Le Professeur de Liverpool
Le Professeur: The Man Who Loved Liverpool Enough to Change It A story of the young French teacher who stood on the Kop and fell in love with Liverpool, of the manager who returned thirty years later carrying the ideas of modern French football — and of the man who understood that to save the club he loved, he had to change it. Prologue: The Boy on the Kop In September 1969 a young French teacher arrived in Liverpool. His name was Gérard Houllier. He had come to teach at Alsop Comprehensive School in Walton, a working-class neighbourhood barely a mile and a half from Anfield. He was twenty-two, a football fanatic from the Pas-de-Calais, and he was about to fall in love. He stood on the Kop that autumn and watched Bill Shankly’s Liverpool dismantle Dundalk 10-0 in a European tie. He breathed in the fire of the stand, the roar that turned 40,000 people into a single voice. He was already obsessed with football. After that night he was obsessed with Liverpool. “He ...
