated. Coaches capable of designing and sustaining complex projects—grounded in many external factors and, often, unpredictable ones like injuries—pushed their teams to new levels.
In the 2015–2016 Premier League Leicester could win; this year’s Liverpool—even this year’s Tottenham or Chelsea—would have strolled through it. Sarri, Pochettino, obviously Guardiola, as well as Emery (and adding Espírito Santo too) shaped a league that was a feast for the eyes, with other clubs also led by coaches who had experienced the “big” stage. The only discordant note was United, who, with another name and another budget, might have been fighting relegation.
Weekends changed: there was no reason to watch any other league if you cared about football. Of course, there are also the obsessions—the relationship with Greek teams where we are more a part of them—but there the reasons for watching are not purely footballing. Thankfully, I personally had one more motive that year to follow closely at last a proper Greek league season too—one that, in the end, was won by the best team because it played better, not simply because we “helped it because it was better”.
At the same time, big changes in my life brought me even closer to elements of Merseyside culture. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” transformed from a football hymn into a motive for decisions in my own life, and as a result the emotion, when it appeared in football images, became far greater. Liverpool’s other songs spoke more directly to my personality, after the different world I had met in recent years outside Greek borders—a world that helped me understand traditions that had previously felt foreign. I felt closer to the psychology of an Irishman, a Scot, a Belfast resident who must decide whether he is Irish or a subject of the empire—and ultimately closer to the psychology of the Scouser, able to understand what this culture was trying to say.
At the same time, another permanent change of country brought me very close to a large part of Liverpool’s international fanbase. In the USA, football has gained countless friends in recent years. Twenty years ago you could hardly watch European matches; now they are prime-time events on television, even if broadcast during working hours. European clubs have fan communities and supporters’ groups that meet, filling cities and pubs.
But the population is split in two by language. Spanish-speaking Latinos, who love the ball and always have, support Spanish teams—mainly Barcelona and Real. English speakers, mostly whites, descendants of English and Irish, as well as many Scousers who emigrated during the hard 1980s for the city of Liverpool (…when Maggie Thatcher…), support English clubs. Among the latter, for a strange reason that cannot be explained by trophies, Liverpool fans probably take first place. It is incredible that this fanbase—built to such a degree over the last fifteen years—formed during a period when Liverpool were not at the top of the football world. Which means inspiration never stopped existing, and people are not stupid—anywhere.
The battle with Barcelona felt like a personal wager. The new had to finish off the arrogant old. The outdated mentality of superstars had to be defeated by the collective. Footballing mediocrity had to be crushed by genius. The match at Camp Nou was a warning. Despite the 3–0, Liverpool had stood far better on the grass of the Catalan stadium. It seemed capable of scoring as many goals as it wanted—if only it were not so unlucky. But luck has its rules: you can be unlucky or lucky once, but not forever.
The “miracle of Anfield”—even if it’s nice to call it that—wasn’t so much a miracle as something written in advance. The way it came, and especially the fourth goal that humiliated all the millions laid at the blaugrana’s feet, was the slap the mentality of a mediocre world needed: a world built on innate talent and the worship of circumstances. I could watch that Anfield match again and again—watching the faces of the superstars as they realised they were powerless to show any arrogance against real work, the building of inspiration, and the generous sharing of dream with millions.
In an England of the most unstable political period, with Brexit and unbelievable characters managing the fate of an entire people, extraordinary processes are taking place—though the future and their outcome remain uncertain. Yet even in the era of total professionalism, this society still produces extraordinary football, because this society created this sport to be its mirror. That does not get erased—and it shows in the faces of Henderson, Robertson, Alexander-Arnold: products of this society, representing it in every English and European stadium.
Madrid was simply the crowning. The supporters of occasional football did not enjoy the final. But the plan was specific: the winner, against Tottenham, had to be smarter than City’s “nouveau-riche” and Ajax’s “babies”. Smartness demanded solutions that seemed strange—like 38% possession. Liverpool did not park the bus, but they did not play tiki-taka. They gave the ball to a fantastic Tottenham who had a plan 90% right, without following Tottenham’s game, and they exploited to the fullest the remaining 10% of the opponent’s imperfection.
That is the modern way of thinking—not only in football, but in general. One must never overestimate one’s powers and turn a simple project into a complicated one. The goal was for the cup to return to Merseyside—and, obviously, following that plan, it did.
The fact that in a city of 500,000 inhabitants, 750,000 people were in the streets to celebrate is not a football phenomenon, but a social one. Those images made me feel so much a part of this creation that I was forced to unwind this thread—from 11 May 1996—to understand why I could cry like a little child, in a way I never managed to cry when I actually was a little child.
Back then, I chose Liverpool as my team at a time when there was no one around me to share that support. Today, Liverpool showed me that it chose me as its supporter, giving me back—many times over—what I didn’t live through in all those years I waited for my own team to be better than everyone else’s. From here on, whatever happens, I have one more reason to be inspired and to feel a part of it, because beyond football emotion, it gives me inspiration for my own life too—something that can be described in another text, one that will take a long time to be written, and whose ending I hope will be just as optimistic and joyful.
…we’re never gonna stop and we’ll never walk alone…
