It is not strictly accurate to claim that Liverpool fell into the doldrums between winning their last league championship in 1990 and securing their first Premier League title thirty years later.
In those three decades the Reds won the FA Cup three times, the League Cup on four occasions and in 2005 memorably pulled off a comeback of comebacks in Istanbul to lift the Champions League trophy.
Moreover, in the late 2000s, under the austere management of Rafa Benitez, Liverpool briefly began to challenge for the league again, taking Manchester United right to the wire in 2008/09.
Elevated with a midfield of Gerrard, Mascherano and Alonso , with Torres up front, what a team that was.
Yet, for all of these high points, this was a club seemingly stuck in terminal decline, at least when compared to their illustrious former selves.
This was not the Liverpool of old, the one that dominated the English footballing landscape for nigh-on 25 years, consistently reaching a level of excellence that others simply couldn’t come close to matching.
For an entire generation, Liverpool football club were the big, bad wolf. The team to beat. The absolute best. And then, so quickly as to shock, they weren’t.
The reasons why and how they went from being extraordinary and extraordinarily successful, to ordinary and ordinarily competitive, are multi-fold and naturally enough – as so often is the way – originate from poor decisions being made from the top down.
Following Kenny Dalglish’s resignation in 1991, it was believed that Graeme Souness would offer some continuity and he was suitably lured south from Rangers.
Only Souness’ appointment proved to be a disastrous one, as the surly Scot endeavoured to deconstruct Liverpool’s legacy and start anew.
Ironically, the one area in which he succeeded in this regard was by signing a litany of players not fit to wear the famous shirt and inevitably as a consequence, Liverpool plummeted into semi-irrelevance.
From the Souness era to the Millennium, the Merseysiders averaged a league position of fifth, and though granted there was never a dramatic low, such as featuring in the Premier League relegation odds, nor were their defeats put on first anymore on Match of the Day.
Losses were no longer a novelty that got the nation talking. They were the norm from an also-ran.
What made their steady and inexorable decline infinitely harder to take of course was seeing their arch rival from down the M62 emerge as the new super-power.
After decades of dwelling in mediocrity, Manchester United rose imperiously to prominence under Sir Alex Ferguson and with their title triumphs coinciding with the newly-formed Premier League and its considerable commercial weight, it duly made the Red Devils a world force.
This was their time and it’s fair to say they full capitalised on it. Indeed, United dominated the English footballing landscape for nigh-on 20 years.
For an entire generation, they were the big, bad wolf. The team to beat. The absolute best. And then, so quickly as to shock, they weren’t.
The parallels between United’s recent struggles and Liverpool’s failure to adjust to being mortal in the Nineties are hard to ignore. In fact, they are uncanny, right down to the mistakes being repeatedly made.
They begin with United attempting to appoint continuity in the form of a Scottish manager.
David Moyes may not have tried to deconstruct Old Trafford’s legacies – he would never have dared – but, like Souness, he was not up to scratch, additionally bringing in players who fell far below the elite standards required.
For David Speedie, read Marouane Fellaini.
From there we head into more abstract territory though it’s no less convincing.
Post-Souness, Liverpool found their glorious recent past to be a burden, pulling them in one direction while simultaneously they attempted to start over.
Not knowing which way to go, or who they were anymore, they became overly reverential to their glory days while trying to forge a fresh path. Ultimately, they became caught between two stools.
United too have suffered enormously from this predicament as they veer from one way of thinking, to another.
Each incoming manager vows to organically build but each summer the club spends a fortune on their latest galactico signing, typically in a position that is already well catered to. Why? Because they’re Manchester United, that’s why. It is what they feel they’re supposed to do.
Leaving little funds to then actually buy players to forge a productive collective unit, the manager is forced to shoehorn these luxury players into his ill-balanced side.
Such schizophrenic thinking, and such futile attempts to resolve their problems in a single window, has had unavoidable consequences. United’s average league position since 2013 is fifth. Sound familiar?
In truth, the media haven’t exactly helped matters, falsely portraying every success – because like Liverpool, even their fallow period has brought trophies, if seldomly - as a rebirth, a recovery.
United are back because they have won the League Cup. United are back because they’ve strung five victories together in a row. It’s gotten tiresome.
The media haven’t helped either, by depicting every poor season as a temporary crisis, doing so because it’s in their best interests to retain the illusion that a club blessed with a huge fan-base – and thereby a huge audience and readership – are still as relevant as they used to be.
The truth of the matter is that this season is not a crisis for United. It is their reality and furthermore has been their reality for a decade. This is who they are now and this is who they’ve been for quite some period.
At times, it feels like the only two entities to properly acknowledge this are the cold and clinical betting markets and a popular show broadcast on Saturday evenings.
At the beginning of every campaign, United’s Premier League odds cast them as outsiders, the 13-time champions usually justifying the distinct lack of faith shown in them.
On Match of the Day meanwhile, a defeat by Erik Ten Hag’s men is typically consigned to the middle section.
No longer are defeats a novelty, nor their struggle an especially big story. Rather it is the norm.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
