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Liverpool

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Liverpool Football Club are a professional football club who play in the Premier League and are the most successful team in the history of English football, having won more trophies than any other club. Liverpool have won a joint-record eighteen league titles, seven FA Cups, seven League Cups, three UEFA Cups and five European Cups, an English record.

The club were founded in 1892 and won five league championships between 1900 and 1947. However, Liverpool spent several years in the Second Division during the late 1950s, and did not win promotion again until the appointment of Bill Shankly as manager in 1959. The club traditionally played in red and white, but this was changed to all red in the 1960s.

Under Shankly's management, Liverpool won three League Championship titles, two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup, the club's first European trophy. In the past 30

years, they have been one of the most successful clubs in English and European football; they won four European Cups between 1977 and 1984 and a fifth in 2005.

The Heysel Stadium disaster made the club infamous in Europe; 39 Juventus fans died after a wall collapsed as they fled from charging Liverpool fans. The club were involved in a worse disaster four years later — the Hillsborough Disaster — which saw the death of 96 Liverpool fans in a crush against perimeter fencing. Both disasters have had wide-ranging impacts on English and European football, and the club, to this day.

Liverpool have played at Anfield since forming. Plans to move to a new stadium in Stanley Park by 2011 have been put on hold until economic conditions improve. Liverpool have a very large fan base which holds long-standing rivalries with Manchester United and Everton, against whom they contest the Merseyside derby.

History

Liverpool F.C. was founded after a multi-faceted dispute between the Everton Committee and John Houlding, the owner of the land at Anfield and Everton's president. Everton F.C. founded and played at Anfield from 1884 to 1892. The catalyst that escalated the dispute was when the adjacent landowner wanted to run a road though the newly built main stand. Fundamental difference emerged in how the club should be run when the club assessed the purchase of the whole of the Anfield site. Houlding was accused of motives for personal financial gain. Everton