Phil Taylor

A former player’s chance

Taylor was a former Liverpool player who had built a coaching reputation within the club. As a former player and long-standing coach, Taylor knew Liverpool’s culture and its personnel well. His promotion reflected a preference for continuity at a club that still relied heavily on internal football knowledge. ^[1]

Taylor knew Liverpool from the inside and his tenure was built around an attempted return to the top flight. The repeated near misses show why contemporary supporters could see promise and frustration at the same time.

Taylor’s task was promotion, and the tension of his tenure came from being close without reaching the destination. He knew the club’s culture from his playing career, so the appointment carried an emotional appeal as well as a football rationale. The Second Division finishes showed competence, but the decisive result—returning to the top flight—did not arrive.

Near misses in Division Two

He kept Liverpool near the promotion places, including a fourth-place finish in 1958–59. The promotion challenges were credible rather than trivial: Liverpool finished third in 1955–56 and 1956–57, then fourth in each of the next two seasons. Those finishes showed a team close to the target, but the narrow failure became a defining frustration. ^[2]

The controversy was structural rather than personal. The club was frustrated by repeated failure to secure promotion and felt a more radical reset was needed. The club’s facilities and methods were increasingly viewed as inadequate for its ambitions. Taylor became associated with an approach that seemed to preserve the status quo when the board and supporters were beginning to demand a sharper transformation.

His departure is most significant as the precondition for the Shankly era. Liverpool did not dismiss him because he was irrelevant to the club; it concluded that incremental progress was no longer enough.

The choice to resign in 1959 is important because it cleared space for a manager with a more radical programme. Liverpool’s later revival can make the Taylor years look like a mere prelude, but they show why the club was ready to accept a wholesale change in standards, facilities and expectations when Shankly arrived.

The road to Shankly

Taylor resigned in 1959, opening the way for Bill Shankly’s appointment. His resignation in November 1959 created the vacancy filled by Shankly. In retrospect, the change is a clear dividing line: Taylor left a capable Second Division side, and Shankly turned that base into a modernising project.