Anfield Road started life as a source of independent, free, news and views on Liverpool Football Club. It was here before anyone was really using Twitter, when most news about football came from traditional outlets, outlets that maybe don’t always have the good of the club or the fans in mind when they wrote stories about Liverpool FC (or any club, really).

What seemed to matter was what sold papers, so headlines were carefully worded to suggest a little more than what was in the story underneath, except when the story underneath was already suggesting a little more than what was really going on. Every so often there would be an apparent vendetta against your club, its manager or some of its players, and the stories coming out weren’t exactly favourable.

Newspapers don’t always lie, in fact they rarely do, but they are very good at wording things in a way that suggests something quite different to what really happened. Time and again two unconnected events are linked with words like ‘after’, leading the reader to assume one caused the other. They are also good at sharing information from unnamed sources, sources that might actually be far from reliable, and whilst many reporters will avoid sharing information they have any doubts about, others are quite happy to share gossip that might be coming from someone with an axe to grind or a player to unsettle. It’s not usually the paper making it up, it’s someone they spoke to, and whilst you’d expect them to show some responsibility and integrity by making certain these sources are truthful, by giving others a right to reply, they’d rather twist words, selectively take a couple of lines from a string of quotes, without context, and sensationalise some trivial story to help sell those papers, or nowadays get the hits. Don’t get us started on clickbait headlines.

This site was set up to try and explain what the stories in the papers really meant. Pointing out where they’d been sensationalising, highlighting where they’d used phrases that were vague enough to get them off the hook when time passed by and showed their story not to be what it seemed, using its own sources to get to the truth.

This site never needed to sensationalise stories with misleading headlines to get clicks. It just needed to share the truth. It never needed to parrot whatever the club was putting out, especially when under questionable ownership. It just needed to share the truth. At all times that is what we’ve tried to do on Anfield Road and if our output has fallen off in recent times maybe the club hasn’t needed looking after in that same way, maybe enough people have found a way to get themselves heard and to keep the club on the right lines, warn the traditional media when they twist the truth.

Not just that. Nowadays we can use Twitter and other socials to share our opinions and get out our truth, we can talk on podcasts to do the same, we haven’t gone away, certainly not far, and we’ll be using this platform when the time comes.

For now though, please enjoy the archives of this site, all the old posts, dating back to the days before Hicks and Gillett, let alone FSG, and so much of the stuff that’s gone on since.

And of course: Don’t Buy The Sun.

Anfield Road Archives >>.