Fierce new rivalry is defined by struggle to create perfect club – and do it the right way
Animosity between City and Liverpool at times seems to be a battle for the soul of modern football
The curiosity of the Premier League’s burning new rivalry between Manchester City and Liverpool is that whatever happens today at Anfield, the antipathy between the players, and even the managers themselves, is at nothing like the level of the layers of hostility around them.
From around 1997 to the mid-part of the next decade, Arsenal and Manchester United came to despise one another. The tone was set by Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger and the various player feuds: Martin Keown and Ruud van Nistelrooy; Patrick Vieira and whichever of the Nevilles was closest to hand. It was conventional in that respect, jousting personalities who could not hide the way they felt about one another.
City v Liverpool is less outwardly spectacular although no less visceral.
It is consumed with the governance of football, the motives of ownership in the modern age and the credibility of a certain kind of success. It is about financial fair play, the ethics of nation-state owners – about who is justly able to consider themselves a historically great club, and the odds stacked against those trying to break into the elite.
Given what is at stake today, it will be fiery at times. But that is unlikely to change the friendship, for instance, between Jordan Henderson and his England and former Liverpool team-mate Raheem Sterling. Nor between the Brazilian contingents in both clubs who know each other well. Pep Guardiola rang Jurgen Klopp in the immediate aftermath of the Champions League final in June to congratulate him. Klopp’s glowing tributes to Guardiola are, by all accounts, what he says about him in private. Neither man sounds like he hates the other.
City’s wealth upsets rivals. Not just that, but the origins of it – the Abu Dhabi regime that is undemocratic, all-powerful. Why it is they even want to own a football club. Liverpool have always denied that they pushed the hardest for the Fifa and Premier League FFP investigations into City, of which only the former has been concluded. As to the wider picture, City ask how they would ever have been expected to establish themselves as a super-club without Abu Dhabi. It cost what it did because the elite was closed. The rich got richer and they bought your best players.
As a result, a different kind of animosity has been born of this rivalry, one that feels at times that it is the struggle to create the perfect club.
The best playing philosophy, the best recruitment, the commitment to building a global institution that simultaneously feels like a local club.
In short: doing things the right way. In Liverpool’s case that means without the fossil fuel fortune which for City is a hard case to answer. In response they have tried to set a benchmark of excellence, the best training ground, the most advanced academy system, the world’s most famous manager.
It expresses itself in unusual ways. The FA Youth Cup final played between the two clubs in April, which
Liverpool won on penalties, was an edgy affair.
It seemed not just to represent the best of the two clubs’ young players but also their power to attract and retain the top footballers in the North West and beyond. Another battle over the soul of football. In recent years City had come scouting on Merseyside for the first time and enjoyed some success. Liverpool had signed City’s striker Bobby Duncan, a Liverpudlian, who was later to leave them too.
It asks wider questions, about why a player joins a certain club, about a club’s tradition for bringing young players into their first team and what that says about them as an institution. These things matter in the modern game as much as they have ever done. The margins are fine – at both there is the opportunity for prestige, an attractive education and development programme, as well as a big contract. The challenge is to gain an edge.
Which one does it mean more to represent? Which of the two is the better, shrewder, smarter developer? Where does the future lie?
There has been considerable movement of staff between the two in this constant battle to build the infrastructure that powers the modern super-club. The “Spygate” row has its roots in the movement of two senior recruitment staff, Dave Fallows and Julian Ward, from City to Liverpool.
Barry Hunter, the Liverpool chief scout, also joined from City. Guardiola’s assistant Rodolfo Borrell, was academy director at Liverpool. There has even been poaching by Liverpool of members of City’s online editorial team to replicate their strategy of appealing to a global fan base.
It has spilt over occasionally into something more unpleasant. The City players singing one of their support’s off-colour songs about Liverpool on a team flight at the end of last season. The bottle attack on the City team bus travelling to the Champions League quarter-final. On both occasions the two clubs have sought to douse the flames. City denied there was any offensive connotation in the song in question. Klopp was unequivocal in his condemnation of the fans who damaged the City bus. Yet still it simmers.
City see themselves as lacking a strong voice to speak on their behalf, especially in the pundits’ studio and the big live debate where public opinion is shaped. Vincent Kompany may yet be a Sky Sports guest today, balancing a Liverpool-heavy presence.
There are other factors. Some local media have become more partisan, and more reflective of the bias on social media as they chase the clicks. They have occasionally abandoned impartiality altogether by presenting injuries to key players on the other side as – finger quotes – good news.
It can make sensible people do silly things. Liverpool chief executive Peter Moore tweeted a picture of a canary after City’s defeat at Carrow Road in September, before thinking better of it. There is just something that gets under the skin of both clubs’ executives locked in this battle to leverage their particular advantage – wealth, history, reputation – and by doing so demonstrate their own superiority. Both have a notion of themselves as outsiders, somehow disadvantaged by the presence of the other.
While feuding personalities, such as Ferguson and Wenger, can mellow over time, City v Liverpool belongs to a different class. It is institutional, and it could run and run.
It is about who can consider themselves a historically great club and those trying to break into the elite