Liverpool Fixtures: How a Merseyside Calendar Rules the Global Mood Swing

LIVERPOOL FIXTURES: A GLOBAL CIRCUS IN RED
By our correspondent who has watched too many 3 a.m. kickoffs in airport bars

Liverpool’s fixture list dropped this week, and—surprise—the planet did not tilt off its axis. Yet from Jakarta sports bars to Lagos betting kiosks, the schedule was parsed with the reverence usually reserved for papal conclaves or nuclear launch codes. Why? Because in the age of planetary-brand football, Liverpool FC is less a city’s team than a floating anxiety machine beamed into 200 territories, 24/7, like a crimson Netflix special nobody can cancel.

The Premier League, that genteel 19th-century English pastime, now operates as a sort of soft-power IMF. Liverpool’s 38-game league slate, plus whatever fresh hell the Champions League draw conjures in October, underwrites television deals worth €12 billion across six continents. Farmers in rural Vietnam delay planting rice to watch Mohamed Salah cut inside; cryptocurrency exchanges in Buenos Aires time their implosions to coincide with halftime at Anfield. The club’s global fan survey claims 771 million “followers,” a number roughly equal to every European who has ever lived. Statisticians confess the figure is nonsense, but marketing departments have already booked it as gospel, so here we are.

Scan the fixtures and you see the usual geopolitical kabuki. The opener away at Chelsea—billed as “Reds vs. Blues,” which sounds like a Civil War reenactment but is really a proxy battle between two Gulf-subsidized petro-projects whose owners would struggle to locate the Mersey on a map. October welcomes Arsenal, a club owned by an American who made his fortune renting mattresses to college students. Somewhere in the schedule lurks the Merseyside derby, a yearly exercise in municipal self-harm so intense it could be syndicated as group therapy. December brings the traditional winter blitz: four games in nine days, perfect for inducing the sort of cardiac arrhythmia that keeps defibrillator salesmen in business.

Broadcasters, those kindly drug-pushers, have already circled the March 2025 slot for possible rescheduling. If Liverpool reach the Champions League quarter-finals, the match at Old Trafford will be shunted to 4:30 a.m. Myanmar time, because nothing says “people’s game” like forcing monks to choose between enlightenment and watching Darwin Núñez sky another sitter. The FA Cup fifth-round weekend has been left deliberately blank, a vacuum into which fantasies of glory or calamity can be poured like cheap gin.

Human-rights watchers note that Liverpool will spend New Year’s in Saudi Arabia for the Super Cup, a friendly tournament invented to launder reputations faster than a spin cycle. Players will pose smiling next to a sovereign-wealth trophy while journalists ask Jurgen Klopp about “sportswashing,” a term everyone pretends to understand. The manager, ever the populist philosopher, will praise the “passionate local fans,” carefully omitting that many were bussed in and given free scarves the color of freshly minted blood money.

Meanwhile, back in the city itself, residents calculate which weekends to flee. Home fixtures raise Airbnb prices by 400 %, pricing out locals whose grandparents watched the Kop from wooden planks. The council, ever vigilant, has introduced a “tourist tax,” levied at the exact rate required to replace the revenue lost when UNESCO stripped Liverpool of its World Heritage status. You couldn’t script tighter accounting without a Swiss gnome.

The cosmic joke? Even if Liverpool win every trophy, the victory parade will be dampened by the knowledge that next season’s fixtures start in six weeks, earlier because FIFA has expanded the Club World Cup to 32 teams and relocated it to a parking lot in New Jersey. The wheel keeps spinning, the hamster grows obese, and somewhere a child in Nepal names his pet goat “Virgil” without knowing why.

So bookmark the fixture list, international citizen. Circle the dates, set your alarms, and stock up on coffee strong enough to wake the dead—because by May, when the title race climaxes simultaneous to a U.S. election recount and the hottest April on record, you’ll need caffeine, denial, and perhaps a new religion. Football, like climate collapse, is no longer seasonal; it’s background radiation. And Liverpool, bless their red hearts, are the Geiger counter that keeps on clicking.