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The Reds Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Liverpool F.C.

The Reds Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Liverpool F.C.

By: Trevor Daivid Delves
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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.

© 2026 The Reds Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Liverpool F.C.
Episodes
  • Episode 1 - The House That Houlding Built (1892–1923)
    May 27 2026

    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.

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    25 mins
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