The Meaning of Number 19

The meaning of number 19

OVER the weekend, Manchester United overtook Liverpool as the most successful club in the history of domestic English football by winning their 19th league title, one more than their Merseyside rivals have clocked up in their august history. On the same day, Manchester City, the richest club in the world since being taken over by Gulf billionaires three years ago, began what is likely to be an epoch of success by winning the FA Cup.

Liverpudlians can still claim to belong to the greatest football city in the country, and perhaps the whole of Europe: Liverpool have won the Champions League, the continent's most glittering bauble, more times than United, and the city's second biggest club, Everton, have a grander history than City. But United's recent dominance, and their symbolic 19th title, hurts the pride of Merseyside, where memories of Liverpool's own pomp in the 1970s and 1980s are growing fainter.

The galling thing for many in Liverpool is the sense that recent football history speaks to a broader divergence of fortunes between the two great cities. Both suffered as a result of the de-industralisation brought about by globalisation. Their populations fell and unemployment rose. But Manchester's reputation began to revive in the 1990s. It has come to be seen as a go-ahead metropolis, with a pro-business city council, gleaming residential and retail developments and a large yuppie population employed in finance, law and professional services. It has more university students per capita than any other European city, and it has produced much of the best British pop music of the past 30 years. The world's first industrial city has become very good at the "soft" stuff: sport, culture, academia, service-sector enterprise. I suspect that most Britons instinctively regard Manchester as the country's second city, despite Birmingham's traditional claim to that status.

Liverpool, meanwhile, is seen to have struggled since the 1980s, when massive unemployment scarred the city and Margaret Thatcher was seen by locals as a kind of foreign overlord. The common perception outside the north-west of England is that Manchester is successful and confident, and that Liverpool is neither.

The reality is more complicated. Manchester has social blights of its own. United fans sing taunting songs about "Liverpool slums", but their own city has similar levels of deprivation. "Gunchester" still suffers from violent crime. And Liverpool has undergone a mini-renaissance of late: it was European Capital of Culture in 2008, and has seen retail centres, conference venues and other major developments go up in the city in recent years. But the external perception of a city being left behind by its nearest rival remains. For a place with such a grand history (home of William Gladstone, the Beatles and colossal