Singing about tragedies has no place in soccer.
Any soccer fan with basic knowledge will tell you that when Manchester United and Liverpool Football Club play each other, it is much more than a game. Two teams just thirty miles apart have torn apart friends and family with sides being chosen and lines being drawn. It is as classsic a rivalry as there has ever been. Liverpool were the cream of the crop in the 70’s and 80’s, racking up four Champions league trophies. Manchester United were the team of the 90’s and early 2000’s winning two Champions League titles.This beautiful rivalry has been unfortunately disgraced lately by singing of tragedies that have happened to both clubs.
February 6, 1958 and April 15, 1989. Two dates that will live forever with Manchester United and Liverpool Football Club. For Manchester, a plane crash in Munich that saw them lose more than half of their team. For Liverpool, a stampede during a semi-final game that saw 96 people crushed to their deaths. Two tragedies that should be mourned have been mocked and sung about since they occured. Whenever Liverpool visits manchester you can always hear a group of bad eggs singing “Who’s that dying on the runway”, the disgusting tune they have sung for ages mocking the air disaster. It goes both ways however, Manchester United fans have been known to sing “We won the league without killing anyone” whenever playing their dreaded rivals. In my opinion the victims are the friends and families of those who lost their lives in these tragedies who have to sit and listen to these vile chants. Liverpool fans travelling to Manchester in 2005 were greeted by freshly-painted “Hillsborough 89” graffiti on a highway. Whereas LFC fans were accused of throwing human feces at Manchester United fans in 2006.
Just recently Manchester United came under fire when thousands of their fans began chanting “murderers” about the hillsborough disaster in a European competition with Liverpool. Former Liverpool midfielder Ray Houghton condemned the chanting, saying: “There were people in the crowd who lost loved ones at Hillsborough and that’s really hard to take”. Because it was a European competition and not just an English league game, it caught the eye of UEFA (soccers governing body) Officials. An official Manchester United statement directly after the game read “It has always been the position of Manchester United that chants of this nature, which refer to historical tragedies, have no place in the game”. Another occasion where the teams fans have been horrid towards one another was during a minute of silence on the 50th anniversary of the plane crash when Liverpool fans kept chanting “Who cares”. The abuse doesn’t stop in the stadium though, both Liverpool’s and Manchester United’s official facebook and twitter accounts are riddled with opposing fans posting pictures of both tragedies trying to rile up the other side as much as they can. Mothers of players from either team have gotten hate mail and death threats in the case of Wayne Rooney, who was a former Manchester United captain. Below are some tweets I have found referencing the two disasters.
The hate these two clubs have even go down to the players with Gary Neville, a former Manchester United captain once saying after a win against Liverpool, “They’re absolute shite, I don’t know why anyone would ever play for that club”. The hate runs down to young children as well. David Beckham, a soccer legend who once played for Manchester United recalls his first time playing at Liverpool. “I was warming up when a young fan wearing a Liverpool scarf called me over, he couldn’t have been older than seven and he asked me for an autograph, as soon as I handed it to him he ripped it up in front of me and said welcome to Anfield, you won’t win here.”.
The question that must be asked is, where do we go from here? With neither side ever being officially punished for any chants (which are extremely punishable under UEFA rulings), it almost feels as if UEFA is enabling these fans to rile up each other even more in the hopes it will generate more excitement for games or increase merchandise sales. Children are taught to hate the other club from the time they are very little and hold that hate throughout their lives. This is a generational problem that needs to go away before this escalates and becomes a bigger problem than it already is. Fans who try and fix the problem are often pointed out and made fun of, usually when two teams play vendors outside the stadium will make banners with one side representing one team and one side representing the other, this is not the case with Manchester United and Liverpool as both supporters won’t go near anything that has to do with their rivals. Only time will tell whether these old wounds between these two clubs heal, or get worse.
