Previous chapters have demonstrated that both Orangeism and Catholicism are no longer as important as they once were to the Merseyside populace. Amid the decline in religious affiliation and sectarianism, Liverpool's two football clubs, Everton FC and Liverpool FC, have become the dominant repositories of identification. The pre-eminence of football does not, of course, automaticallydiminish sectarianism. In Glasgow, the presence of Celtic and Rangers has arguably consolidated Catholic versus Protestant and Scottish–Irish versus Scottish–British hostilities. Indeed, it has been claimed that ‘sectarian abuse and violence can manifest itself in a very visible and prominent way within Scottish football’. In Liverpool, however, the football clubs are not associated with a particular side of the divide and the growth in their popularity divided the city on non-sectarian lines. This chapter assesses the extent to which football in Liverpool constitutes the new godless religion. It begins, however, by assessing whether Liverpool couldhave gone the way of Glasgow in possessing two clubs with antagonistic support bases reinforcing an existing sectarian divide.

The ‘Green’ of Goodison and ‘Orange’ of Anfield: Reality or Rhetoric?

There is a conviction in some quarters that, like in Glasgow, where ‘Rangers and Celtic supporters drew/ [draw] upon their respective Protestant and Catholic allegiances to give a sharper edge to their rivalry’, the same is at least partially true for Liverpool. It has been traditionally claimed that Everton FC is ‘the Catholic team’ of Merseyside, whereas Liverpool FC is ‘the Protestant team’. From a historical perspective, the proposition has a potential plausibility. Sectarianism was rife during the formative years of Liverpool's professional football clubs and the split of Everton FC resulted in drastically different make-ups of both the boardroom and shareholdings of the two clubs.

Everton FC and Liverpool FC were never religiously exclusive in terms of players or respective support bases. Nonetheless, sectarian bias has been alleged. Unlike Glasgow's Old Firm, associated with Catholic Irish identity (Celtic) or Protestant British Unionism (Rangers) (once seen as ‘the establishment’), Merseyside's divisions were never clear cut.