This article is part of _The Athletic _’s series celebrating UK Black History Month. You can _ _find the full series here .
Earl Jenkins is recalling the time Trent Alexander-Arnold came back to Toxteth to hand out awards at a junior football club.
The Liverpool right-back was returning from tour commitments in Australia and it had been a long flight, so his brother and representative, Tyler, wasn’t sure how he’d feel upon landing home.
Earl was advised not to tell the kids of Kingsley United, the club he has run for 20 years, about the special guest, just in case he was delayed. As it happens, a jet-lagged Alexander-Arnold, accompanied by Tyler, turned up, straight from the airport.
“It says a lot about the family,” Jenkins recalls. “They didn’t want to make a promise they couldn’t keep and let people down.”
There are three Alexander-Arnold boys, including Marcel. They grew up in West Derby, four or so miles away, close to Liverpool’s old training ground, Melwood. Trent initially went to school in Crosby, even further north.
Yet the family has connections in L8, the district known on Merseyside by its postcode and which includes Toxteth. His father, Michael, was born and raised there, and this meant Tyler played for one of Jenkins’ teams at Kingsley as a child.
Jenkins speaks to The Athletic in a coffee house on Lodge Lane, a busy thoroughfare that is different to the rest of Liverpool, a city which has strong links to Ireland and is otherwise overwhelmingly white. There are restaurants that represent communities from Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia and Jamaica, the Caribbean island where the Alexander-Arnolds have roots.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is now a senior figure at Liverpool (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
Two roads away is Vandyke Street. Trent is now deputy to a Liverpool captain who has almost the same surname. His trajectory and importance to the team was just a dream when he knocked about on the same stretches of tarmac all those years ago: not just because of his age, but because no footballer with a hint of Black skin from L8 or other parts of the city had managed to engrain themselves in the Liverpool first team at any point in the club’s history.
It would take Liverpool 88 years to field a Black or mixed race player for the first time. That man was Howard Gayle – who was brought up in Norris Green, less than a mile from Anfield, but also had links to L8. His career at the club, however, amounted to just five games.
John Barnes became a Liverpool legend after a decade’s service, having been born in Jamaica and brought in for a huge fee from Watford but Liverpool’s Black community had no significant presence in the club’s history until Alexander-Arnold’s emergence in 2017.
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Perhaps it is a reflection of progressive attitudes that it has barely been mentioned that the two local stars currently in Liverpool’s first team are of mixed heritage and are associated with L8 in some way.
Curtis Jones’s postcode as a child was L1, the next district along, which includes Chinatown, where Liverpool’s Black community originally lived before it spread southward and centred itself on the other side of Upper Parliament Street, in the years after World War 2.
It is possible that next month, Alexander-Arnold and Jones will, between them, have played 400 times for Liverpool. According to Jenkins, such a distinction for Liverpool’s Black community seemed “unthinkable” before Alexander-Arnold broke into the first team as recently as six and a half years ago.
Curtis Jones has also become a regular in the Liverpool side (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
Gayle’s debut for Liverpool came in 1980, when he came on as a substitute at Manchester City.
While city rivals Everton had fielded their first Black player in 1965, after Mike Trebilcock was brought in from Plymouth Argyle, the first local Black player to reach the first team was Cliff Marshall nine years later – six years ahead of Liverpool.
Marshall, who like Gayle came from L8 and had been approached by both Liverpool and Manchester United, made the move on the back of his performances with England schoolboys rather than his achievements at a local level. According to Jenkins, there were barely any platforms for any Black player to prove himself because of an absence of organised junior clubs.
Gayle’s opportunity at Liverpool, for instance, came because of his goals as a teenager for an amateur team in the adult leagues called the Bedford. Though Gayle had played junior amateur football, this was because of the availability of clubs in Norris Green, where he grew up.
“Black players from L8 had to join junior teams from outside the community,” says Jenkins, who thinks many Black players found it difficult to get playing time they merited due to underlying racial prejudice, or more simply, not feeling able to demonstrate their talents in an environment they felt comfortable in.
L8 is still, despite improvements in race relations, segregated from the rest of the city. The district is cut in half, dissected by Upper Parliament Street, with one side dominated by huge Georgian townhouses, including the one on Gambier Terrace, where John Lennon used to live. The other side stretches from Wavertree to Park Road, where the land slopes downward into the River Mersey.
Liverpool’s significance as a port was built off the slave trade and this has affected attitudes in the city. Many of the traders lived in the townhouses that represent the wealthier half of L8. The part where Alexander-Arnold, Gayle and Jenkins are associated with does not have the same grand frontage, and it is only over the last couple of decades that some of the terraced houses that sprawl from the old shopping artery of Granby Street have been restored, thanks in part to the efforts of activists like Jimi Jagne.
In 2023, Liverpool is a tourist destination, which contributes towards its reputation as a multicultural city. The reality is that it is multi-ethnic. “Multicultural suggests that we’re all living together, and that’s still not true,” Jagne tells The Athletic over lunch at a cafe several quieter streets closer to the river along from Lodge Lane.
Jagne, who is half-Gambian and half-Chinese, was never a footballer but he could see the area’s appetite for the game. “L8 has never lacked confidence or self-belief,” he says. “But there was no value placed on our community.”
