Survival guide to Liverpool winning the Premier League

The unthinkable may actually happen in 2019 – Liverpool could finally win the Premier League. Here is a survival guide for patrons of England’s other clubs.

Firstly, this is not a post for Liverpool fans – it’s for the supporters of Manchester United, Everton, Tottenham, and the roughly 5,300 other clubs in England’s footballing system.

A win on Thursday night would put Jurgen Klopp’s men ten points clear of Manchester City and there is already an impending sense of doom around social media. How will one cope if the insufferable Kopites finally lay their hands upon the Premier League chalice?

Before deleting all of your online accounts, quitting your job to avoid scouse co-workers, leaving the country, or spending an entire year confined in a dark room, here are some survival tips should the worst really come to the worst.

Accept it

The first step towards dealing with any distressing situation is accepting it, and, in this case, the best way to do that is knowing that it could have been  a lot worse – they could have won it in 2014.

Off the back of underwhelming seventh and eighth place league finishes, little was expected of Brendan Rodger’s Liverpool side at the beginning of the 2013/14 campaign. Early points dropped against Southampton and Swansea showed why they were 33/1 outsiders to get their hands on the title.

But after Luis Suarez returned from a lengthy ban and Steven Gerrard dropped into the ‘Pirlo role,’ Liverpool’s season took an unlikely upward trajectory. An astonishing 11 game win streak, beginning with Arsenal and ending in a ‘title decider’ versus Manchester City, saw The Reds jump from fourth to first, scoring three or more in nine of those fixtures.

The narrative was one for football’s romantics. Gerrard, the one club man in the autumn of his career, had heroically led the underdogs to the title. The writing looked to be on the wall: they were ‘gonna win the league.’

In the end, we all know what happened: an on-field ‘this doesn’t slip speech,’ a subsequent slip, and an unthinkable capitulation at Crystal Palace, handed the league to Man City. Gerrard would never win the title as a player  – something Asier Del Horno (Chelsea), Richard Wright, Jeremie Aliadiere, (Arsenal), Darren Ferguson, Luke Chadwick, Ronnie Wallwork, and Tom Cleverley (Manchester United) all managed.

Leicester City has since won the league in a true footballing fairytale and no one can claim there is anything magical or romantic about Liverpool’s current challenge.

Give credit

Give Liverpool credit, but not to the players or manager (obviously). Give credit to the Liverpool board.

The board went out and ostentatiously addressed Liverpool’s flaws with numerous extravagant splurges. Virgil van Dijk (£75 million) is football’s most expensive ever defender; while, Alisson Becker’s (£55.5 million) price tag was the most costly for a goalkeeper. The Reds also made Naby Keita (£52.75) the most expensive African player, splashed out £39 million on Fabinho, and added Xherdan Shaqiri to its attack line.

Make sure to have these figures at the top of your head to immediately switch the narrative from Liverpool’s on field feats to its financial flexing and again take any shimmer of romanticism away from the achievement.

I’m sure Tottenham fans will unashamedly applaud the valour of Liverpool’s board in backing its manager; while, Arsenal will feel it may have had some hope of competing if they had also shopped in the aisles of Harrods rather than Poundland.

If Liverpool manages to put City to the sword on Thursday night, then 2019 may be a tough year for all of us non-Kopites. But we will get through it – and hey, there is still plenty of time for them to let it ‘slip’ again.