Merseyside Derby History: Everton, Liverpool and Family

The argument was about rent. Not religion, not politics, not which end of a city somebody came from — a landlord and a tenant fell out over money and the terms of a lease, and out of that came two of the most decorated clubs in English football, standing on opposite sides of the same municipal park in north Liverpool. Everything else about the Merseyside derby follows from the smallness of that original quarrel and the shortness of the walk between the two grounds.

Stanley Park is 45 hectares of Victorian public space, opened in 1870, with a palm house and a boating lake. Cross it from the Anfield Road side and you come out near Goodison. Nowhere else in England do two clubs of this size share a boundary that thin. It shaped the derby's character for a century, and it is the single fact you need before any of the rest makes sense.

One club, one landlord, and a row about the lease

Everton were formed in 1878 as St Domingo's FC, a side put together so that the young men of a Methodist chapel congregation in Everton village had something to do in the winter months after the cricket season ended. Within a year they had opened the club beyond the congregation and renamed it after the district. In 1888 they were among the twelve founder members of the Football League, and in 1891 they won it.

They played at Anfield from 1884. The land was controlled by John Houlding, a brewer, local politician and eventually Lord Mayor of Liverpool, who had helped the club find the site and who was its president. For eight years the arrangement held. Then it did not.

The dispute was about the rent Houlding wanted, about his ownership of the land as against the club's tenancy of it, and about the commercial relationship between the club and Houlding's brewery. Everton's committee, led by George Mahon, took the view that a football club should not be a subsidiary of its landlord's business interests. Houlding took the view that he had made the club possible and was entitled to the return. At a meeting in 1892 the membership voted with Mahon. Everton walked out of Anfield.

They had somewhere to go. Mahon had already identified a site on the north side of Stanley Park, and Goodison Park was built there and opened in 1892 — the first purpose-built football ground in England, designed for football from the ground up rather than adapted from a cricket field or a running track. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most early grounds were repurposed; Goodison was drawn on paper as a football stadium and built to be one.

Houlding was left with a ground and no team. So he founded a team. His new club was initially called Everton Athletic, which the Football Association refused to sanction, and it became Liverpool FC.

1. 11878A Methodist chapel congregation in Everton forms St Domingo's FC.
2. 21879The club opens beyond the congregation and takes the name of the district, Everton.
3. 31884Everton begin playing at Anfield, on land controlled by the brewer John Houlding.
4. 41888Everton become one of the twelve founder members of the Football League.
5. 51892A dispute over rent and the club's independence ends with the membership voting to leave Anfield.
6. 61892Goodison Park opens on the far side of Stanley Park, the first purpose-built football ground in England.
7. 71892Houlding, left with an empty Anfield, founds a new club that becomes Liverpool FC.
8. 81893Liverpool are admitted to the Football League and the two clubs begin their parallel histories.

The documented sequence of the split. It describes what happened at each stage, not the merits of either side's case.

What the split did not involve

It is worth being explicit about the absences, because they explain the tone that followed. There was no sectarian dimension. Both clubs drew support from Catholic and Protestant Liverpool from the beginning, and the attempts you occasionally read about to map the Merseyside divide onto the city's Irish and Orange histories do not survive examination. There was no north-versus-south geography, because both grounds are in the same part of the same city. There was no class divide worth the name.

What was left was a family argument in the most literal sense — a club that split, with the same supporters living in the same streets, choosing sides for reasons that were often no deeper than which way an older brother had gone.

• 1878Everton formed
• 1892Liverpool formed
• 1892Goodison Park opened
• 1962Top-flight derby unbroken since

Founding and construction dates, plus the year from which the derby has been played in the top division without interruption. Historical dates only.

Why it was called the friendly derby

The phrase was in general use for most of the twentieth century, and it was not sentimental. It described an observable fact: Merseyside derbies were played in front of crowds that were not segregated in the way other derbies were, because segregating them was impractical. Households contained both. Streets contained both. Two men who worked the same shift on the docks went to the same match and stood in the same part of the ground shouting for opposite teams.

The high-water mark was the mid-1980s, when both clubs were at their strongest at the same time and Merseyside monopolised English football. Everton and Liverpool met at Wembley in the 1984 League Cup final, which finished goalless and was settled by a replay at Maine Road. They met there again in the 1986 FA Cup final, the first all-Merseyside FA Cup final, which Liverpool won 3-1 and which completed a league and cup Double for them. Supporters travelled south together on the same trains, mixed on the terraces at Wembley, and sang a joint chant about Merseyside. Photographs from those days look, to a modern eye, like something staged.

