The Reds Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Liverpool F.C.
When John Houlding lost an argument about rent with the Everton committee in the spring of 1892, he did the only logical thing: he founded his own football club on the ground they vacated. He called it Liverpool. It would go on to win twenty league championships and six European Cups — and yet the road from that petty Victorian dispute to the summit of world football runs through places no supporter would have chosen to visit.
Reds Through the Ages tells that story across ten episodes, each covering a coherent chapter in the club's history. It begins with the founding and the early titles, moves through twenty-four years of unexplained decline and the moment Billy Liddell held a fading club together almost alone, and arrives at December 1959 — when a Scotsman from a mining village in Ayrshire stepped off a train at Lime Street and rebuilt a sleeping giant from the Second Division up.
From there: the Boot Room years and Bob Paisley's nine seasons of quiet, devastating excellence — three European Cups, six league titles, twenty trophies in total, delivered by a man in a cardigan who refused to take credit for any of it. Then the catastrophes — Heysel, Hillsborough — and the thirty years without a title that followed. Then the return: Istanbul in 2005, when Liverpool were 3-0 down at half-time in a European Cup final and somehow won. Madrid in 2019. Ninety-nine points in 2019-20, the title after thirty years, clinched in an empty stadium during a pandemic.
And now, in 2025-26, the story continues.
A Special Episode steps outside the chronological structure to cover the full history of the Merseyside derby — one of English football's most unusual rivalries, between two clubs that share a city, a history, and more often than not, a family.
This is a series for Liverpool supporters who want to understand where the club came from. It is also for anyone who wants to understand what a football club can mean to a city.
You'll never walk alone.
The Reds Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Liverpool F.C.
Episode 1 - The House That Houlding Built (1892–1923)
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It begins with an argument about rent. In January 1892, Everton Football Club voted to leave their Anfield ground rather than accept a rent increase from their landlord, John Houlding. They walked across Stanley Park to Goodison Road and never came back. Houlding, left with an empty stadium, did the only logical thing: he founded a new club and filled it.
Episode One covers Liverpool's first three decades — from John McKenna's scouting trips to Scotland that assembled the "Team of the Macs," through Tom Watson's seventeen years of professional ambition that produced two league championships, to the post-war back-to-back titles of 1921 and 1922 that should have launched a dynasty and were instead its end. Why Liverpool spent the next twenty-four years winning nothing is one of the game's great unanswered questions. This episode asks it.
Player of the Era: Alex Raisbeck — the Stirlingshire half-back who captained the 1901 champions and gave Liverpool its first identity, at a time when the club was still trying to prove it deserved to exist.
It's the spring of 1892. The Football League, the world's first, is just four years old, a rough and tum coalition of clubs from England's industrial north and midlands. The city of Liverpool, the second city of the British Empire, already has a football club, one of the best in the country, in fact, a founding member of that new league. The club is called Everton, and it plays its matches at a ground on Anfield Road, in the residential streets of Anfield, to the north of the city centre. The ground belongs, along with a great deal of other Merseyside property, to a man called John Holding. Holding is a Tory, a brewer, a self-made man of considerable wealth and influence, known in some quarters as King John of Everton. He is not a man accustomed to being thwarted. In February of that year, Holding, who is not only Everton's landlord but also their president, proposes raising the ground rent from pound 100 a year to pound 250. This is not in itself outrageous. But it is part of a larger pattern of behaviour that the Everton committee has come to resent. Holding wants control. He wants the club to be a limited company, with him as the major shareholder. He wants his ale sold in the pubs around the ground. The rent dispute is the final straw. After months of bitter argument, the committee decides it has had enough of King John. They vote to leave Anfield. They find a new piece of land across the beautifully manicured Stanley Park, a patch called Goodison, and in August 1892, they open Goodison Park and play their first match there. The move is complete. Holding is left at Anfield, alone, holding a lease on an empty football ground, abandoned by his own club. So he founds one of his own. On the 15th of March 1892, in Holding's own front room, Liverpool Football Club is created. Not from a community