Liverpool organises a title party that dare not speak its name

The plans have taken months to fine-tune: hours and hours of meetings and calls and delicate negotiations, venues to book, permits to obtain, guests to confirm. Kenny Dalglish is in. The Lightning Seeds are in. Even Les Dennis is in. And through it all, nobody has dared say the words out loud.

Even now, Daniel Nicolson — one of the organisers of Red Weekender, three days of shows, concerts and events to be held at the Exhibition Centre on Liverpool’s waterfront on the last weekend of May — remains resolutely, possibly even ­pathologically, coy on the matter.

He is happy to talk about the ­project as a “fan-led football ­festival.” He sees it, more than anything, as a showcase for the organic, homespun supporter culture that has ­flourished around Liverpool in the last decade or so, the podcasts and fan ­channels and bands that exist as remoras to the great red whale at their centre. He will ­acknowledge that, through an ­accident of timing, it is a ­welcome chance to revel in the 20th ­anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul.

What he will not do, under any ­circumstances, is refer to it as a title party. There is no mention of Liverpool ­winning the Premier League in any of the promotional material Nicolson wrote, a choice both conscious and ­deliberate. He did not use that as a selling point to those he invited to take part. (The television presenter Kelly Cates, who will interview Rafael Benítez on stage on the first evening, confirmed to the Observer that it was only ever “implied”.)

“We all get excited as fans,” Nicolson said. “We all get a bit above our ­station. But as far as I’m ­concerned nothing is done until it’s done.”

In his case, that is less a policy and more an article of faith. Last weekend, as Liverpool’s players trooped back to the dressing room at the King Power Stadium after beating Leicester City, the defender Ibrahima Konaté held up a single finger and bellowed, into a passing camera, “one more.” Arne Slot’s team was one win away from sealing the title.

By Wednesday night, that had been revised: Liverpool need a ­solitary point against Tottenham this afternoon to claim the club’s 20th championship. (Failing that, a draw in any of their remaining four games will do.) Nicolson has no intention of buckling. He has still not announced what is planned for the festival’s final day. He is not about to start ­tempting fate now.

He is not the only one feeling superstitious. Jürgen Klopp, the club’s former manager, has said he intends to be in Liverpool for the celebrations, but admitted he has held off returning to Anfield before the title is “decided.” “I will be there for the last game,” he said at a fundraising event in Cape Town last month. “I didn’t want to go earlier, to be honest, because I didn’t want to jinx it.”

A similar approach has taken hold inside the club. Although Liverpool have worked with the city’s local authorities to draw up plans for an end-of-season parade, staff have been just as reluctant as Nicolson to put into words why they might need one. The word “title,” as one ­executive put it, has acquired a sort of “Macbeth” quality over the last few months. From the outside, of course, all this caution is vaguely comical. This season’s Premier League title race has had the quality of a procession for so long that the eventual anointing of the champions has come to seem like little more than a bureaucratic nicety.

The massed ranks of the club’s fans stopped pretending otherwise as long ago as February 23, when victory at Manchester City led the travelling support to abandon their worries about hubris and offer the first ­rendition of Now You’re Gonna Believe Us, the traditional hymn of impending glory.

It was also aired at Anfield a ­couple of weeks later. Liverpool had, at that point, been top of the league since November. Their lead had stretched from six points at the start of February to double that by the end of the month. It has oscillated only a ­little since, a likelihood morphing into an inevitability.

That unyielding immutability is, in many ways, fitting. The team Slot has crafted is not as raucous, not as thrilling, as the versions nurtured by Klopp. They have rarely blown opponents away; too often to be coincidence, they have tended to ­outlast them instead, winning games not by knockout but on points.

As the Dutchman told Men In Blazers this week, the fact that Liverpool have had to scrape and claw for every point reflects not their weakness but the league’s strength. This Premier League as a whole has been defined by fine margins, and Liverpool have mastered the fine margins better than anyone else. They have become champions by being just a little better than everyone else, all of the time.

While that might mean the season has lacked drama — and, in defiance of the cold mathematics, allowed a rage-bait orthodoxy that Liverpool have stumbled to the title to take hold — it has provided both club and fans with precious time to plan.