Anfield

Anfield opened in 1884 on land owned by John Orrell, a minor landowner who was a friend of Everton member John Houlding. Orrell lent the pitch to the club for a small rent after Everton needed to leave their previous ground at Priory Road because of the noise their crowds produced on match days. The first match at the new ground was played on 28 September 1884, Everton beating Earlestown 5–0. The ground was capable of holding around 20,000 spectators and occasionally did, though the regular gate was upwards of 8,000; it was considered of international standard, hosting the British Home Championship match between England and Ireland in 1889. Everton became Anfield's first league champions in the 1890–91 season.

In 1892, negotiations to buy the Anfield land from Orrell escalated into a dispute between Houlding and the Everton committee over how the club was run, and Everton left for a new ground at Goodison Park. Houlding, left with an empty stadium, formed a new club to occupy it, Liverpool F.C. and Athletic Grounds Ltd. Liverpool's first match at Anfield was a friendly against Rotherham Town on 1 September 1892, in front of 200 spectators, which Liverpool won 7–1.

Liverpool's first Football League match at Anfield followed on 9 September 1893, a 4–0 win over Lincoln City watched by 5,000 people. A new stand holding 3,000, designed by architect Archibald Leitch with a distinctive red and white gable, was built in 1895 on the site of the present Main Stand. A further stand of timber and corrugated iron went up at the Anfield Road end in 1903. After Liverpool won their second league championship in 1906, a new stand was built along Walton Breck Road; Ernest Edwards, sports editor of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, named it the Spion Kop, after the hill in South Africa where a local regiment suffered heavy losses during the Boer War in 1900 — more than 300 men, many of them from Liverpool, died in the failed attempt to take the hilltop.

The Kop was redesigned and extended in 1928 to hold 30,000 standing spectators under a new roof, becoming the largest Kop stand in the country, able to hold more supporters than some entire football grounds. That same year the topmast of the SS Great Eastern, one of the first iron ships, was rescued from a shipbreaking yard at nearby Rock Ferry and hauled up Everton Valley by a team of horses to be erected beside the new Kop as a flagpole, where it still stands.

After the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which police mismanagement caused overcrowding and the deaths of 97 Liverpool supporters, the Taylor Report recommended that every ground in the country be converted to all-seater accommodation by May 1994. The standing Kop, which had held tens of thousands, was rebuilt as an all-seated single-tier stand in 1994, its capacity cut to 12,390.

The Kemlyn Road stand gained a second tier separately, becoming a double-decker with executive boxes and 11,000 seats. The expansion had been planned since the 1970s and 1980s, when the club began buying up surrounding houses, but was held up until 1990 because two sisters, Joan and Nora Mason, refused to sell their house. Once the club reached agreement with the sisters, the renamed Centenary Stand was officially opened by UEFA president Lennart Johansson on 1 September 1992.

Liverpool first proposed leaving Anfield for a new stadium at nearby Stanley Park in 2002, and planning permission was granted in 2004. The project stalled after owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks, who had bought the club with borrowed money in 2007, struggled to finance it following the 2008 financial crisis. Fenway Sports Group acquired Liverpool in October 2010 and cancelled the Stanley Park scheme in favour of expanding Anfield instead.

A new third tier was added to the Main Stand, opening for the first home game of the 2016–17 season on 9 September 2016 and raising capacity to 54,074. The Anfield Road End was rebuilt between 2021 and 2024; on 17 August 2023, contractor Buckingham Group announced it would file for administration, jeopardising the stand's timely completion, and on 7 September 2023 the club took control of the project itself. Much of the new stand opened for a Premier League match against Burnley on 10 February 2024, taking capacity above 61,000. Anfield remains owned by Fenway Sports Group and operated by Liverpool F.C., which has played there since 1892.