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.
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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.
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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.
“What is really interesting about it is the BBC guy who's fronting the report,” said John Williams, author of Red Men: Liverpool Football Club, The Biography. “He’s talking about the crowd like he would talk about some tribe in the South Pacific. As if they're completely weird and strange, and somehow completely non-English. And in a way, he's kind of right. Because the Liverpool crowd, particularly — more than Everton, I think — has a deep-seated Irish oral culture at the heart of it. It wasn't very English [at the time] to sing songs collectively like this.”
There’s a large population of Irish descent in Liverpool, those who crossed the Irish Sea for jobs and opportunity, “and the Irish don’t need much to sing at almost any moment,” Williams said. “I think that also influenced the way in which music and football began to connect in the early '60s.”
In 1959, Bill Shankly arrived to manage Liverpool in the second division, where they’d been mired for five seasons. They hadn’t won a trophy since 1947, “and really, they were not a very important club,” Williams said. “They didn't have a great history for winning titles. They'd never won the FA Cup.” Shankly went about fixing up the dilapidated training ground and selling off players who weren’t at the level. But more than that, he went about cultivating Anfield as the team’s greatest resource, a temple to hold the power and the mythology he wished to build.
“He tells the Liverpool crowd that they're the greatest fans, this is the greatest place to watch football,” Williams said, “and that he is going to take this club that's in the middle of the second division, and he is going to make them the greatest club in the world.”
Just as the Scotsman arrived and the 60s dawned, the city of Liverpool was beginning its own transformation. A rich seafaring tradition had built a transatlantic bond with the United States, as lots of young men from Liverpool worked on the great passenger liners and cargo ships. When they went over to America, they brought back culture — vinyl records in particular. You can hear that in the Beatles’ sound, which was taking over the world by the time Shankly started winning silverware. (Ahead of the 1965 FA Cup final, Liverpool’s first win, the Fab Four sent him a telegram wishing his team luck against Leeds United.) That sound, and all kinds of popular music, started to invade the terraces as well.
“The Kop is really the first place in England where pop culture and youth culture begins to connect with football,” Williams said. “At the same time that Bill Shankly arrives at Liverpool — this very young, charismatic, messianic Scottish manager — just at the moment that he arrives, the city of Liverpool becomes the focus of pop music. And all of these things fuse together, and by the early 1960s, Liverpool supporters on the Kop are singing Beatles songs in celebration of the city and also of the club.
“And they begin to adapt these songs, and apply them to their players and to the team, and to the city,” Williams continued. “And really it's the first time that there's this interconnection, this merger between football culture, youth culture, and pop music. And singing. So for the first time, really, in a concentrated way, a group of fans in a stadium begin to sing songs. And singing songs becomes an established part of English football culture."
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At the center of that, in a neat illustration of the American connection, is “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the Broadway musical Carousel, which opened in New York in 1945, it was covered by local Liverpool group Gerry and the Pacemakers to chart-topping success in 1963 and became the club anthem soon after it began to ring out on the Kop. More than 60 years later, it’s the most legendary matchday tradition in world football.
“‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is kind of a thermometer for what the night’s gonna be like,” McKenna said on the podcast. “It sets a tone. And we have a bit of a problem with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ at the moment. Not serially, I think there are some very compelling renditions, but if you have a mixed [home section] crowd of, say, 20 percent, even 10 percent, suddenly you’ve got 10 percent of the people in the stadium who would normally be Liverpool fans who aren’t holding a scarf or flag or whatever they want to hold up during the anthem.
“The other issue is, [playing] the Champions League anthem or the Premier League anthem means that we now can’t play ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in the same timing that we want to,” McKenna added. “It sort of peters out before the players come out. Imagine you’re walking out of the tunnel and you’ve got ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ playing — that’s a big moment.”
“Before it was a seating Kop, I used to stand on the Kop, so I used to sing, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’” said Stephen Warnock, broadcaster for NBC and Sky Sports, on The Football Weekend in December. He grew up on Merseyside, rose through Liverpool’s academy, and broke into the first team. “To be able to put myself on the pitch and walk out — hairs on the back of the neck, tears in the eyes. It is everything you dream of and everything you want. I was very fortunate to be able to stand on the Kop, sing the song, and then sing it on the pitch. Because I was singing it as I walked out as well.”
“Now it’s sort of like, right, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is finished, OK, let’s get the Champions League anthem from UEFA,” McKenna said. “It misses everything that’s good about football for a bit of bureaucracy.”
It’s the kind of bow-and-curtsy to the authorities that is entirely anathema to Liverpudlians, whose instinct to look West towards Ireland and America for their affiliations grew one hundredfold in the 1980s, the Thatcher era, when they broadly felt that Britain had abandoned them.