Then 1989. Everton and Liverpool met in the FA Cup final again that May, weeks after the Hillsborough disaster, in a match played under a weight nobody who was there has ever quite described adequately. Liverpool won 3-2 after extra time. The response of Everton supporters to Hillsborough — the scarves tied along the Shankly Gates, the collections, the presence at the funerals — is remembered on both sides of Stanley Park and is the strongest argument the friendly derby label ever had.

The evidence for the label

Sceptics point out, fairly, that "friendly derby" was always partly a press construction, and that there were bad-tempered Merseyside derbies long before the 1990s. Both things can be true. What made the label defensible was not that the matches were gentle — several were not — but that the crowd relationship around them was genuinely different from what you found at, say, a Tyne-Wear or a Sheffield derby.

Two pieces of evidence carry most of the weight. The first is that both clubs' supporters continued to attend each other's matches when their own side was away, a habit that persisted well into the era of organised football violence elsewhere in England and which required no unusual courage on Merseyside. The second is the joint travel to Wembley, which was not a one-off gesture but the ordinary arrangement for four finals in six years. Coaches left the same streets carrying both colours.

Neither of those things is imaginable now, and the reasons for that are worth setting out properly.

The 1980s, when Merseyside owned English football

For a stretch of the decade the league title did not leave the city. Everton under Howard Kendall built a side around Neville Southall in goal, Kevin Ratcliffe at the back and Peter Reid in midfield that won the league in 1984-85 and again in 1986-87, and which in the first of those seasons also won the European Cup Winners' Cup. Liverpool, in the same window, won the league repeatedly and the European Cup in 1984.

The two clubs finished first and second in the same season more than once. That is the condition under which the friendly derby made sense: neither set of supporters had anything to be defensive about, and the fixture was a contest between the two best teams in the country rather than a status test.

It is also the condition that has not returned. English football's economics changed in the decade that followed, and the mechanism by which a city can put two clubs at the top of the table simultaneously — a broadly level distribution of gate money and a transfer market without vast wage disparities — no longer exists in the same form. That is a judgement rather than a fact, but it is one most people who watched that period would recognise.

The 1985 European ban is the hinge. English clubs were excluded from UEFA competition after Heysel, which removed Everton from the European Cup at the moment they were plausibly the strongest side on the continent, and by the time the ban was lifted the team had been dismantled. Evertonians regard it as the single event that separated the two clubs' trajectories. It is not a complete explanation — Everton's decline had internal causes too — but as grievances go it is better founded than most.

How the tone changed

The warmth did not survive the 1990s intact, and the reasons are more prosaic than dramatic.

The first is divergence. Everton's last league title came in 1986-87 and Liverpool went on winning things; a rivalry between near-equals is easier to keep good-humoured than one where one side spends decades looking up. Resentment accumulates in the gap. The second is money. The Premier League's formation in 1992 and the broadcasting revenues that followed rewarded clubs already at the top and made the distance between the two clubs financial as well as sporting. How that revenue is actually distributed, and why it entrenches gaps rather than closing them, is set out on the Premier League TV rights money page.

The third is generational. The supporters who stood together in the 1960s and travelled together in 1984 were succeeded by supporters who had only ever known all-seater grounds with hard segregation, imposed after the Taylor Report, and who therefore never shared a terrace with the other side at all. Ground design changed the social experience of the fixture. The history of how English terraces disappeared, and what replaced them, is covered on the terraces page.

The fourth is simply that the football got nastier. Which brings us to the cards.

The disciplinary record and what it actually means

The Merseyside derby has produced more red cards than any other fixture in Premier League history. That is the settled fact, and the total has gone up over the years rather than plateauing, so any specific number quoted anywhere ages quickly. The record itself has proved durable.

Individual dismissals have entered the folklore. In September 1999 at Goodison, Everton's Francis Jeffers and Liverpool's Sander Westerveld were both sent off for fighting each other — a goalkeeper dismissed for throwing punches in a derby is not a common sight. In March 2015 at Anfield, Steven Gerrard came on as a half-time substitute and was sent off within a minute for a stamp, on his birthday, in what everyone understood would be one of his last derbies. Both are replayed endlessly, for opposite reasons, on opposite sides of the park.

The explanations offered are usually moralising and usually wrong. The more useful reading is structural. The fixture is played at a tempo neither side sets deliberately — it is set by the crowd, and by the knowledge that a derby defeat is remembered at work on Monday in a way an ordinary defeat is not. High tempo produces mistimed challenges. Mistimed challenges in a match already carrying that much heat produce reactions, and reactions produce second cards.

There is also a refereeing dimension worth naming honestly. Officials appointed to this fixture know its reputation before they arrive, and a referee who has been told he is walking into the most-carded match in the competition is not approaching it with an open mind about tolerance thresholds. Whether that makes the record self-fulfilling to some degree is arguable and not resolvable from the outside.

Two further points about the disciplinary record are usually left out. The first is that a red card in this fixture carries a suspension served in subsequent matches, so a derby dismissal costs a club beyond the ninety minutes — the standard tariff runs from one match for a second caution up to three for violent conduct, with the Football Association able to extend it. A sending-off in a derby the club then loses is therefore a double penalty, and clubs have appealed derby red cards more aggressively than most for exactly that reason.

The second is that the introduction of video review changed the shape of the problem rather than solving it. Reviewable incidents — violent conduct, serious foul play, missed straight reds — are now more likely to be punished than they were, which pushes the count up. Second yellows are not reviewable, which means the most common route to a derby dismissal is untouched by technology. The fixture's card record has kept climbing through the video era.

1. 1DismissalThe referee sends the player off and reports the offence in the match report.
2. 2Automatic suspensionA ban begins from the club's next fixture, without any further hearing.
3. 3Standard tariffOne match for two cautions, two for denying a goalscoring opportunity, three for violent conduct or serious foul play.
4. 4Claim of wrongful dismissalThe club may appeal a straight red on the ground that the referee made an obvious error.
5. 5OutcomeThe ban is upheld, overturned, or in some cases extended if the appeal is judged frivolous.

The standard disciplinary route under English football's regulations. Tariffs are the normal starting points and can be varied by the Football Association.

Element of the fixture	What it produces
Short distance between grounds	Almost entirely local crowds on both sides
Split families and workplaces	Consequences that last past the final whistle
Long periods of unequal strength	Resentment on one side, condescension on the other
Very high match tempo	Late challenges and reactive fouls
Refereeing expectation	Cards issued early to establish control

Households split down the middle

This is the part outsiders find hardest to believe and Merseyside finds unremarkable. A red father and a blue son. Brothers who sit apart at Christmas. Couples who take separate cars on derby day and meet afterwards. The mixed household is the normal case on Merseyside rather than the curiosity, and it is a direct inheritance of the 1892 split, which divided a supporter base that was already formed rather than creating two from separate populations.

The practical effects are everywhere. Children's first kits are frequently a matter of negotiation. Funerals get colours. Both clubs have run schemes and charitable programmes jointly, which two clubs in most other English derbies would never contemplate, and the city's response to disaster and bereavement has repeatedly been a shared one rather than a divided one.

None of which stops it being genuinely unpleasant for ninety minutes. Both things are true at once, and the local formulation — that you can love someone and want their team relegated — is not a joke.

The matches that stayed with people

The 1966 FA Cup final is the one older Evertonians reach for first: Everton two goals down to Sheffield Wednesday and winning 3-2, Mike Trebilcock scoring twice, in the same summer as the World Cup. It is not a derby, but it belongs in any account of the fixture because it is the reference point against which Everton supporters measure everything.

For derbies proper, the FA Cup has done most of the work. Everton and Liverpool have been drawn together repeatedly and have produced replays, extra time and abandoned-then-rearranged ties. The February 1991 fifth-round replay at Goodison finished 4-4 after extra time, with Liverpool leading four separate times and Everton equalising four separate times; Kenny Dalglish resigned as Liverpool manager days later. There is no proven causal link and everyone on Merseyside draws one anyway.

Then the 1984 and 1986 Wembley finals already mentioned, and 1989. Four major finals between two clubs from the same park inside six years is a concentration English football has not seen before or since, and it is why the mid-1980s remain the reference era for both sets of supporters, for different reasons.

Everton's European Cup Winners' Cup win in 1985, beating Rapid Vienna in Rotterdam, sits awkwardly inside the story. It came in the season Everton won the league by a distance and were widely reckoned the best side in Europe, and it was immediately followed by the ban on English clubs in European competition after Heysel — a ban Everton had no part in causing and which cost them their European Cup campaign. Evertonians regard that as the great unresolved injustice of the club's history, and the fact that the ban followed a Liverpool fixture is not something either side finds easy to discuss.

Players who wore both shirts

Dave Hickson is the reference case, a centre-forward who played for Everton, then Liverpool, then Everton again in the 1950s, and who is remembered fondly at both. Johnny Morrissey crossed from Liverpool to Everton in 1962 in a transfer the Liverpool board reportedly disapproved of after the fact. Steve McMahon came through at Everton and won everything at Liverpool. Peter Beardsley went the other way, from Liverpool to Everton in 1991, and played well for both.

