The news came late Sunday night around “half eleven” Liverpool time, and the despair had flooded in by Monday. The emotional came to feel physical.
“The people were feeling heartbroken, sickened,” said Peter Hooton, a lifelong Liverpool Football Club supporter. “It was a feeling like your whole life had been ripped open.” Really, it felt like some odd strand of death, as if “your whole DNA” had gone disfigured, “ripping up all your history and your tradition,” a sense of “complete and utter shock and devastation.”
A cadre of gigantic soccer club owners had tried to form an exclusive Super League of Europe, but they had gone bumbling so much more deeply than that.