Fandom is based around a comforting credo. Fans — of any team, in all sports — believe that they have power, that they can make a difference, that they are in some way participants in events, rather than mere observers. It would be too much to call it a delusion: in soccer, where statistics suggest there is a far more pronounced home advantage than in most other sports, especially. It is still likely, though, that the noise a crowd generates, the atmosphere it creates, accounts for only a small constituent part of what determines results.

That is even true at clubs like Liverpool, where the reputation of the fans is fetishized. (Last month, Arsène Wenger, no less, described Anfield as the most “heated” stadium in Europe, the “one place you do not want to go” for a Champions League second leg.) The idea of the fans’ power outstrips the reality of it.

Power, though, is not the same as agency. Liverpool fans had garlanded their homes, and themselves, in red and white, and they had gathered outside Anfield to roar on their heroes, and they had followed Klopp’s instruction to back their team to the hilt, but they knew that, really, nobody on Merseyside had any agency. What Liverpool did, what Anfield did, was dependent on someone else. The team with the agency was in sky blue, and playing against Brighton. Liverpool would learn its fate from its phones.

So Close, and So Far

For 21 minutes, Liverpool dreamed of being champion: 21 minutes between Mané’s giving Liverpool the lead against Wolves and Aymeric Laporte scoring Manchester City’s second at Brighton, on the way to a comfortable 4-1 win that confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team as the first to retain the Premier League title in a decade. News of that goal came through the medium of oddly jubilant Wolves fans, taunting their hosts.

Anfield did not groan. It did not break down in tears. It did not grow fractious. Slowly, instead, it deflated. “Fingers crossed for an equalizer,” the stadium announcer George Sephton said at halftime as he read out the score from Brighton. The mood was subdued, the crowd rousing itself only to sing through the pain of reports of two more Manchester City goals, and to celebrate — with genuine emotion, Klopp felt — Mané’s second.