Manchester United v Liverpool was thrilling. Just imagine if they were both going for the title

Sequels often find it hard to better their predecessors. Still, Sunday’s Manchester United’s 2-2 draw with Liverpool brought much of the anarchic counter-attacking that made March’s FA Cup quarter-final between the two so thrilling.

United’s results against Liverpool this season — draws home and away in the Premier League and the 4-3 FA Cup win — have seen Jurgen Klopp’s side knocked out of the Cup and an extra wrinkle thrown into an absorbing three-way title race.

However, United have been cast as underdog disruptors rather than protagonists on equal footing with Liverpool.

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It is one of the stranger quirks of English football that the two most successful clubs in the country are rarely at their peak simultaneously. Since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, there have been comparatively few matches between them that can be considered as title race ‘six-pointers’.

In the 1996-97 season, Roy Evans’ Liverpool played host to Sir Alex Ferguson’s United in mid-April. Liverpool were two points behind United and could have gone top of the league with a victory (United had a game in hand), yet United ended up 3-1 winners and finished the season as Premier League champions.

In March 2009, Rafa Benitez’s Liverpool defeated Ferguson’s United 4-1 at Old Trafford. Fernando Torres gave Nemanja Vidic twisted blood in a game that looked to have huge ramifications for the title race, only for both teams to have a near-perfect run to close out the season and United to win their 11th Premier League title by four points.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United met Klopp’s Liverpool at Anfield on January 17, 2021, with United first in the league and Liverpool in third. A drab 0-0 draw saw Paul Pogba punch the turf in frustration after missing an opportunity to score a late winner. Yet in a season disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, with games played behind closed doors, it is difficult to call this draw a title decider: Manchester City eventually won the league, finishing 12 points ahead of United.

(Paul Greenwood/CameraSport via Getty Images)

One of the biggest rivalries in English football has not had a genuine title-deciding fixture between the two for quite some time. If such a fixture were to occur, it would make for a cultural event likely to garner a lot of eyeballs and generate a lot of money.

“When I was at the BBC the biggest audience for any team you would get was Man United,” says sports rights consultant David Murray. “Which is why when the FA Cup comes round, they’re televised pretty much every time even if it’s not a very good game. The second club is — by some margin — Liverpool.”

United’s 2-0 win over Derby County in the FA Cup third round in January 2018 broke a streak of 58 matches in the competition being shown live on television by a UK broadcaster, a run stretching back 12 years and two different channels. The club are in now in a run of 32 successive FA Cup matches being selected for broadcast, and last month’s FA Cup quarter-final against Liverpool saw viewership peak at 8.6 million people in the UK across ITV’s platforms — the largest television audience of 2024 across all channels, albeit on a free-to-air broadcaster. In the U.K., Premier League matches are shown on Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Amazon Prime — all paid-for platforms, which would put a lower ceiling on viewing figures.

But if United and Liverpool were to meet as the best sides in a title race, it has the potential to break records all over the planet.

“It’s hard to think of a much more marketable rivalry title race than that,” says Ged Colleypriest, founder of sports marketing firm Underdog. “They are two of the biggest rivals in the UK. It’s the biggest inter-city rivalry that you have. Two of the biggest clubs, two of the biggest names throughout their history have been dominant at various periods. To take that history and combine it… it would be absolutely staggeringly huge.”

This month, NBC Sports released statistics on the most-watched Premier League games in the United States. Fixtures including both Liverpool and United, as well as their December 0-0 draw at Anfield.

United have struggled to mount more than a handful of convincing title challenges since Ferguson’s retirement, but they remain a commercial draw. Sunday’s 2-2 result was accompanied by Daniel Sturridge serving as part of an ‘NBC Fan Fest’ in Nashville, Tennessee.

There have been other attempts to turn a match-up between the two sides into a special event, too. Early in the 2016-17 season, the first game between Klopp’s Liverpool and newly installed United manager Jose Mourinho was moved to a Monday evening kick-off. Sky Sports News featured a countdown to what they had dubbed “Red Monday”.

What followed was one of the duller clashes between the two sides, as both teams cancelled each other out in a drab 0-0 draw.

“It was a terrible game of football,” says Colleypriest. “And it goes to show that for all the marketing you can put into sport, you can’t replicate true jeopardy and drama. That’s why we’re talking about a hypothetical scenario here. In that scenario where there is a title on the line it’s absolutely massive.”

High viewership potential also leads to high advertising potential and a hypothetical title decider could entice advertisers in a way few others could match.

“The biggest advertisers would go, ‘Get me in there, get me in there. I need a spot in it’,” says Colleypriest. “It’s of that Super Bowl status: ‘We’re spending our money somewhere and part of it has to go in there’. Just from a big-brand perspective, you want to be seen next to those biggest events.

“You would be hard-pressed to get in there, they could almost name their price on that.”

A title decider between Manchester United and Liverpool could make for one of the most lucrative and most-watched games in Premier League history. All that’s needed is the right confluence of events, and for both teams to be good at the same time. It’s not too much to ask, is it?

(Top photo: Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)