Gary Ablett is the one that stands out on the honours board: an FA Cup winner with each club, which is a thing nobody else has managed on Merseyside. Abel Xavier moved directly from Everton to Liverpool in 2002 and was booed for the rest of his career at Goodison.

The move that still gets brought up is Nick Barmby's, in 2000, from Everton to Liverpool for a fee, at the peak of his career, with no intermediate club to launder it. Direct transfers between the two clubs are extremely rare precisely because both boards know what they cost in goodwill. Barmby scored against Everton in his first derby for Liverpool and declined to celebrate, which helped nobody.

Stanley Park and the walk between the grounds

The two grounds are less than a mile apart. You can stand on Anfield Road and see the floodlight pylons at Goodison over the trees on a clear day. The walk across the park takes about a quarter of an hour and is the ordinary route between them; on derby day it is closed off and stewarded, and supporters are funnelled around the outside on the roads instead.

Everything about matchday logistics on Merseyside follows from this. There is no long away journey. There is no coach convoy arriving on a motorway. Both sets of supporters come from the same bus routes and the same neighbourhoods, which makes segregation a matter of managing streets rather than managing travel. Merseyside Police run the derby as a high-category operation with early kick-off times, road closures on Walton Lane and Priory Road, and dispersal routes planned in advance.

For an away supporter of either club, the practical guidance is unusually simple: get there early, expect to be held afterwards, and do not try to cut through the park. The general mechanics of away allocations and how English clubs handle them are covered on the away end tickets page.

Everton's move to the docks and what it does to derby day

Goodison Park served Everton from 1892, was rebuilt in stages across the twentieth century, and by the end was a listed-in-spirit collection of stands with obstructed views, tight concourses and a capacity in the high thirty-thousands that could not be raised without demolishing the surrounding streets. The club spent decades looking for a way out — a proposed move to Kirkby collapsed after a public inquiry, and a Walton Hall Park scheme went nowhere.

The site that worked was Bramley-Moore Dock, on the northern waterfront, a Grade II listed dock basin infilled to carry a stadium of roughly fifty-two thousand. It moved Everton away from Stanley Park for the first time in over a century and put the two grounds a couple of miles apart along the dock road rather than a walk across a park.

What that does to the derby is not yet clear and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The walking fixture becomes a travelling one in one direction. The pubs that served both grounds serve one. Goodison itself was earmarked for continued football use rather than demolition, with the women's team the intended tenant, which keeps a ground in Walton but not the men's derby. Anyone interested in how English clubs finance and site these projects will find the pattern on the new stadium builds page; Everton's is one of the more complicated examples in the country.

Songs, humour and the culture of the fixture

Liverpool's adoption of "You'll Never Walk Alone" dates from 1963, when the Gerry and the Pacemakers version was at the top of the charts and the Kop sang whatever was, and it stayed when everything else moved on. Everton have "The Grand Old Team", and the Z-Cars theme as the players emerge — a television police drama's title music, adopted in the 1960s, and one of the few English entrance tunes with no relation whatsoever to the club or the city beyond the fact that somebody liked it.

Merseyside humour is a genuine feature of the fixture rather than a decorative one. The wit at both grounds is quicker and more self-deprecating than at most English clubs, and derbies produce banners aimed as much at the club's own directors as at the opposition. The nickname economy is dense too — the Toffees, from the toffee shops of Everton village that predate the club; the Blues and the Reds, which are exactly what they sound like. More of that etymology is on the club nicknames page.

What you will not hear much of is the sort of chanting built on regional contempt that fuels the north west derby between Liverpool and Manchester United. The Merseyside derby's insults are personal and local because the two crowds are the same crowd.

Going to a Merseyside derby

Neither club sells tickets for this fixture on general sale in any meaningful sense. Both operate membership and loyalty systems in which derby matches sit at the top of the priority ladder, and the away allocation on each side is small — English clubs are required to make away seats available, but the requirement is set as a proportion or a fixed number, whichever is lower, and at a ground of this size that means a few thousand at most.

If you do get in, arrive early. The atmosphere at both grounds in the half hour before a derby is the best part of the day and it starts well before the players appear. Expect a heavy stewarding presence, expect no alcohol in view of the pitch — that is national law, not club policy — and expect to be kept in your seat for a spell after the final whistle.

Ground tours run at both venues on non-match days and are worth doing for the history rather than the architecture. Goodison in particular carries more visible past per square metre than almost any football ground in the country.

The rest of the sport's regional rivalries are set out on the England hub and in the wider football section. For the north east version of the same argument between two cities rather than two halves of one, the Tyne-Wear derby is the closest comparison in England — and the differences between the two, one a family quarrel and the other a civic one, tell you most of what you need to know about how English rivalries actually form.