“The people just said, ‘Right, that's it. We're no longer identifying with that part of England,’” Williams said. “We're going to look to other influences that we feel more at home with. They liked being outsiders. Liverpool people feel of themselves as somehow not fitting, living at the end of the street. Living on the edge of something.”
The Flat Iron pub is at the corner of a triangle where two streets meet, not unlike its namesake building in New York. The black asphalt of Walton Breck Road outside was slick with a day’s rain beneath the stone façade painted two shades of green. On the other side of the building, creating the fork in the road where The Flatty sits, is Anfield Road.
Inside the pub, there’s a bar with standing room on both sides, and towards the narrow end there are tables against the walls in a ring. Red pillars rise up to the ceiling, and near the top, arrow-shaped signs bear the names of Irish cities: Kerry, Cavan, Dublin. A chandelier of Stella-style pint glasses hangs near a scarf honoring current left back Andy Robertson. There’s a giant Irish flag with “The Flat Iron Pub - Anfield, Liverpool” superimposed, and still more scarves name-checking clubs like Atlético Madrid and Lech Poznań. There are two empty bottles of Jack Daniels hanging, too, with bulbs inside to give them second life as light fixtures.
It was warm, pints were secured, and a young couple vacated a table along that ringed perimeter just in time for me to take a seat next to Howard Williams. After a few minutes, we got to talking — about the state of the Liverpool team, about my own side, Arsenal, about the battles the two have had down the years and how football has changed and why he still keeps coming.
It’s 56 years since Williams’ first trip to Anfield with his schoolmate — sat across the table from him here — whose father brought them to the match. (When the patriarch died, his grandson, who arrived not long after we sat down, inherited his season ticket.) From then on, Williams would journey up to Anfield Road from his home in Liverpool’s south suburbs, where he said his parents went to pick his older brother up from camp one summer afternoon and returned with an extra boy in the back seat who introduced himself as Paul McCartney.
A few pints later, it was time to say our goodbyes. From the warm wood and red and chatter of the Flatty, we all washed out into the black night of northern English winter, joining the stream of red-and-white-scarved characters moving inexorably in one direction down Walton Breck Road. We marched past the rowhouses, the Chinese eatery, the “Hat, scarf, or badge” shop, the perpendicular streets on both sides lined with still more red- or beige-brick rowhouses fronted by painted bay windows.
This is the Liverpool and the Anfield that Gérard Houllier said he fell in love with during a brief time studying here, decades before he became the Liverpool manager. The stadium built into a community, stitched into the fabric of a town. In the years before some of the immediate area was cleared to expand the ground to its current 61,000-plus capacity, it was built in even tighter.
Many heroes in Red lived in the shadow of the stadium. One of the great early captains of Liverpool, Alex Raisbeck, was a commanding Scottish center back who led the team to two league titles in 1901 and 1906 while living in a house on Elsie Road. We passed it on our journey from the Flatty. Then there was a brief stop just outside the stadium perimeter, where the food vendors deal out of painted shipping containers, for a chicken sandwich. Then it was through the turnstiles and into the narrow brick hallways of Anfield.
Many makeovers ago, this place was the property of John Houlding, a local brewer, who leased it to Everton F.C. beginning in 1884. There was no Liverpool Football Club then, and for close to eight years, the Blues played at Anfield.
Except there were devout Methodists on Everton’s board of directors, and they didn’t particularly like the association with a purveyor of alcohol — or having to deal with Houlding, who was by most accounts a difficult man. He raised the rent in 1892, Everton responded by moving across Stanley Park to Goodison, and suddenly Houlding had an 18,000-capacity stadium and nobody to play there. He considered selling it off for housing, but instead he established “Everton F.C. and Athletic Grounds Ltd” — a new club. The Football Association refused to recognize his new creation, however, and he was forced to go for “Liverpool F.C.” Thus was born the rare club that has a stadium before players or fans.
They played their first match at Anfield in September of 1892. By 1906, the legendary stadium architect Archibald Leitch was tapped to build a spectator stand, and the Scotsman had an outsize role in crafting the Anfield architecture for much of its existence. It’s a different place now, the product of multiple redesigns and a dramatic expansion of the Main and Anfield Road stands, but in those narrow hallways, fighting to get a pint at halftime, you can feel the place has been there forever.
We went down the hallway to the stage-left edge of the Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand, and then it was up the stairs and out into the great hulking landscape of the arena, the red seats disappearing rapidly as the minutes ticked down towards kickoff. The rows down the bottom of the Kenny had leg room to make a budget airline blush, but we’d be standing soon anyway.
And then it came, the anthem. Scarves were raised everywhere aloft, walls of red fabric over heads on all sides, and deeper into the verse — “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart” — the words burst from the Kop’s lungs and from everyone around. A true-classic YNWA it may not have been, not the stuff of a Champions League semifinal second leg, but you sensed still that there was a tear or two falling somewhere in the house.
