This column begins with a confession. One I am afraid and not a little ashamed to make. One that my instincts tell me I should be taking to a priest who is bound to silence, or at the very least an understanding therapist. Certainly not to a forum of sports fans with strong opinions and keyboards full of potential swears.
Scourging rods at the ready, then: this week I have been wearing aLiverpooltop. And I am not a Liverpool fan.
I understand the line that I have crossed. For most of my life, I would have been the first to draw that line. I would have scratched it across the pavement in a horrid squeal of chalk and dared you to defy it. This fall from grace started innocently enough, and if you’re in a mind to be generous, I’ll explain.
My mother was a lifelong Liverpool fan (for transparency, she was not from Liverpool, nor is any of my family) and when my niece was turning three, I discovered that the club sold a kid-size throwback bomber jacket. I bought it for her birthday, partly because I knew it would annoy her football-refusenik parents, but mostly because there is no cuter sight than a little girl with a tumble of curls wearing Shankly-era training gear.
Six years later, her little brother is about to outgrow the hand-me-down. Some idle browsing for larger sizes alerts me to the fact that the adult version is on sale. With a tap it is in my cart. In a click it is on its way. The politics of actually wearing it have not yet occurred. And then on Sunday, the very same day it arrives on my doorstep, Liverpool win the league.
My mum, who died in 2021, would have loved that Spurs game. And so, on the Monday, it doesn’t feel too wrong to throw it on – over a navy jumpsuit, thanks for asking – in her memory. I am nervous that someone will ask my opinion on Arne Slot’s wing-play tactics, or Trent Alexander-Arnold’s future; but I live in London, where talking to strangers is punishable by social, if not literal, death. What I do get, when someone clocks the badge, is a just-detectable lengthening of eye contact, and even the occasional smile. I smile back. It feels pretty good.
The rules on wearing club colours that are not your own have always seemed pretty well set – you don’t do it. And the sense of taboo is understandable in football, where the wrong shirt in the wrong crowd can invite violence. For the supporter of any sporting team that has been through tough times – and show me the team that hasn’t – those shirts and sweaters represent loyalty and commitment, taking your lumps, keeping the faith. Wearing them when you haven’t earned the right – or because you happen to like the colour – is a profanity.
Which makes donning my Liverpool jacket for a second day trickier territory. Am I still honouring my mother, or am I just enjoying the way the crimson fabric works with my lipstick? Worse than that: am I getting a kick from the micro-nods on the street, the nano-bursts of recognition in people’s faces?
I’ve still got it on as I head to a party thrown by a Liverpool fan who was actually at Anfield on Sunday, so I watch the highlights on the way to assuage some of my guilt. Possibly the polyester fibres are impregnated with some kind of hypno-serum, because when Alexis Mac Allister spears in his left-footer my fist clenches with delight.
I ask my host whether it’s OK that I’m wearing “his” colours. He says that it’s fine, and anyway isn’t it weird that something created for pleasure and leisure demands such a monastic approach? If you’re into food, or music, he points out, no one expects you to restrict yourself to just one type.
His friend disagrees: he remembers the first Liverpool top he bought as a kid. He’d hang it on a chair by his bed and fall asleep looking at it – that’s what the shirtshouldmean, not this shallow-piggybacking-cultural-appropriation-identity-theft. And yet, every piece of merch sold to a suggestible creature such as me is growing his team’s brand, reach and transfer war chest.
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Is it not in Liverpool Football Club’s interests to have as many people wearing its clothing as possible, regardless of individual intent? Occasional, one-off purchases are still a form of support, a contribution to the cause. Then there’s the mesmeric power of the jacket itself. Who knows how quickly it could have me swearing fealty to the Kop?
All this to say, I’m still wearing it four days later – and struggling to feel sorry. Yes, I exchanged a fraudulent grin with a delivery driver who was wearing his Liverpool shirt to work and waved at me from the side of the road. And yes, wearing the colours of a globally famous team that have just won a historic title does look a heck of lot like glory hunting, which is the worst sin you can commit in the sports world, aside from buying a half-and-half scarf.
But I’m not deluded. I know this moment isn’t my moment. That’s not why I’m keeping the jacket. Nor is the fact that it’s a stylish wind-resistant light-layer for the spring-summer crossover season. I’m keeping it because ever since I started wearing it, I’ve walked around with my head up and a face that’s ready to smile. Because people who have no other word of English have said “Liverpool!” to me in the street. And because it prompted a lengthy, silent conversation with a deaf man on the tube, who wanted to convey to me in the two stops between Finchley Road and Baker Street that he hadn’t played sport since he was a little boy, when someone had kicked a ball and slammed him full in the face.
Club colours don’t just have to serve a sense of tribe and belonging – they can be about wider connection, too. Wearing someone else’s clothes is great for teaching us we’ve more in common underneath.
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