Opinion: Critics of LFC fans booing Trent are eerily silent on genuinely ‘disgusting’ behaviour

Harsh. Fickle. Disgusting. Those are among the adjectives used by some pundits to criticise Liverpool fans who booed Trent Alexander-Arnold at Anfield on Tuesday night.

The 27-year-old was back on Merseyside for the first time since his acrimonious exit just over five months ago, when he effectively ran down his contract at his boyhood club and left to join Real Madrid on the cheap, with previous declarations about wanting to become a Reds legend ultimately ringing hollow.

As Jamie Carragher correctly pointed out for anyone who can be bothered to listen, many Kopites’ issue with our former vice-captain wasn’t in him leaving per se. Rather, it was because he claimed to profess loyalty to LFC but was seemingly taking Spanish lessons in preparation for a move to the Bernabeu whilst still playing for Liverpool.

Inevitably, there were plenty of pundits whose minds were made up long before last night’s match and were ready to trot out their agendas.

Liverpool fans criticised over booing Trent Alexande-Arnold

Jamie O’Hara described the booing of Alexander-Arnold at Anfield on Tuesday as ‘harsh‘. Teddy Sheringham bemoaned it as ‘a perfect example of supporters being fickle’. Peter Schmeichel pontificated that it was ‘disgusting‘ behaviour by the Merseyside faithful in attendance.

Isn’t it funny how the latter two were prominent players for Manchester United, eh?

If such rent-a-quotes want to have their opinions about the Liverpool fans’ reception towards the 27-year-old, that’s fine. However, in our view, they’re picking the wrong battle when it comes to condemning the behaviour of people who attend football matches in this country.

With Christmas not far away, it’s a depressing inevitability that, once the November international break is over, every Reds game for the remainder of 2025 will probably have a minority faction of ‘supporters’ of the teams we’re playing against indulging in poverty chanting to the tune of Band Aid.

Sometimes, it mightn’t even be an LFC match where the childish and immature ‘Feed the Scousers’ is aired. It was heard at Man United’s 1-1 draw away to Ipswich 12 months ago, when some of the Portman Road faithful rightly called it out as ’embarrassing’.

Tragedy/poverty chanting is not ‘banter’ – it’s a hate crime

Such chants are not banter. They’re deliberately provocative, offensive and controversial, perpetuating a stereotype from how our city was maliciously targeted by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in the 1980s.

Sadly, poverty is rife across the UK, with thousands of people in this country having nowhere to call home and/or unable to afford basic sustenance.

Even more despicable are the chants designed to mock the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. Inaccurate and vile slurs of ‘murderers‘ and ‘victims’ are all too prevalent at some matches involving the Merseyside club.

For someone to go to a football match and spew such bile is reprehensible in the extreme. That’s not supporting your team. That’s an intentional and deliberately hurtful hate crime.

Whenever tragedy chanting is heard at a football match in the UK, the same depressing cycle occurs. It’ll get called out on social media, clubs will release hollow statements and the media will pay lip service to it happening, but it’ll quickly be swept back under the carpet.

Where are the pundits when tragedy/poverty chanting occurs?

It won’t dominate the news agenda in the same manner that Liverpool fans booing Alexander-Arnold has done over the past couple of days. If Kopites are met with deliberately hurtful tragedy/poverty chants, will we hear the likes of O’Hara, Sheringham and Schmeichel calling that out?

We highly doubt it.

That’s the sort of behaviour at a football match which is genuinely ‘disgusting’, not directing a few boos at a player who walked out on his boyhood club.

(On that note, when Jack Grealish was jeered at Villa Park upon returning with Manchester City in 2021, where was the media condemnation then? What he did wasn’t wrong; rather, we’re pointing out the double standards between that and the Trent scenario.)

As we’ve said before, it’s Alexander-Arnold’s prerogative to make the career choices that he feels are right for him, and he’ll have accepted the inevitable backlash from Liverpool supporters when he decided to join Real Madrid in the manner that he did.

That wasn’t particularly pleasant to witness, but it’s nowhere near as reprehensible as the tragedy/poverty slurs aimed at Liverpudlians at stadia and on social media. Unfortunately, it doesn’t suit the wider media agenda to give a damn about that.

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