Then things kicked off, and from the start Lille were no doormat. They scampered in behind the Liverpool field, ran at the back line. The #9, Jonathan David of Canada, was a particular problem, but Hakon Arnar Haraldsson in the white #7 took the cake, taking responsibility and running with the ball, carrying it forward, taking on all comers.
Liverpool took the possession, Lille took the counterattacks, and then it all flipped for the home side’s opener: Kostas Tsimikas won the ball off David with a sliding challenge, it fell to Curtis Jones in deep midfield, and the local lad sliced through the entirety of the Lille team with a through ball for Mohamed Salah to finish on the run, high over the keeper with typical aplomb.
Things were only going one way from there, it seemed, particularly when Lille defender Aïssa Mandi got himself sent off for a very cheap second yellow card. But then the French side got in behind Liverpool’s defence to the byline, and Gabriel Gudmundsson found Haraldsson with a low cross near the penalty spot. The Icelander’s shot was blocked, but the loose ball fell to David and he buried it, 1-1. The away support behind the goal went intergalactic. The limbs went flying upwards, the roar shot across the pitch and washed over us. Lille had become the first team to come to Anfield in European play in 2024/25 and score. Game on.
“I shagged yer mum!” the red-haired Red shouted from the row behind just as Lille’s #10, Rémy Cabella, swung his boot to strike the ball next to the corner flag a few yards away.
The timing of the man’s outburst was incredible. The patience, laudable. He’d waited until just the right moment to launch the distracting invective, and everybody around cracked up. It’s not all famous old songs at Anfield, though the crowd here lives within a tradition unlike any other across world football.
“I argue in my book that Anfield became a particular kind of venue for fandom in the 1920s,” said Williams, who’s also published Red Men Reborn! to trace the epochal tenure of Jürgen Klopp. Liverpool won the league twice in that period —1922 and 1923 — but it was a force of personality on the pitch who came to define the era.
Elisha Scott tended goal in front of the Kop. Still Liverpool’s longest-serving player, the supremely talented Northern Irishman fought a famous rivalry with Dixie Dean, the legendary Everton center forward who once scored 60 goals in a single league season. But Scott was also a man of uncommon charisma, a fiery character who’d explode at his defenders and regularly declare that the Kop was a different kind of place.
“Elisha Scott used to say, ‘These people are my people, and I feel very close to them. And they know much more about football than other fans do,’” Williams explained. “And really from that moment, the people who watched and stood on the Kop became identified as a very special crowd.”
It was, as mentioned, a different stadium in those days, crafted by Archibald Leitch in his trademark style: crisscross façade patterns, a decorative gable on the Main Stand, all built into what was essentially an ordinary residential neighborhood. Now there is some buffer space between the stadium and the houses, where on spare exterior walls you’ll find murals to Ian Rush, Steven Gerrard, Trent Alexander-Arnold.
By the turn of the millennium, concerns were growing that the ground wasn’t big enough to hold Liverpool’s ambitions in the new world of football, and there were calls to build a new stadium like the neighbors across Stanley Park ultimately chose to do.
“Nobody at Liverpool wanted a new stadium, even though it was only planned to be built a couple of hundred yards away,” Williams said, “because they felt very deeply that the stadium isn't just bricks and mortar. The stadium is something that carries memories and traditions and reflects the lives of your fathers or your uncles and other people who've watched the club.”
They found a way to expand in place. Even with major renovations to the Main Stand in 2016 and Anfield Road in 2023, the stadium does feel different to the shiny new grounds popping up all over Europe. But is it, as some fear, more and more the same?
In the end, the Lille match was less than an Anfield classic. Harvey Elliott’s deflected strike from a corner was enough to snatch all three points off Liverpool’s 10-man opposition, who could only give the Reds a scare for so long.
For a true argument against the idea that Anfield has lost something, though, we need only go back to 2019. That’s when Liverpool lost 3-0 at the Camp Nou — now undergoing its own renovation — and found themselves with an impossible task: score four goals without reply against mighty Barcelona.
“Nobody gave us a chance. We had two of our best players missing, and everybody kind of assumed that we were going to lose,” Williams said. “But I remember being outside the stadium before that match, and the whole sense among the fans was, ‘We're gonna win this. We're gonna beat them.’ And that was communicated to the team, I think, and to the coach, that we could. And we beat them 4-0.
“We knew what the reaction elsewhere was going to be,” Williams continued. “People were going to say, ‘This is just unbelievable, how did this happen?’ But the fans I was with on the Kop were saying, ‘I told you this was going to happen.’ Because we have the power to do this. We can make these incredible players — even Lionel Messi — we can make him afraid of being here. We can make this a really difficult place for him to play. And that victory was our victory.”
Well, that sounds different, doesn’t it?⚽︎
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Photography by Jack Holmes, with the exception of the black-and-whites (from Getty Images)