And United’s current owners, the Glazer family, pioneered a radical approach to sponsorship that has since been copied by almost all of United’s rivals: signing dozens of minor, territory-specific agreements with everything from tractor producers to vineyards. United was mocked, in the 1990s, for its willingness to hawk anything with its crest; it is mocked, now, for having an official soft-drink partner in Nigeria. The results, either on the books or on the field, have been no laughing matter.

Liverpool, by contrast, seemed to be clinging to the past. In 1992, it had completed work on a new stand at Anfield, which opened on the 100th anniversary of the club’s first game.

This was not a club, though, embracing the future. The Centenary Stand (since renamed for Kenny Dalglish) might have been home to Anfield’s first executive boxes — long after most of its rivals had started offering corporate hospitality — but it was, almost as soon as it opened, out of date: too small, too functional, too old-fashioned. United was preparing itself for a changing world. Liverpool was assuming everything would always be as it was. When United threw open the doors to its megastore, Liverpool’s club shop was still a small hut in a parking lot.

There were reasons for that stasis. Anfield, unlike Old Trafford, was hemmed in by tight, narrow residential streets; it had already had to shelve plans for expansion because of objections from neighbors. Liverpool, as a club, was still reeling from both the Heysel disaster of 1985, in which 39 Juventus fans were killed, and the Hillsborough tragedy four years later, which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans.