Why I have decided to quit supporting Liverpool after 50 years

Last week, a consortium backed by the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought a 38 per cent stake in Liverpool FC. This week, before the start of yet another Premier League season, I finally decided to stop supporting the club. I started supporting Liverpool in 1976. In those 50 years, we lifted 11 league titles and six European Cups. In 1982, Liverpool drew my hometown, Dundalk FC, in the second round of the European Cup. I saw Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Graeme Souness a stone’s throw from the house in which I grew up, in which my mother still lives. Since 2007, I’ve lived in Manchester and Sheffield. Getting the train over to Lime Street on match days, texting my son and brothers from the ground, having a pint in The Flat Iron surrounded by all the GAA county flags, has meant more to me than I can adequately describe. Put it like this: Liverpool feels the nearest to home an Irishman living in England can get. I’m writing this wearing the jersey I bought in June 2019 for the night of the Champions League final. I’ll wear it until this article is complete and then no more. READ MOREThe main sponsor emblazoned across my jersey is Standard Chartered, the insurance company. Its chief executive Bill Winters recently referred to 8,000 workers set to lose their jobs to AI as “lower-value human capital”. In Red Card: English Premier League sportswashing of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians, a report published this May by the charity War on Want, Standard Chartered is listed among six companies “enabling Israel’s atrocities with finance and fuel”. This season’s jerseys include the logos of Axa and Expedia. The former retains investments in suppliers of military equipment used in Gaza. On the latter’s website, with just a few clicks you can book a holiday rental in West Bank settlements designated illegal under international law. Wearing these jerseys, of the clubs we love, we make ourselves sandwich-boards for their sponsors. As the Red Card report argues, “clubs are sportswashing the companies and normalising the atrocities. This is not only unethical but risks rendering them complicit in war crimes”. In the report’s league table of complicity, Liverpool come top.If those war crimes in which their sponsors are arguably complicit render the clubs potentially complicit as well, then does my support of the club make me complicit? Bit of a stretch, possibly. But can I unequivocally say no to that implication? No. In a report by the charity War on Want, Standard Chartered is listed among six companies 'enabling Israel’s atrocities with finance and fuel'. Photograph: Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images And so, I hereby stop. I chose to do the very thing no Liverpool fan is meant to do – to walk alone. I’d love to think this is a blip, that very soon I’ll be back in the Kop. But the Bezos consortium has first dibs of buying Liverpool outright within the year.But why? Why do the billionaire class want to own football clubs such as Liverpool? The usual reasons are offloading existing debt, asset-stripping, using the brand’s rich tradition to launder a dodgy reputation. Take your pick. In Bezos’s case, it may be nothing more than wishing to win one over on his old adversary Elon Musk, who only last year expressed a desire to buy Liverpool. What everyone agrees on is that Bezos, Lakshmi Mittal and Eduardo Saverin probably know nothing of the club, its history and its current team, and really couldn’t care less. Zarah Sultana, an Independent MP in the UK and herself a lifelong red, has taken to X to voice her objection to the news. “Amazon is a central partner in Project Nimbus,” Sultana writes, “providing cloud and AI services to the Israeli state. While Israel carries out a genocide against the Palestinian people, Amazon’s technology helps underpin the infrastructure that makes it possible. And now that fortune is buying its way into Anfield.”“Liverpool is more than a business,” she says, “it’s a community. Supporters have a voice. We’ve used it before: against the Super League, against ticket price hikes and against owners who forgot what this club stands for. We MUST use it again.”Will fans rise up? Unlikely. On The Anfield Wrap, the thinking fan’s platform and podcast, Karl Coppack lays out much the same horrifying evidence but ultimately concludes: “I’m weak and I’ll always have my version of Liverpool to support, even though it directly contradicts the evidence of my own eyes. They can’t touch that. I’ll still support mine. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t.”Beyond Project Nimbus, Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post is fundamentally authoritarian. His ongoing war with mayor Zohran Mamdani over delivery drivers’ contracts and wages in New York should give the willies to all the brilliant people who staff our backrooms. He thinks Donald Trump’s second term has been “more mature, more disciplined”. Tell that to the children of Renee Good, or any of the families of victims of Ice killings. Conor O'Callaghan at Anfield for Liverpool match That such a person now co-owns more than a third of Liverpool FC, and could one day own it outright, is beyond the pale. That he and his gallery of ghouls might soon sit in the directors’ box, in a city with such profound roots in the Labour movement and trade unions and human rights, is a bridge too far. And if this isn’t a bridge too far, then nothing matters. Sign Andrew Tate and his little brother. Give Itamar Ben-Gvir a two-year contract: we could use reinforcements on the right. And no, I won’t be supporting any other Premier League club. Arsenal, joint-second in the Red Card league table of complicity, have just announced a new sponsorship agreement with Deel, a US company which has supported and donated to the Israel Defense Forces. Manchester City, joint-fourth with their local rivals in that same table, is owned by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations has long concluded that the UAE contributed financially to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Sudan.Support for these clubs is support for those horrors their owners in turn support. I’ve been one of the millions, like yourself – yes, you reading this article right now – who turn a blind eye daily to this uncomfortable fact. Who give them our money. The clubs we’ve all supported and loved are controlled by bad folks who patently know nothing about football, who care zilch for grassroots support and are doing everything in their unfathomable power to squeeze out season ticket holders forever, who make capital off the suffering of innocent people. If you can pretend otherwise, knock yourself out. I wish I could do the same, and continue to wear the red jersey out of blind sentiment, but I can’t.♦ Conor O’Callaghan is a novelist and the author of Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War (2004)