Liverpool, Manchester United and a shifting dynamic

Sunday: Liverpool v Manchester United

Anfield, 4.30pm; Live on Sky Sports

It was October 2021 and Jürgen Klopp was in a knife-twisting mood. “United never look happy when they play us,” he told his Liverpool squad in their final team meeting before their visit to Old Trafford. “They always want to use this game to sort out everything. We are different. We want to squeeze everything out of this amazing situation we have here.” The subtext was clear enough: this was a team liable to shatter on first contact. In for the kill.

Before the game, as Liverpool coach Pep Lijnders recounts in his book Intensity, Klopp and his staff homed in on United’s pressure points with a sadistic relish. Scott McTominay and Fred were to be targeted ruthlessly in midfield. Roberto Firmino was assigned to drag Harry Maguire and Victor Lindelöf out of position. Bruno Fernandes’s space was to be shut down aggressively. The result was a 5-0 victory, the Theatre of Dreams set ablaze, thousands of fans beating a path for the exits at half-time.

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But even as Klopp savoured one of his signature triumphs, he saw what was coming, even if not everyone else did. In an interview with German television that same month, he reflected on the shifting landscape of the Premier League, with new investment flooding in and the old giants regrouping. “United are United,” he said. “They won’t stop investing until it works out at some point.”

Has that point now been reached? –— Never mind that Liverpool haven’t conceded at home in the league all year and that Erik ten Hag’s side have yet to record an away win against anybody better than Fulham.

Narrative, extrapolation, perception: this stuff matters, however evanescent its relationship to results on the pitch. For Liverpool fans, who have not seen their side beaten at home by United for seven years, Sunday’s game represents a moment of extreme foreboding, the sum of their most vivid fears. Ironically it is perhaps Klopp’s side – 10 points behind United, 21 points off the leaders Arsenal – who are now looking to this fixture as a potential remedy.

How we reached this point remains a matter of some conjecture. Buried in the subtext of Klopp’s comment about United’s investment was a certain accusation of caprice: the idea that by simply throwing money at a problem the biggest clubs will eventually happen upon the right alignment by a simple law of averages. Is this what has happened in United’s case? Casemiro was a last-minute signing that has paid off brilliantly. Not many clubs could afford to take an £82 million punt on Antony or simply write off a global superstar such as Cristiano Ronaldo. Meanwhile, there were plenty in the Old Trafford hierarchy pushing the merits of Mauricio Pochettino over Ten Hag this time last year.

In essence this was the culmination of the strategy United’s former chief executive, Ed Woodward, outlined a decade ago. “If we have a bad year,” he said in an interview with a club fanzine, “we have the financial strength to change the team. We have so much deeper financial strength that instead of selling three players and buying three, we can do five.” As if to underline the point, United brought in five first-team players in the summer (Antony, Casemiro, Lisandro Martínez, Tyrell Malacia, Christian Eriksen) and Liverpool brought in three (Darwin Núñez, Fábio Carvalho and Arthur Melo).

But of course, United’s resurgence goes beyond financial might. The investment in Ten Hag’s side has been not simply in terms of money but time and patience. The backroom structure has slowly been filled out after years of neglect. There is now an established playing style, something United have arguably not enjoyed since Louis van Gaal. Naturally, there are no long-term guarantees. But United are at least trying to construct a coherent identity, to build a functioning organisation, to be – in other words – a little more like Liverpool.

At the same time, curiously enough, Liverpool have been trying to become – for better or worse – a little more like United. This week the club announced a record-breaking set of financial results, overtaking United in terms of revenue for the first time since the 1990s. Some of the increase was related to performance on the pitch – in particular their run to the Champions League final in 2022 – but in large part their off-field success is the result of an unrelenting focus on commercial growth, leveraging their global fanbase for every last cent.

New sponsors have been pursued with the same speed and alacrity that characterised Woodward’s United: an Official Cloud Storage Partner, an Official Asia Betting Partner, an Official Sound Partner (whatever that means). The expansion of the Anfield Road Stand should be completed this summer. And of course in recent months the club’s owners have been casting their net for potential investors, with some reports even suggesting that the Fenway Sports Group is plumping the club up for a sale that would guarantee it a sumptuous return on its initial investment.

And so to the latest instalment of a fixture that has never simply been about football. In a sense, Liverpool and United have spent most of their history defining themselves against each other, tussling for supremacy, measuring their progress in their rivals’ chagrin. But perhaps the most intriguing element of the current dynamic is the way in which each has sought to mould itself in the other’s image. Derbies are always about points of difference, dividing lines, directions of travel. But Sunday’s game may just illustrate how similar these two global superclubs have become.