meeting, not from a long-cherished vision of sporting glory, not from civic pride or a desire to represent the people. It is born from a landlord's refusal to be inconvenienced, from a rent dispute, from sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. Welcome to Reds Through the Ages. A complete history of Liverpool Football Club, told across ten episodes, from that landlord's quarrel in the spring of 1892 to the global institution of right now. I'm your host. Each week we'll cover a distinct era. The managers who defined it, the players who illuminated it, the trophies they won, the catastrophes they endured, and the fundamental questions that each chapter of the club's history was really asking. Today we go to the very beginning. We explore the chaotic birth, the assembly of a team from scratch, the shrewd appointment of the club's first great manager, the two league titles that made them an early powerhouse, and what it meant to be Liverpool Football Club in the years before anyone knew what Liverpool Football Club was truly going to become. This is Episode 1, the House That Holding built. The world that made them, the year is 1892. Queen Victoria has been on the throne for 55 years. The British Empire covers nearly a quarter of the globe. And Liverpool, the city, is at the zenith of its power. The docks, a marvel of Victorian engineering, run for more than seven miles along the Mersey waterfront, handling more cargo than almost any port on Earth. Cotton from the American South, tobacco from the colonies, sugar from the West Indies, grain from Canada, timber from Scandinavia, the wealth of an empire flows through this city, and the city has shaped itself accordingly. Grand neoclassical buildings, St. George's Hall, the Walker Art Gallery, the County Sessions House, declare its importance. This is a city built on global trade, confident and assertive. But behind the grand facades, it is a city of profound contrasts. The merchants in their counting houses and the dockers on the waterfront, living impact, in sanitary courts. The population is approaching 600,000. It is the second city of the empire, or so liverpuddleans will tell you, and they are not entirely wrong. The city is also, by 1892, a city of immigrants, a melting pot on a scale few English cities could comprehend. The Irish arrived in their hundreds of thousands during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, and they stayed, shaping the city's politics and its character. Welsh workers came for the docks and the railways, building their own chapels and communities. Scottish merchants and professionals settled in the commercial districts. There are German merchants, Scandinavian sailors, a significant Chinese community near the waterfront. Liverpool is not a gentle pastoral English city. It is something more specific and stranger. A port city, an Atlantic city, a place that belongs partly to the sea and only partly to the island it sits on. It is tough, worldly, and outward looking. Football in 1892 is still a young professional sport, raw and rapidly evolving. The Football League was founded just four years earlier, in 1888, and its 12 founder members were drawn exclusively from the Midlands and the North, the industrial heartlands where the game had taken root. The South of England, with its traditions of amateurism rooted in the public schools, regarded this new professional league with a degree of suspicion. Paying men to play football had only been formally legalized in 1885, and for many, it still felt morally distasteful, a grubby business. But they were being decisively overruled, week by week, by the sheer size of the crowds. 40,000 people attended the 1889 FA Cup final at the Oval in London. This was no longer just a pastime, it was becoming a mass obsession. In Liverpool itself, football is already the dominant sport of the working class. Everton, the club that has just departed Anfield, drew crowds of more than 20,000 for significant matches in the late 1880s. The men who come to watch are dock workers, factory hands, warehousemen, railwaymen, clerks, men who work with their hands and their backs, and for whom Saturday afternoon offers a few precious hours of escape and collective identity. Football gives those hours a shape and a meaning, a result to celebrate or curse at work on Monday, a player to admire or argue about, or occasionally follow with something approaching worship. It is into this world in the spring of 1892 that John Holding drops a new football club. It doesn't have a tradition, it doesn't have a history, it doesn't have a single supporter who chose it over any alternative. What it has is a ground, and a man who is determined not to be defeated by a committee vote about rent. A club assembled in a hurry. John Holding's first problem, having founded a football club, was straightforward but immense. He needed footballers and a name and a manager and a kit. The club existed on paper, but it did not exist on a pitch. He and his associate, William E. Barclay, first tried to call the new club Everton Athletic, a provocative move that was swiftly rejected by the football authorities, so they settled on the city's name, Liverpool. For colours, they chose blue and white, the same as their departed tenants. The Football League, meanwhile, had to be persuaded to admit a brand new club with no history and no squad and was not immediately enthusiastic. Liverpool were initially denied Football League membership. They were told to play in the regional Lancashire League and prove themselves worthy of a place. The man holding put in charge of building a team from nothing was John McKenna. An Ulsterman from County Monaghan, not Tyrone, McKenna had come to Liverpool for work and found, along the way, a talent for administration and a genuine deep love of the game. He was organized, shrewd, and well connected. McKenna understood the problem immediately. He couldn't recruit from Everton for obvious reasons of loyalty and bitterness. There simply weren't enough quality local players available who weren't already attached to other clubs. So he went where the quality was. He went to Scotland. In the spring and summer of Mess Tour from 1892, McKenna made a decisive scouting trip north of the border. Scottish football at that time was arguably the most advanced in the world, built on a sophisticated passing game. While many English clubs still favoured a more individualistic, dribbling style, the players were technically accomplished, tactically aware, and physically committed, and crucially, they were willing to come south for the better wages offered by the professional English game. McKenna signed a whole team of them in rapid succession: goalkeeper Billy McCowan, fullbacks Andrew Hannah and Duncan McLean, halfbacks James McBride, Joe McQueen and Matt McQueen, and a forward line of Thomas Wally, Jock Smith, John Miller, Malcolm McVean, and John McCartney. The entire starting lineup was Scottish. The press, with the affectionate mockery that English sports journalism has always deployed toward anything slightly unusual, immediately christened them the Team of the Max. On 1st of September 1892, Liverpool played their first ever match. The opponents were Rotherham Town in a friendly at Anfield. With only a handful of spectators present, Liverpool won seven first. Malcolm McVean scored the club's first ever goal. It was a statement, though at the time it was hard to know quite what it was a statement of. Here was a club assembled in a few months, from players recruited across the border in a city that already had a football club it preferred. Liverpool were an answer to a question nobody had asked, yet they kept winning. The Lancashire League season of 1892-93 went exceptionally well. Liverpool won it at the first attempt. This success was enough to persuade the Football League to expand, and Liverpool were elected to the second division for the following year. And in 1893-94, their first Football League season, they were unstoppable. They won the second division championship without losing a single one of their 28 matches. Promotion to the 1st Division was secured via a test match victory over Newton Heath, the club that would one day become Manchester United. From a concept in a landlord's front room to the top flight of English football in two years, the speed of it was remarkable. The man who made it respectable. Liverpool's first spell in the 1st Division lasted only a single season. The step-up in quality was too great, and they were immediately relegated. They won the second division again the following year, 1895 to 96, and returned to the top flight, this time better prepared. The first years back in the 1st Division were decent but not distinguished. They avoided relegation, competed reasonably, and slowly built a fan base. But the club lacked the professional infrastructure and strategic vision to sustain a genuine challenge for honours. It was still, in some ways, an improvised thing: a stadium, a committee, a rotating cast of Scottish professionals who came and went as the wages and the results dictated. What changed everything was the appointment, in August 1896, of Tom Watson as Secretary Manager. Watson had already won the Football League Championship three times with Sunderland. At just 37 years old, he was the most decorated and respected manager in the country. Holding's decision to break the bank to appoint him was a clear signal of intent. This was not going to be a makeshift club forever. This was going to be a proper one. Watson was everything a late Victorian football institution needed. He was organized, he was credible, he had the respect of other clubs, and crucially, of the Football League's administrators. He understood how to build a squad systematically, not through panic buying or the lucky find, but through careful assessment of character, patient development of young players, and the maintenance of a playing style that his squad understood and believed in. He professionalized every aspect of the club, from training and tactics to travel arrangements. He was also, in the manner of the great managers of every