The opening chapter emphasises the author’s personal and family LFC history. This history – from the father born in the L4 district of Liverpool to the son who follows the team from afar in Germany and Canada – embodies the relationship between local and global that underpins both support for the club in the modern era and this book.

This chapter uses Jürgen Klopp’s resignation in 2024 as a jumping off point for reflections on the author’s ‘long distance love’ for LFC, drawing on his experiences watching LFC and LFCW in 2023/24 and his return to Toronto at the end of the season.

This chapter examines the Jürgen Klopp era, focusing on nine key moments in his hugely successful time as LFC manager (2015-24). It culminates in the near-tragedy at the Champions League final in Paris in 2022, when Liverpool supporters drew lessons from history that UEFA failed to draw. In the process, they saved European football’s showpiece event from a disaster on the scale of Heysel and reaffirmed a post-Hillsborough reputation for holding the establishment to account for dangers and untruths that still too often threaten the modern fan.

Liverpool’s FA Cup final win over Leeds United is the jumping off point here for a chapter on LFC, the Beatles, and Liverpool’s social history in a period when the city was, in the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘the centre of consciousness of the human universe’. Ginsberg was on Merseyside in May 1965, the month in which Liverpool beat Leeds to win the club’s first FA Cup. The ensuing celebrations, as one local newspaper remarked, made The Beatles’ recent homecoming ‘look like a vicarage tea party’. Central to this chapter is the interlinked role of football and music as mass cultural forces behind Liverpool’s resurgent civic pride in the 1960s.

This chapter foregrounds Liverpool’s first European Cup win against Borussia Mönchengladbach in Rome as the starting point for discussion of the self-styled Europeanisation of the club and, above all, its supporters in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing heavily on oral history, it analyses Liverpool’s emergence as an international cultural phenomenon, via supporters’ clubs, samizdat publications, fashion, television, and cheap travel.

This chapter provides a political and cultural history of the Hillsborough disaster, focusing on its role in both the ostracising and rebirth of the city of Liverpool. Much has been written about the causes of Hillsborough, and the cover-ups and miscarriages of justice that ensued. Chapter 10 focuses on the disaster’s local and international impact on the LFC fan base, for whom it became the touchstone of club loyalty and anti-establishment identity.

Chapter 12 examines Liverpool’s fifth European Cup as the spark for a new wave of international support, especially in Africa and North America. This chapter uses ‘the Miracle of Istanbul’ – Liverpool’s comeback win over AC Milan in the Champions League final in Turkey – to examine the roles of television, travel, and one absurd football match in the renewed internationalism of the Liverpool fan base from the mid-2000s.

A framework for subsequent chronological chapters on LFC from 1959 to 2024, Chapter 2 offers a fan-focused history of the place Liverpool supporters call home, Anfield. Going back to the ground’s opening in 1884, and LFC’s residency there from 1892, Chapter 2 examines Anfield’s evolution as a physical and emotional space, focusing in particular on the Spion Kop. The vast terrace, opened in 1906, became under Shankly the centrepoint of Anfield’s reputation, internationally renowned for its noise, humour, and sometimes rough camaraderie.

This chapter uses Bill Shankly’s appointment as manager as the jumping off point for a discussion of LFC and the city of Liverpool on the cusp of the 60s. It examines the pre-1959 career of Bill Shankly, his early (not immediately successful) years as LFC boss, and the club’s long and fruitful relationship with Scottish football. The arrival of the ultimate Scottish hero, Shankly, is placed in the context of e.g. the 1892/93 ‘Team of the Macs’ and popular players such as Alex Raisbeck and later Manchester United manager Matt Busby.