Has Anfield Lost Its Formidable Atmosphere?
I can only speak to my own experience under the lights in Liverpool on a Tuesday night.
The songs came rolling down the Kop in waves, the ones you can make out through the television — “Li-VER-pool, Li-VER-pool” — and others with distinct verses of their own, winding tales that tell the story of what it means to follow one of Europe’s great clubs from a city in the North West of England that thinks of itself as a place apart.
We had dreams and songs to sing, of the glory ‘round the fields of Anfield Road.
The hymns began at the very top of the most famous stand in football, where the floodlights don’t shine and the figures loom in dark silhouettes, leaning forward just slightly each time they launched a chorus into the winter mist. A day of rain had given way to a mild night, but the dewy fog still rolled off the River Mersey to hang over the city of Liverpool and this grand old stadium. The piercing lights high above each stand — the Kop End and the Anfield Road Stand on the short sides, the Main Stand and the Kenny Dalglish down the lengths — cut through the long winter’s night to illuminate the red all around and the emerald green in the middle.
It was Tuesday night. It was the Champions League. It was Anfield.
French opposition had come to town for the occasion, though it wasn’t the Parisians who would ultimately end Liverpool’s European campaign in the Round of 16. This was the league phase, Matchday 7, and Lille of Ligue 1 had drawn the short straw. They journeyed up to this citadel to face the most formidable team in Europe at that moment, Arne Slot’s Red army that would soon finish top of the new-look Champions League standings. They were barreling towards a Premier League title, too. Some might have figured that Liverpool would roll Les Dogues —The Mastiffs — and march on, but the French side had other ideas.
———————————
This story is part of the CATHEDRALS series covering the world’s great stadiums. Check out the feature on Goodison Park as Everton prepare to leave their home since 1892.
———————————
Just after midday, I’d run into some Lille supporters at The Winslow, the famous Everton haunt, and eight hours later they were loud, proud, and ready. From our seats almost exactly diagonal from them, their melodies streamed across the rangy pitch, the entirety of the away support rising for just about the full 90 minutes to belt out their own songs of belonging. The flares came out early in the first half, and the smoke wafted across the 18-yard box and over the goal to their left, catching the stadium lights to add new minerals to the fog and the mist.
The French were boisterous indeed, proof that this place can bring the best out of the visitors. “Anfield under the lights remains one of the bucket-list experiences for any football fan,” would later say on the U.S. broadcast when Liverpool met PSG in March. In the week that followed, though, the legendary commentator published a column on Substack suggesting that “Anfield is not the same anymore” because “our relationship with our football heroes has changed…even Liverpool heroes. It’s now up to them to give us something to get excited about.”
On last week’s episode of The Football Weekend, I asked Liverpool fan Laurence McKenna whether the symbiosis between the Anfield crowd and the players has changed, half-expecting him to say — and not without reason — that tourists like me in the crowd were costing regulars their chance to sing and shout and build the mighty Anfield sound. But he didn’t.
“I’ve been at Anfield for really special nights,” McKenna said, like “when we had the comeback against Dortmund in the Europa League. It’s the stuff that, if you’re a football fan, dreams are made of. I was there when we beat Man City 3-0 in the Champions League, and Anfield was a huge part of that.
“But the difference on a night like the PSG night is not so much the actual crowd, the regulars. The regulars are always there. The regulars are regular for a reason. It’s the fact that the ticket resellers had resold to a majority of PSG fans…and you can look around the stadium and see it. I said to two friends I was there with, ‘This is not all Liverpool fans.’ You could see it even in our row….and it deflates the atmosphere by that 10, 15 percent. You just can’t get chants going in the same way. You can’t get that symbiosis.”
In line for a drink at halftime, he said he spotted five PSG fans behind him and two in front. “I’m there thinking, as friendly as we are, ‘I don’t want you here’….I think what’s deflating Anfield is the resellers. A lot of people blame the tourists, but broadly, it’s not. It’s the resellers. Tourists will sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and they’ll get involved with the chants.”
Maybe there was less of that away-fan infiltration for a group stage match, or maybe it was just the sweet innocence of Anfield virginity, but I found the place plenty lively. There were lulls, sure, and the away fans did take over here and there, but the Kop was at the heart of things and often sprung into action when the French folk started to dominate the atmosphere. It was just off to the left from where we were sat, on the other side of the corner flag, and the left end of the Kenny Dalglish Stand proved to be the perfect place to feel the waves of song come tumbling down the steep hill of standing supporters.
Liverpool’s is not the only “Spion Kop” that popped up at stadiums all around England in the early 20th century — nor, writes Simon Inglis in Football Grounds of Great Britain, was it the first. That was the one at Arsenal’s old Manor Ground in South East London, before they made the move across the Thames, where veterans of the Second Boer War working at the nearby Royal Arsenal saw “an embankment formed by a huge overground pipe” next to the pitch that reminded them of a colossal hill near Ladysmith, South Africa, where a particularly unnecessary and deadly battle was fought during the war.
The nickname stuck, and at first, Inglis writes, it was a convenient place to watch Arsenal matches without paying for a ticket. Then the club built a bank of terracing on it, two years before Liverpool built their own stand and an editor at the Liverpool Echo christened it the “Spion Kop.”
But there surely is no terrace or stand — at Arsenal or anywhere — with quite the heritage, the tradition, the noise of the Kop at Anfield with the lights shining brightly through the night. On this, my first visit, I could only wonder: Just how much have things really changed?
In 1964, the BBC’s Panorama went to Anfield to see how “LIVERPOOL FANS bring POP to the KOP.” In grainy black-and-white footage, they follow the players as they climb the steps in the tunnel and take “the field of praise.”
Those are the words of the presenter, John Morgan, who proceeds to station himself in front of the Kop, then standing-room only. It’s something more than that, actually. It’s a great swaying mass of humanity, with waves running through it from left to right and right to left and occasionally back to front, as someone loses their footing on the terracing and brings everyone around them spilling forward. You can see, in that moment, that they’re all leaning on each other for support, not so much standing as drifting together, one big molecular ocean. They are singing the Beatles and Cilla Black, grinning wildly for the camera. After all, they’re bashing Arsenal 5-0 to win the league: