Into the Red

After a decade in football wilderness, weighed down by the legacy of unmatched domestic and European successes in the 1970s and 80s, Liverpool Football Club under new French coach Gérard Houllier and forward-looking chief executive, Rick Parry face up to the huge challenge of building a new team and a successful modern club at Anfield fit for the twenty-first century.

But change is never easy and a rough ride lies ahead. Hard-headed and controversial, Houllier and his policies are proving contentious: changing the dressing-room culture which has been central to the clubs earlier successes and his policy of player rotation, to name just two. So how does this new coaching guru, with a strong personal attachment to both the city and the club, see the future of the game and Liverpools place in it? And do the fans of the club its lifeblood share Houlliers vision of a borderless international football squad and a more pragmatic, less flamboyant approach to playing the modern game? Into the Redcharts the place of football in the city of Liverpool, along with some of the reasons for the clubs dramatic fall from grace. It also reports on the extraordinary revival season for Liverpool FC in 200001 as the club battled, uniquely, in Europe and at home for honours across four different fronts, and on season 200102, a dramatic one for Houllier in particular. It includes comment from some of the key protagonists at Anfield as Liverpool FC begins to build, on and off the pitch, an exciting new footballing era for the club, dragging it into the new millennium and ultimately challenging the great football epochs of the teams history under legends such as Shankly, Paisley and Fagan.

John Williams has written widely on football and football culture. Previous publications includeHooligans Abroad,The Roots of Football Hooliganism,Game Without FrontiersandIs It All Over: Can Football Survive The Premier League?He also regularly contributes to football magazineWhen Saturday Comes. He is the director of the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research and is a lecturer at the University of Leicester.