Anfield stadium announcer George Sephton can count on one hand the number of Liverpool home games he has missed since his first day on the job on August 14, 1971.
During his first two decades in front of the mic, Sephton got used to announcing Liverpool as the champion of England – the club won a remarkable 11 First Division titles between 1973 and 1990 to add to the seven it had already won up to that point.
Had you told him then that it would be another 30 years before he could call the Reds champions of England again, you might have noted a hint of surprise in his response.
“I’d have said you were crackers!” he laughs in an interview with CNN Sports. “After the triumph in 1990, the following season we didn’t get anywhere. And then it goes on each season and you’re thinking, ‘It can’t go on much longer. It can’t go on. It just can’t go on.’
“And it went on…”
Bittersweet victory
Had you told him the manner in which Liverpool would finally claim its 19th league title, that surprise would have turned to disbelief.
In March 2020, with the Reds 25 points clear at the top of the table under legendary manager Jürgen Klopp, they looked almost certain to become English champions for the first time since the First Division was rebranded as the Premier League. But then Covid-19 struck, the world went into lockdown and the league was halted.
It would resume three months later, but not as fans knew it. Sephton, reinstated in his box in one corner of Anfield, played music and made announcements, but did so to an empty stadium. With English soccer remaining behind closed doors and pubs still closed, fans watched from their homes as the players got their hands on the trophy that had eluded Liverpool for so long.
“It was spooky. I remember I came home from the last game when we picked up the trophy at Anfield behind closed doors,” Sephton recalls.
“I’d just been to a dinner where Peter Moore, who was CEO at the time, he stood up and said that Liverpool had a billion followers worldwide. Then on that night, there were 600 people inside Anfield, including all the Sky TV crew and whatever.
“I was so privileged to be there, but it was so disappointing for the rest of the Anfield faithful – people who have been coming for years and couldn’t get in to see it. It was awful.”
Among that Anfield faithful is Neil Atkinson, host and CEO of The Anfield Wrap.
“Of course, something was lost, and the whole situation is covered with sadness,” he tells CNN. “People made life decisions around wanting to be in Liverpool for the moment that Liverpool won the league. And then, effectively, it wasn’t the same.
“It wasn’t what it was meant to be.”
That’s not to say that Liverpool supporters spent that moment feeling sorry for themselves.
“I think that everyone made the best of the circumstance that they found themselves in,” says Atkinson, who spent the night with a small group of friends, social distancing “on the beach, drinking, setting off fireworks and listening to ‘Nessun Dorma,’” an aria from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, most famously sung by Luciano Pavarotti.
“I’ll remember that for the rest of my life in a really weird way,” he adds. “I hope that Liverpool win the next 10 league titles, and we’ll never celebrate any of them like that.”
Chris Pajak, co-founder of fan channel The Redmen TV, remembers hearing the news that the Premier League would be put on hold.
“We never really knew if it would start again,” he tells CNN Sports. “Were we ever going to win the Premier League? Were we that cursed that we’d never be able to lift it?”
When the league did resume, platforms like The Redmen TV and The Anfield Wrap became one of the only ways for supporters to experience the collective spirit that so many craved during one of the biggest moments in the club’s history. Pajak formed a Covid support bubble with best friend and fellow co-founder Paul Machin, and their live watchalongs garnered 25,000 viewers at a time.
“I got a different experience to probably a lot of other fans because I felt that togetherness,” Pajak reflects. “But I also felt a little bit hollow because we didn’t get to celebrate it as fans.”
It was a hollowness that many believe has extended into seasons since.
“I think it has affected fans, certainly. I think we kind of felt cheated, to be honest,” says Pajak. “We didn’t get a parade for a start. We didn’t get to congregate en masse and show our love for the side, the squad and everyone who works behind the scenes.
“And I think a lot of people felt a little bit jaded by that, and that may have been a bit of a hangover into the next few years as well.”
The following season would prove difficult at times. With stadiums still closed to supporters, an injury-ridden Liverpool would fall to a club-record six straight losses at home between January and March 2021. Sephton believes the absence of fans was felt more keenly at Anfield than anywhere else in the country.
“Liverpool have got the best supporters in the business, bar none,” he says. “So the fact that we didn’t have any supporters in the place meant that we lost more than all the other clubs in terms of background atmosphere.”
Atkinson is on the same page. “Some players suited empty stadia, some players didn’t suit empty stadia,” he says. “I would argue – because, of course I would, but I think there’s a fair body of evidence – that Jürgen Klopp had done an excellent job of building a squad of footballers who enjoyed emotional football.”
Fans were slowly allowed back into stadiums over the course of that 2020-21 season, and Liverpool was far from unsuccessful in the years that followed, winning an FA Cup and two EFL Cups as well as coming to within two games of an unprecedented quadruple in 2022.
But, by the time Klopp departed in May 2024, there was a nagging feeling among some supporters that arguably the greatest team in the club’s history had not managed to win – or celebrate – as much as it should have done.
After nearly nine years with its iconic manager, the club would now enter a new chapter under relative unknown Arne Slot.
Big shoes to fill
The consensus among Sephton, Atkinson and Pajak is that the team Slot inherited cannot quite compare to the one Klopp had in 2019-20. There is the sense that this is a squad at the start of its journey, rather than one which had been on the verge of a league title for at least a year.
Preseason predictions from journalists and pundits reflected that sentiment, with very few forecasting Liverpool to finish above Manchester City or Arsenal.
In many ways, it is easy to see why there was a degree of uncertainty around Slot. Winning the league in your first season as a Premier League manager is, by all accounts, really hard. Only four managers prior to Slot – José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Manuel Pellegrini and Antonio Conte – have ever managed to achieve the feat.
And yet, with Manchester City and Arsenal both suffering disappointing seasons in the league, no one has been able to get close to Liverpool this season.
“It is Jürgen’s squad, but Slot’s got more out of Jürgen’s squad than Jürgen could, and I didn’t think that would be possible at the end of the season last year,” says Pajak.
Sephton too has been “pleasantly surprised” by what he has seen from the Reds over the past nine months. But Atkinson sees it differently.
“I’m not surprised with Liverpool’s points total, after this many games. I am surprised at everyone else’s,” he says.
“For me, the players are everything, so if Arne Slot had done a reasonable job, I’d have expected them to get around 82 again (as the team managed in 2023-24). But if Arne Slot had done a very good job, which he has, then I think where Liverpool are isn’t unreasonable.”
Closure
In many ways, Liverpool is back where it was five years ago – it has again strolled to a league title powered by the likes of Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk.
And yet, for most supporters, the conclusion to this season feels like something else entirely.
“It’ll be completely different because there’ll be so many people who’ve never seen it before, never seen us win it,” says Sephton, speaking ahead of Sunday’s emphatic 5-1 victory against Tottenham which sealed the title with flair.
“There’ll be lots of people who missed out in 2020, and for them, it’ll be some sort of closure.”
Pajak shares the sense that Liverpool supporters are almost celebrating two league titles at once.
“When it did happen (last time), it wasn’t like that incredible release of emotion I think I expected it to be. I almost feel like, thinking about the present day, that actually this might give us that release after all these years,” he explains.
“I genuinely can’t wait for the last game of the season where we get to do a true lap of appreciation, with the players going around lifting the trophy and that. I think at that point you’ll be thinking about people who have been on the journey with you, some people who may have passed who won’t get to have seen them lift the Premier League,” Pajak adds.
“So yeah, I’m gonna be a mess by the sounds of it!”
For Atkinson, it isn’t so much about the moment the title is confirmed, or even the moment van Dijk lifts the trophy.
“We’ll get that moment, and that moment will be great,” he tells CNN ahead of the win against Tottenham. “But it’s more that sense of communal, peaceful satisfaction. That was what we lost – that long summer of meeting up, talking about it.
“You’ve not only won the league for one day,” he adds. “The winning of the league is the same (as 2019-20). The having won the league will be completely different. And that’s the thing I’m most excited about.”
The memories of 2020 – while they are tangled up with all the uncertainty and pain and ‘what-ifs’ of the pandemic – are not bad memories. The giddy joy of live watchalongs and “Nessun Dorma” remains mostly intact.
But there’s nothing quite like an entire city celebrating together.
Leave a comment