W. E. Barclay & John McKenna

Creating a club at Anfield

Barclay was Liverpool’s first secretary-manager, while McKenna was the club’s founding organiser and a key figure in recruiting the original squad from Scotland. Their partnership belongs to the practical work of creating a new club after Everton left Anfield. The job was far broader than choosing a team. In the club’s formative months they had to secure players, arrange fixtures, establish Anfield as Liverpool’s home and give a new organisation enough credibility to join the professional game. ^[1]

The earliest Liverpool story is not a modern manager story. Barclay and McKenna were dealing with recruitment, fixtures, finance and football administration while trying to establish a new identity in a city where Everton had just left Anfield. Their work makes more sense when read as club building rather than simply team selection.

Liverpool began with a vacant ground, an urgent need for players and no settled football identity. Barclay and McKenna had to make the club credible before they could make it famous. McKenna’s recruitment work in Scotland supplied much of the early playing strength, while Barclay’s secretary role dealt with the practical machinery of entering competitions. The Lancashire League title was therefore more than an early honour: it demonstrated that the new club could attract players, organise itself and win immediately.

From founding work to league football

They won the Lancashire League in 1892–93, took Liverpool into the Football League and oversaw promotion from the Second Division in 1893–94. Promotion was especially important because it established Liverpool in the national pyramid rather than leaving the club as a regional curiosity. Their early recruitment created the base from which the next generation could compete in the First Division. ^[2]

There is no major personal controversy attached to the partnership in the surviving mainstream record. The important context is institutional: early Liverpool used a committee-and-secretary model rather than the later, clearly defined modern manager role. Descriptions of them as ‘managers’ should therefore be read with care. Selection, administration and decision-making were shared more widely than in the modern head-coach model, and the surviving record is less detailed than for later eras.

That distinction matters because the partnership created habits that later managers could inherit: a commitment to organised recruitment, competitive league football and Anfield as a permanent home.

The 1893–94 Second Division campaign gave Liverpool a national platform. Winning the division without a league defeat established a pattern of ambition that later generations would treat as normal. Their work also explains why modern labels can mislead: responsibility was shared across committee members, secretaries and football organisers, rather than concentrated in a single head coach.

A partnership of the formative years

Their direct team-management role ended as Liverpool moved toward the longer single-manager tenure associated with Tom Watson. McKenna remained influential at Liverpool long after this initial arrangement ended, while the football side passed to Watson. The transition marked a move from founding improvisation towards a more recognisable long-term managerial office.