The nervous energy will creep in before Liverpool meet Manchester United at Anfield on Sunday. No fixture has a bigger cachet in English football and their meetings can throw up surprise results. “Form goes out of the window”, as the old saying goes.
However, the fact is that United has never been more applicable to Liverpool than today. At least not from a sporting point of view. And the further down the Premier League table they fall, the more absent they will be in the minds of Liverpool fans, especially those of the younger generations.
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The rivalry between two clubs from neighboring cities in the northwest of England who love to hate each other will never completely go away, but their respective trajectories may not be much more divergent than they were at the beginning of 2025. While Liverpool find themselves in the United , the most sensible in the table of 20 Premier League teams with forty-five points, is in 14th place with less than one point (22), just seven ahead of promoted Ipswich Town and with its own coach, Ruben Amorim, admitting that they are in a relegation battle.
That 23-point gap is unprecedented – Liverpool were 24 points down on United at the end of their 2019-20 season – but never before have there been so many teams between the two clubs at the halfway point of a Premier League campaign.
It would be unfair to compare the impact Arne Slot has had at Anfield since his summer appointment as Jurgen Klopp’s successor with the difficulties Amorim has faced since replacing the sacked Erik ten Hag at United two months ago, given the contrasting circumstances. Slot has done an extraordinary job, but he also had time to get his message across to the players during the pre-season and inherited a squad who led the Premier League deep into last season before fading in the final weeks to finish third.
Amorim, for his part, attempted to take on one of the toughest responsibilities in club football at one of the most hectic times of the season, and with a team whose confidence had already been shaken by a series of depressive effects under the leadership of Ten Witches.
He has not helped himself at times, not least in his insistence on imposing the 3-4-3 formation he used at previous club Sporting CP of Lisbon on a set of players who seem ill-equipped to make it work (his devotion to that setup was one of the factors which counted against him when Liverpool considered appointing him when Klopp stepped down at the end of last season), but for now others are bearing the brunt of the criticism.
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Former United defender turned TV pundit and commentator Gary Neville described their expensively-assembled line-up as the “pound-for-pound, worst team in the country” on Monday night during the 2-0 home defeat by Newcastle United, a result that was their sixth defeat in all competitions during December — the most United have suffered in a single calendar month since September 1930.
Few expect 2025 to start better for United than the way 2024 ended as they head to Anfield for their first game of the year.
Slot’s side beat them 3-0 at Old Trafford in September in an early display of the Dutchman’s tactical acumen, and if a professional were asked to pick a composite XI from the two groups before the second leg of the Sunday, it would be difficult to think about it. of a single United player who would be part of the team. In football terms, there is now a chasm between those clubs.
That’s not to say United should turn things around this weekend. They’ve grown accustomed to disrupting Liverpool’s progress in recent years: they were the only team to struggle with them in the first six months of the 2019-20 season (a 1-1 draw in Manchester in October) and, more pertinently, making back-to-back trips to Old Trafford derailed Liverpool’s quadruple offer under Klopp last spring.
First, United eliminated their FA Cup rivals in the quarter-finals with a 4-3 win after extra time; Then, three weeks later, a 2-2 draw marked the start of a two-win streak in seven league games for Liverpool that ended their name hopes.
It’s effects like the ones that have made this game intriguing for so many years, because as bad as United have been at times, they’ve remained competitive, even at Anfield, where they’ve recorded two draws in their last four visits, even if on both sides. Defeats by 7-0 and 4-0.
It remains to be seen how long this will continue. United have rarely been this bad, at least on paper, and it is no surprise that some young Liverpool fans now see this in a similar way to the Merseyside derbies against Everton: a complicated skirmish between the underdogs in conflict they still have enough. teeth to inflict a painful, but not fatal, bite.
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It’s not that Liverpool have dominated in distant matches against United, but rather that they are still on the verge of chasing a bigger prize these days. For Liverpool, the biggest domestic events now take place against Manchester City (but not this season, considering that even Pep Guardiola’s reigning champions have already dropped 14 points), Arsenal and Chelsea.
The enmity persists and will probably persist. Last year, when The Athletic asked its supporters to vote on who they would prefer to see Liverpool win the championship if Liverpool were lost, only 23 responses out of a maximum of 3,000 said it was United (most opted for Arsenal). The chance to silence United’s boasts of being the English club with the most titles in the top flight (they have 20, one more than Liverpool) will also have to be a tantalising prospect.
But with half of this season remaining, the only relevance United have in terms of its title race is if they pull off an upset against one of the main contenders. For Liverpool, this is now a race against Arsenal, Chelsea and, remarkably, Nottingham Forest.
Sunday’s attack will have color and fervor. But an importance? Not precisely.
(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)