era, a man who could convince a player to come to Liverpool when that player had other, perhaps more attractive options. He sold them a vision of what the club could become. The first championship came in the 1901 season. Liverpool finished two points clear of Watson's old club, Sunderland, with a record of 19 wins, seven draws, and eight defeats from 34 matches. The title was clinched on the final day of the season. The team was built around the imperious captaincy of Alex Raisbeck at centre half, but also featured the prolific goal scoring of Sam Raybold up front. It was Watson's fifth season at the club, the payoff for five years of patient, methodical construction. Anfield that spring was a different place from the provisional ground of 1892. The spy on cop, the great open-air standing bank at one end, had been extended and after the Second Boer War, was renamed in honor of a battle at which a disproportionate number of Liverpool men had fallen. The ground had history now. The club had history. Something real, something lasting, was being built. The second title came in 1905-06, and in even more remarkable circumstances. Between the two championships, there had been a disastrous 1903-04 season, which saw the club relegated back to the second division. It was a humiliating setback, but it concentrated minds. Watson rebuilt, and Liverpool won the second division for a third time in 1904-05. Then, in their first season back in the top flight, they won the 1st Division Championship, finishing four points clear of Preston North End. To go from second-tier champions to champions of all England in the space of 12 months was an astonishing achievement. The FA Cup, however, remained elusive. The final came in 1914, Watson's 18th year at the club. Liverpool, captained by Raceback's successor Ephraim Longworth, lost 1-0 to Burnley at Crystal Palace in a match famous for being the first attended by a reigning monarch, King George V. It was the last major final of an era. The world was about to change completely. The Silence, 1915 to 1919. Tom Watson died on the 6th of May 1915 from pneumonia. He had managed Liverpool for 19 years, a record that still stands. He had built the club from a hastily assembled novelty act into a two-times champion of England. He had seen Anfield transform from a basic Victorian enclosure into a proper football ground, one of the finest in the country. He had, in the truest sense, made Liverpool Football Club a real, respected institution. He died in office. And five weeks before his death, on the 24th of April 1915, the Football League season had ended, and it would not begin again for four long traumatic years. The word for what happened next is stopped, not paused. Stopped. The fixtures, the transfers, the league tables, the Saturday afternoons that had become the rhythm of working class life in Liverpool and a hundred other cities. All of it stopped. The Great War demanded a different kind of commitment. The men who had filled the COP on match days, the young men of Liverpool enlisted in their thousands, many joining the POW's battalions. Serving side by side with their friends and neighbours from the same streets, they went to France and Flanders and Gallipoli. Many of them did not come back. The ground sat quiet, the turnstiles stilled. Anfield became, during the war years, a place used for military drilling and vehicle storage, practical, necessary, and as far from the joy of football as it was possible to get. There were wartime competitions, loosely organized regional leagues, with teams made up of whoever was available, players too old for service, those working in reserved occupations, those home on leave, the occasional guest player. Liverpool took part, but these were not real seasons. They were placeholders, a ghost of the game. The real game was holding its breath. When the Football League finally resumed in August 1919, Liverpool returned to find a club much diminished from what it had been. Watson was gone. Some of the players who might have formed the core of a strong post-war side were gone too. Their careers ended by injury or time. The new manager, David Ashworth, who had guided Oldham Athletics successfully before the war, would have to build something from the remains of what Watson had left behind. The supporters came back to Anfield as people come back to anything after a long, traumatic absence, glad that it still exists, and not quite sure how to feel about the time that has passed and the people who are no longer there to share it. The high watermark, 1919 to 1923. The years between the resumption of League Football and the back-to-back championships of 1921-22 and 1922-23 are years of reconstruction, and then suddenly, glorious achievement. David Ashworth assembled a side that drew on the remnants of Watson's last squad and the generation of players who had come through or survived the war. The football was not romantic. It was functional, organized, and ferociously hard to beat. The team was built on the foundation of one of the greatest goalkeepers in the club's history, the brilliant and eccentric Irishman Elisha Scott. The 1921-22 title was Liverpool's third. It came on goal average. The thinnest of margins over Tottenham Hotspur. 