Manchester v Liverpool Rivalry in Football

Supporters of teams in London will often claim there is a bitter rivalry between them all, but in truth only really Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur can claim to have any sort of genuine enmity towards one another. In the midlands, the likes of Aston Villa and Birmingham City or Leicester City and Nottingham Forest might have a shout for mutual dislike, yet the clubs are rarely in the same divisions as one another for it to matter in any real sense. The dislike between Liverpool and Manchester United, on the other hand, is a real battle that has lasted for decades, with Manchester City having join in in recent times too. Why?

A Historical Dislike of the Neighbouring Cities

It would be really easy to assume that the dislike felt by many Mancunians towards Scousers and vice-versa is almost entirely down to the football. After all, at one point Liverpool was the most successful club in the country and Manchester United trailed well behind, feeling the pang of jealousy towards their Merseyside rivals, before United dominated the Premier League and Liverpool fell off the pace. In reality, though, the rivalry between the two cities began long before football had become the national sport. Instead, it was all down to the industrialisation of the two cities during the Victorian era.

Inter-City Railway

In 1830, George Stephenson designed and built the world’s first inter-city railway, running between Liverpool and Manchester. Primarily created in order to allow faster transport of people, raw materials and finished goods between the Port of Liverpool and the factories and cotton mills of areas like Manchester, it was so successful that it influenced the building of railways around the country. The problem for Mancunians was that Liverpool as a city essentially controlled it and charged Mancunian merchants dues, deciding what was transported quickly and what wasn’t.

Manchester Ship Canal

As a result, a decision was taken to construct the Manchester Ship Canal. This was designed to give the merchants of Manchester easy access to the River Mersey without needing to put their belongings on the trains. When it opened in 1894, it was the largest such ship canal in the world, with Liverpool angry at the perceived loss of income from the import and export fees that they had been able to charge the Mancunian merchants. It began a rivalry between the two cities based on economic and industrial improvements, to say nothing of the fact that Manchester had been the biggest city in the north prior to the explosion of the trade in Liverpool courtesy of the docks and access to the Atlantic trade.

How It Moved to Football

The completion of the Manchester to Liverpool Ship Canal came just three months prior to the first meeting between Liverpool and the club that was then known as Newton Heath in a play-off match. That match ended up seeing the side that would later become Manchester United lose and get relegated to the Second Division.

Tensions Grew as Teams Go Head-to-Head

If there had already been tensions between the working class people of the two cities, now they grew to boiling point. Liverpool went on to win the First Division title in 1901 and again in 1906, which was the season that United finally managed to get out of the Second Division and back into the top-flight.

Two seasons later and it was United that had finished as champions, whilst Liverpool had slipped into a mid-table position. They then won the FA Cup in 1909, which was a trophy that the Merseyside club wouldn’t win until the 1960s. Between the two World Wars and the years after the Second World War, Liverpool dominated.

Busby & Shankly

Even when United did begin to level out, it rankled that there were able to do so under the former captain of their Merseyside rivals, Matt Busby. Liverpool slipped into the Second Division, but when Bill Shankly arrived he changed the fate of the club for decades to come, making it the most successful in England.

Johnson Switches from Man City to Everton

Whilst Liverpool and Manchester United were going head-to-head, there is an argument that the first genuinely heated rivalry between the two cities on the football pitch came between Everton and Manchester City. That was in the latter part of the 1920s and early section of the 1930s, largely thanks to the fact that City’s all-time leading goalscorer, Tommy Johnson, left City for Everton and helped the Merseysiders defeat his former club in the FA Cup final of 1933. As far as United were concerned, there was a brief rivalry between the two teams in the 1960s, as well as the Red Devils winning over the League and European Cup Winners’ Cup in the FA Cup in 1985.

The Alex Ferguson Era

The arrival of Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United changed the club’s fortunes irrevocably. Prior to the Scot taking over as manager of the Red Devils, the club had won the same number of league titles and European Cups as Aston Villa. The behemoth of a successful football team that we know nowadays wasn’t a thing, with Liverpool having been the dominant side in English football in both the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s, meanwhile, were to be the Manchester United era, with Ferguson declaring upon his arrival that he intended to ‘knock Liverpool off their f*cking perch’. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

Liverpool were confident to the point of arrogance, believing that what had made the club successful throughout the previous decades would continue to work. As Manchester United proceeded to turn Old Trafford into one of the biggest and best stadiums in the country, Anfield was left largely untouched. United signed commercial deal after commercial deal, all whilst Liverpool stood still and witnessed their rivals move well ahead of them in terms of finance. At the same time, Manchester City and Everton essentially drifted into insignificance, with the latter barely avoiding relegation and the former not avoiding it at all.

The Modern Rivalry

As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, the retirement of Alex Ferguson and the arrival of the Abu Dhabi Group as Manchester City owners saw the fortunes of the two Manchester clubs all but switch. For United, a change of ownership spelt troubler, whilst for City the exact opposite was true. The Red Devils struggled to cope with the loss of their talismanic manager, replacing him with a series of failures in the Old Trafford dugout that frustrated supporters. Liverpool, meanwhile, grew in stature themselves and the arrival of Jürgen Klopp at Anfield witnessed the Reds become the most consistent rivals of Manchester City.

Head-to-Head Between Man City & Liverpool

For a period, the Cityzens under Pep Guardiola and the Merseyside club under Klopp went toe-to-toe, competing in seasons that put even the greatest of Ferguson’s achievements into the shade. Liverpool finished the 2018-2019 season with 97 points, whilst City got 98. A year later and the Reds won the league with 99 points, then two years after that they got 92 so Guardiola’s men got 93. It was a ding-dong battle that left Manchester United out in the cold. Everton, meanwhile, struggled to even remain as a going concern, let alone have any real worries about what was happening at the top of the Premier League table.

Everton & Liverpool: Inner City Rivals

In fact, any sense of rivalry between Everton and either or the Manchester clubs had all but disappeared when it became clear that they were the only ones that had any realistic chance of stopping Liverpool from becoming the dominant force in the country once more. For all that the rival between the two cities has been a long-lasting thing, the dislike between Everton and Liverpool is significantly more overpowering. As a result, the adage of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ came to the fore throughout the 1990s and on. Everton supporters were happy enough to lose to either club if it mean costing Liverpool any success.

Liverpool & Manchester Will Never Be Friends

Such is the nature of the rivalry between the two cities that none of the clubs concerned will ever truly like each other. If Everton were to be taken over by a nation state in a similar way to what happened with Manchester City, there is no doubt that their rivalries with the two Manchester clubs would flare back up again. Liverpool supporters aren’t lovers of Manchester City because they have stopped them from winning things in recent times, but were happy to celebrate when they were the ones stopping United from ending up as Premier League champions back in 2011-2012. Rivalries tend to shift and change, but Liverpool and Manchester will never be truly friends.