Anfield’s atmosphere has to change – and I am part of Liverpool’s problem, blame my useless manager 

Anfield’s atmosphere has to change – and I am part of Liverpool’s problem, blame my useless manager
There are numerous reasons why Anfield’s match-day atmosphere has tailed off this season and not all of them have quick fixes.

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ByRichard GarnettSport Trends Writer
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It’s a familiar story lived over and over by generations of Liverpool supporters. You never forget your first game.

Whether it was in the swinging sixties, this season or somewhere in between, the anticipation of walking up those steps into the heart of Anfield and seeing the overwhelming sight of thousands of people congregated on a football terrace is a feeling like no other. Most people are gripped by the experience and soon become hooked on the game for life.

That ordeal can be enhanced to far greater heights by being part of a great match that results in a dramatic triumph. It’s truly at that point that the penny drops and supporters realise how they can help influence the outcome of a match themselves and nowhere more so has that been the case than at the storied auditorium of Anfield.

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The Spion Kop became so famous in the 1960s that the BBC sent cameras to the ground for a Panorama special report. Widely regarded as one of the most significant terraces in world football, its scalps include pretty much every top club in European football. A combination of wit, sharp humour, graciousness in defeat and magnanimity in victory earned Kopites the reputation of being amongst the most knowledgeable and respected in the land – a badge of honour that is still worn by supporters – and the club – today.

Plenty has changed over the past 30 years of course. The move to all-seater stadiums in the wake of the Taylor report saw Liverpool’s original standing Kop demolished in 1994 and replaced with a modern 12,000 capacity seated cantilever grandstand. It swept in a new era for football in England as the Premier League grabbed hold of the untapped potential of the game and turned it into a marketing powerhouse.

Fans at the time believed that the Kop would never be the same again, but although that is certainly true, the new stand has built its own story over almost three decades and without question developed a respected reputation in its own right. There have been plenty of occasions during its lifespan when the atmosphere created at Anfield rivalled and even succeeded that of the original standing Kop.

Notable highlights include the emotional return of Gerard Houllier to the dugout after recovering from a heart attack against Roma in 2002, the Champions League semi-final triumphs against Chelsea in 2005 and 2007 (the first of which was arguably the greatest atmosphere experienced in the ground in the past 30 years), the remarkable come-back victory over Borussia Dortmund in 2016, the first Premier League match in front of the redeveloped main stand against Leicester City in 2016 – played in front of Anfield’s highest attendance since 1977 and more recently the improbable 4-0 second leg comeback against Barcelona that put Liverpool on course for their sixth European Cup. All powered by the partisan energy of Anfield and its pumped-up supporters.

Such stories of crazy nights and euphoric success have whetted the appetite of football enthusiasts far beyond the reaches of Merseyside or even Britain for that matter. That is something the club has leveraged over the years and nowadays people flock to Anfield for a matchday experience in the same way you may wish to experience a Real Madrid or Barcelona match.

There can be no denying that the demographic of the match-going fan has changed quite considerably over the past 30 years and it would be no exaggeration to say that the make-up of Liverpool’s fanbase today is miles away from what it looked like in 1994 when the bulldozers move in on the Kop.

With that comes different practices and different attitudes, but when a team is winning like Liverpool has been under Jurgen Klopp, maintaining a good atmosphere is consequently easier. So what happens when things aren’t going so well like last season for example? The result is pretty obvious.

Liverpool’s match-day atmosphere is currently rooted in expectation rather than a culture of organic creation. Is this the price of success and the end result of not losing a home league match for five-and-a-half years? Probably, but that is not the only factor at play.

Anfield has a storied songbook developed over generations, but currently you will be lucky to hear more than a few variations of its repertoire before some of the more mundane modern offerings are looped to fade into a vacuum of complacency. Is this because Anfield now has far more ‘tourist fans’ and day-trippers than it used to? Actually, there is little evidence to support that as a root cause of a dip in the atmosphere even if it could be true in some cases.

The complexities of supporting a popular football club in the modern era should not result in the blame for a drop-off in noise falling squarely at the feet of less-regular visitors but perhaps at how the system works itself. Broadly speaking, the opportunity to attend a Liverpool home match can be compared to owning a house. If you’re old enough or rich enough you’ll probably be OK, but for everyone else it’s a bit of a thankless battle.

Before the standing Kop was turned into rubble in 1994, a teenager could buy a ticket on the day – with their mates – for £4.50. A season later everyone needed to pay a minimum of £9 to get an adult price but a hike in entry for juniors was the least of their worries. Nowadays, supporters with the necessary level of commitment need to purchase a £26.99 annual membership as a minimum before entering an online dog fight with 300,000 others to scrap over around 15,000 available tickets per match.

Not only does that give most people next to no chance of attending matches regularly, the whole experience is hugely unenjoyable and the chances of going to watch a game surrounded by mates becomes a perk banished to history.

As a season ticket holder of over 20 years, I thank my lucky stars that I don’t have to enter into such a hopeless crusade every time I want to attend a Premier League football match and if the tables were turned and I was the one having to frantically tap F5 rather than queue at a turnstile like I did 30 years ago I simply wouldn’t bother.

But if reasonable accessibility for the next generation of fans is a major issue and the luxury of watching the game alongside your mates an unachievable goal, there is still another factor that is killing the atmosphere behind the goalmouth and its people like me who are at the heart of the problem. There are thousands of season ticket holders who traditionally should have graduated out of the Kop years ago but are going nowhere.

When I first started going to games with my father back in the 80s he was a similar age to what I am now and already a Main Stand season ticket holder. Like most his age, he had started off on the Kop with his mates, before growing older and then moving to the relative comfort of the side of the pitch making way for the younger supporters coming through to become the pumping heart of the Anfield atmosphere. But no one is doing that now.

Standing on the Kop for 90 minutes is not ideal when you suffer from a stiff back and occasional achy joints, but it is a walk in the park compared to the old Kop and the trade-off for two other match-day perks is almost certainly worth it. Season ticket holders have built matchday communities around them over the years and value seeing the same people each game as much as the action on the pitch itself. Sharing in the triumphs and failures of the team and occasionally personal ones off it, this is a unique element of football that still exists in the modern game and is prevalent all over the middle of the Kop. A move to another stand breaks all that up. Some would rather give up going altogether than lose that.

But even if seeing the same faces each week isn’t enough to stop a time-served loyalist from considering the comfort of a match-day seat that you can actually sit in for 90 minutes, the uplift in cost is surely enough in most cases to call off a move to another part of the ground. A season ticket in the middle of the Kop this season will set you back £735 but one in the Main Stand of equivalent standing is coming in at £869. Hardly the type of uplift people are looking for during a cost of living crisis.

Recently the club has installed rail seating barriers in certain areas of the Kop as well as the Anfield Road stand. It is a step in the right direction in terms of facilitating areas where fans can stand safely and create a match-day atmosphere, but in reality they will be of little use to the army of older fans populating the Kop who will probably just be grateful to have something to lean on for 90 minutes.

Until workable solutions can be found to alleviate the above issues, I’m afraid you will be stuck with thousands of ageing Kopites in situ cheering the team on when they feel like it. Don’t blame them, blame the system!

Football success often goes in cycles and with that in mind the lauded roar of Anfield will return in earnest before you know it. It is the power of unification and belonging that pulls people to matches in the first place and with the continued upturn in results it won’t take much for another special Anfield occasion to come around once more.

Do you agree with Richard’s assessment of the atmosphere at Anfield? Let us know in the comments section below

This piece was first published in February 2023

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