Liverpool FC’s Relationship With Celtic | OneFootball

Some football clubs have a link to one another for various reasons. Everton and Manchester United have an affinity for one another thanks to their hatred of Liverpool Football Club, for example, whilst Manchester City and Newcastle United have links through being sports-washing operations that are owned by nation-states.

The Reds have ties with numerous clubs, some of which are more tenuous than others, but one of the ones that has stood out over the years is the link between the Anfield side and the Scottish club Celtic. The question is, what are the links?

You’ll Never Walk Alone

Credit: cchana from London, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are more things that link Liverpool and Celtic than just You’ll Never Walk Alone, the song from the musical Cabaret that was made famous by Gerry & the Pacemakers. Yet there can be no denying the fact that the powerful anthem is something that the two clubs have in common. You will get some people arguing about which club first used the song as their anthem, in spite of the fact that it was very definitely the Reds that did so. Any such arguments are generally well-intentioned, however, and there is not a huge amount of bad blood between the Merseyside club and the Glasgow one.

Although other clubs also sing You’ll Never Walk Alone, such as German sides Borussia Dortmund and Mainz 05, the version of the song sung by Liverpool and Celtic supporters is the same and will always be the reason why the clubs are so closely linked. They have played each other in European competitions before and the version of the tune that was played before matches at both Anfield and Celtic Park was amongst the best that you could hope to hear, which is a big part of the reason why there is such a sense of abiding respect between both sets of supporters.

Former Players & Managers

It is not uncommon for football supporters to love players as much as the club that they play for. Although you might think that it is a modern phenomenon for fans to switch their allegiances, or at the very least have a soft spot for a new club because of a player, you’d be wrong. The most obvious name on the list would be that of Kenny Dalglish, who signed for Liverpool from Celtic in 1977, having won four league titles north of the border before lifting it six times on Merseyside, plus another two as manager. He is far from the only player to have ties to both clubs, however.

Although he didn’t play for or manage Celtic, Bill Shankly, the man widely considered to be the father of modern-day Liverpool, was good friends with Jock Stein, who did the same thing for the Scottish side. Not many people consider Brendan Rodgers to be a Liverpool great, but he came closer than anyone to winning the Premier League in the 2013-2014 season, until Jürgen Klopp actually did so six years later. He also won the domestic treble with Celtic in 2016-2017, going the entire season without losing a game in either the league or the two cups, which is some accomplishment.

Working-Class Roots

There are many people who say idiotic, trite things like ‘keep politics out of football’, as though politics isn’t an innate part of everything that happens in the sport. For such people, the working-class roots of Celtic and Liverpool supporters would doubtless be seen as being irrelevant when it comes to why there are close ties between the two sides, but the place that people come from is very relevant indeed. There are definitely links between Liverpool and Glasgow as cities, with both having docks at the centre of what made them the places that they are and made the people so strong.

There is a saying used by people from Liverpool, ‘Scouse not English’. This sense of being ‘othered’ from the country in which the city finds itself also ties in well with Glasgow’s inevitable links to Scotland and a desire to be seen as separate from England. Celtic fans always stood shoulder to shoulder with Liverpool supporters over Hillsborough, with the two sets being united in a strong anti-Tory vibe in the decades since Margaret Thatcher. There is also a strong Irish heritage in play in both cities, thanks to the great exodus from the Emerald Isle during the years of the Irish potato famine.



It is perhaps little surprise that if one of the football clubs is looking to arrange a friendly, the other will be one of the first teams that it gets in touch with in order to organise the game. Given the fact that he played for both clubs, you could imagine any testimonial that Virgil van Dijk has in the future to involve the two sides, for example. Similarly, if the Reds were to bid goodbye to Andy Robertson in the coming years, then it wouldn’t be a shock to see him head to Celtic Park to see out his career. The two players, as with so many others, have the personalities that they do thanks to the two sides they played for.