38 matches, 22 wins, 13 draws, 3 defeats. It was the most consistent season the club had ever produced. Only three defeats across the entire campaign. A defensive record that the Football League had rarely seen equaled. Ashworth's side conceded just 36 goals all season. The COP, now a vast covered terrace at the south end of Anfield, was as loud and as proud as it had ever been. The 1922-23 title was Liverpool's fourth. Ashworth had left mid-season, replaced by Matt McQueen, a former player who saw the season out, two league championships in two consecutive years, four titles in 22 seasons. A club founded in a rent dispute was now one of the great football institutions in England. It should have been the beginning of something. It was not. What happened after 1923, the slow drift, the fading ambition, the slide that would end 31 years later, in the second division, is the subject of episode 2. The great clubs that followed shared something Liverpool lacked. They had a plan, a system. Liverpool, having reached the summit, found they had no real idea how to stay there. Player of the era, Alex Raisbeck. Each episode we look closely at one player whose story captures the spirit of their era. For the years between 1892 and 1923, that player is Alex Raisbeck. He is not much remembered now, and he deserves to be. Born in 1878 in Stirlingshire, the son of a miner, he began his career at Hibernian. Liverpool signed him in 1898 for a significant fee and installed him as the centerpiece of Tom Watson's team. He was 20 years old. The centre half in Razbeck's era was not a purely defensive player. He was the spine of the side, connecting defence and attack, dictating rhythm and tempo. Razbeck was, by the accounts of his contemporaries, exceptional. The Liverpool Echo, after the first championship in 1901, called him simply the finest halfback in England. He captained that side. He was the reason a team of largely unremarkable parts won the Football League. His standards set the standard for everyone around him. He stayed at Liverpool for 11 years, 340 appearances. A second championship in 1906. What Raisbeck represents is what Liverpool was in those years. A club that could not rely on reputation or history. What it had was the quality of its best player, and the way that quality established a standard the whole club was held to. Real identity. That identity would be tested repeatedly, but it started with him. Fans eye view. I want to close with a question. What did it mean to be one of the first Liverpool supporters? Think about what it took. You are a Liverpool man in 1892, a docker, a warehouseman, and your football club has just moved to Goodison Park. You've been going to Anfield for years, and now there is a new club at your old ground, founded by a landlord nobody likes, full of Scottish players nobody has heard of. And somehow you decide to go. You pay your sixpence, you take your place on the terrace, and you watch. What made them do it? Some lived closest to Anfield, some worked for holding, but some of them chose Liverpool in that first year because something about a club that shouldn't exist. A club with no past and all of its future still ahead of it. Something about that appealed to them. There is a particular kind of supporter drawn to the underdog, to the new thing. Liverpool in 1892 was the most extreme version of that possible. They had nothing behind them. By 1923, they had four league championships. By the time this series ends, they'll have 20 and 6 European Cups and nights in Rome and Istanbul and Madrid that the people in that original Anfield crowd could not have imagined. That journey from nothing to something and from something to a kind of greatness is what this series is about. It begins with those first supporters, making their choice. So, Liverpool Football Club, born in March 1892 from a landlord's refusal to accept a committee decision, built from Scottish professionals, champions of England before their first decade was out, champions again in 1906 and again in 1922 and 1923, four titles in 31 years, placing them among the very best. It was founded in anger, and it found, in spite of itself, something like purpose. Liverpool Football Club, by 1923, was a proper institution. The question was whether it knew what to do with that. Next week, on episode 2 of Reds Through the Ages, the back-to-back titles of 1922 and 1923 should be the foundation of a dynasty. Instead, they are the end of one. We follow Liverpool through 31 years without a championship. The wrong managers, the wrong players, and the gradual, bewildering slide that culminates in May 1954, when a club that has won the Football League four times is relegated to the second division. At the centre of it, carrying the club almost on his own, is a Scottish winger called Billy Liddell, who deserved so much more. Until then, thank you for listening. You'll never walk alone.