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Red Letters

Red Letters

Two Fervent Liverpool FC Supporters Correspond Through the Epic Season That Wouldn't End

by Michael MacCambridge and Neil Atkinson
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/11/2021

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For those obsessed with Premier League soccer, following your favorite team is a true collective experience, where it is easy to feel as one with thousands of others. It is also an individual one, in which the emotions you feel are your emotions, the experiences you feel are your experiences, and nobody else can perfectly understand.

Over the course of the 2019-20 season, two longtime Liverpool FC followers wrote to each other about those emotions and experiences. American writer Michael MacCambridge, living in Austin, Texas, is a devoted Liverpool follower. Five thousand miles away, his friend Neil Atkinson, Liverpool resident and a longtime season ticket holder, is the host of the popular podcast The Anfield Wrap.

Each week throughout the historic season, Atkinson and MacCambridge exchanged letters, contemplating Liverpool's progress, comparing and contrasting their different perspectives on the club and the sport, meditating on the manner in which their shared obsession for Liverpool works its way into nearly every corner of their personal lives, and discussing the differences between how the game is consumed in the United States and the United Kingdom and the role modern media plays in shaping our views of sport.

Their collaboration was both timely and serendipitous, as Liverpool marched toward its first ever Premier League title and its first league title in thirty years, with a charismatic manager and the most entertaining team in the sport. In March, of course, the soccer story was overtaken by the larger story of the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc throughout the world, including sports events. In the course of their correspondence, Red Letters provides a real-time account of the pandemic that threatened the very existence of the season that Liverpool followers had been waiting more than a generation to experience.

Red Letters provides a different way to examine the culture of a worldwide sport and development of a soccer season--game by game, in real time, with hopes and expectations tested and altered as the season progresses to Liverpool's Premier League championship, with insight from two avid supporters.

ISBN:
9781496229762
9781496229762
Category:
Football (Soccer
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-11-2021
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Nebraska Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
236x161x36mm
Weight:
0.86kg
Neil Atkinson

Neil Atkinson is a Liverpool-based writer and the host of The Anfield Wrap, a highly popular online football and culture magazine dedicated to Liverpool FC.

An avid Liverpool supporter, Atkinson has co-authored the books Make Us Dream and Red Letters, and has written for the Guardian, the Independent and the Liverpool Echo. Atkinson has also appeared on BBC Breakfast, Football Focus, Sky Sports, TNT Sports and more.

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