Every Liverpool Captain Since 1892 — And What the Role Has Become

Below is a summary of the full article. Click here for the full version from LFC History or go back to LFC Live.

Andrew Hannah took the armband in 1892, in the club's first season after the split from Everton. Raisbeck led the club to its first league championship in 1901 and held the armband for the better part of a decade — remaining the longest-serving captain in the club's history for roughly a century, until Steven Gerrard overtook him.

It is an uncomfortable entry in the club's history, and it belongs in any honest account of how the captaincy evolved. Yeats held the armband for most of the decade that followed: promotion out of the Second Division in 1962, league titles in 1964 and 1966, the club's first FA Cup in 1965, and the captaincy for Liverpool's first European fixture in 1964.

The pattern is consistent across most of the club's history. The captain is now expected to supply continuity precisely when everything around him is changing, a demand the role was never designed to meet and which none of Hannah's or Raisbeck's era would have recognised.