Liverpool Football Club is a professional football club based in Liverpool, England which plays in the Premier League and is one of the most successful in the history of English football, winning more trophies than any other English club. Liverpool has 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 was 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 was 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 F.C. has played at Anfield since its formation, but plans to move to a new stadium in Stanley Park, which was due to be completed by 2011 but has been put on hold until economic conditions improve. Liverpool has a large fan base which holds long-standing rivalries with several clubs. The most notable of these are their rivalry with Manchester United and Everton, with whom they regularly contest the Merseyside derby.