Though Jagne was reluctant to travel to other parts of Liverpool because of the way he looked, he felt more comfortable in other cities where assimilation was clearly evident. He references London, Manchester and Bristol, “where you’d see Black bus drivers, and Black ticket attendants on other public transport – normal jobs. That wasn’t and still isn’t the case in Liverpool.”
Jagne believes that Liverpool as a city has been slow to identify the talent that exists in its Black community. Though the city now has a Black mayor, Joanne Anderson, there are few Black people in other senior executive positions. Walk around the business district on any weekday and the overwhelming majority of the faces are white.
In a football sense, Manchester and Bristol are relevant to any discussion around the football opportunities that didn’t exist in Liverpool. Both cities are regional centres, and have had long-standing Black communities. While the first Black player to represent Bristol Rovers was Willie Clarke in 1900, at Bristol City it was Steve Stacey 61 years later. After Dennis Walker played once for Manchester United in 1963, three seasons after him came Stan Horne at Manchester City.
This was roughly around the time Trebilcock signed for Everton. Though he became the first “Black” player to score in an FA Cup final, his mixed heritage meant some supporters did not even realise Everton had crossed a historical boundary until Marshall came along later, starting a new conversation about race.
Mike Trebilcock made history at Everton (Roger Jackson/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Other Black footballers had tried to make it at Liverpool FC before Gayle, and Jagne knows a few of them. He says one of the players opened up to him a few years ago, having shut down his true feelings about his experiences decades ago. “His parents would take him along (to training) and he said he felt humiliated for them because he knew they were going through this whole business of rejection as well, simply because he wanted to try and play for the team.
“That’s how deep this business is, and what it means is, you start to think whether you should be avoiding even trying in the first place. I felt for him when he was telling me this story because he’s deep into middle age now and it’s something he’s had to live with for a very long time.”
Jagne says the player ended up having a professional football career with a host of lower-league clubs outside of the city. The same can be said for Iffy Onuora, who was spotted by Huddersfield Town while studying in Bradford.
Onuora was raised, not in L8, but in Crosby, seven miles north of Liverpool’s city centre. From afar, Onuora’s brother Emy, the author of Pitch Black, a history of Black British footballers, says he saw L8 as being subjected to “a mix of prejudices, myths and half-truths. Because scouts never went there, all of those ideas were allowed to fester”.
Emy played grassroots football for his school as well as a Sunday league team. He says racist abuse in north Liverpool was “par for the course”. He remembers mistiming a tackle in a game against a school from Bootle. For this indiscretion, he received a barrel-load of racist abuse and the referee, a teacher from the rival school, sent the boy off.
It was, according to Onuora, his only experience of someone taking action because of racial abuse. He says he felt as though he was always being judged on how he’d respond to similar abuse: “If you said anything back, you were thought of as being a hot head and therefore you couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t a fair way to judge anyone.”
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At Liverpool, this was the impossible challenge facing Howard Gayle.
He had grown up away from L8, and in Norris Green, it felt like he was in a minority of one.
Having found that the only way to deal with racism was to fight back, he entered a Liverpool dressing room where players were notoriously teased for insecurities.
For Gayle to succeed in this environment, he had to abandon everything he’d ever known which, to him, felt like a betrayal of his history. The abuse from Liverpool’s captain Tommy Smith, for example, only stopped when Gayle approached him with a baseball bat.
Liverpool’s 1981 European Cup finalists, including (bottom left) Howard Gayle (Peter Robinson/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Some protection came from teammates like Graeme Souness, but Gayle felt that his manager, Bob Paisley, either ignored what was happening or didn’t care.
Paisley was emotionally insensitive and did not possess the same level of social understanding as Souness. As evidence, Gayle pointed to the night he was substituted in a famous European Cup semi-final second-leg victory at Bayern Munich, having brought on as an early replacement for Kenny Dalglish. Gayle was on a booking and Paisley later reasoned that he was concerned at how he might react to the extreme provocation he was facing.
To outsiders, Munich was thought of as being the night Gayle launched his Liverpool career. Gayle saw it as a measure of the attitudes he was up against, and that Paisley didn’t really trust him.
He was living back in L8 by then, and any trust that did exist completely eroded in the summer that followed, when Paisley asked him to relocate in the aftermath of the riots that engulfed the district, a period which is still known locally as “the uprising”. The spark was the arrest of Leroy Cooper, a Black artist. But while to the outside world the uprising was a response to enduring police brutality, it was also about unemployment. With levels in Liverpool at an all-time high under the Conservative government, Jagne says it should not be a surprise this happened when “opportunity” for young Black people in the city never seemed bleaker.
Though Gayle’s brothers knew what he was going through at Liverpool FC, the wider public of L8 did not.
“It was not common knowledge in the community,” Jagne confirms. “We looked at Howard as a kind of chief, you know? Playing for the club you love is the greatest thing anyone can do in this city. But what was happening to Howard did not suit anyone’s expectations.”
There would only ever be one first Black footballer for Liverpool, so Gayle’s experiences were unique. Not even the residents of L8 would be able to truly relate to all of this. Even within his own community, he was marginalised by the effects of racism.
Earl Jenkins’ great-grandfathers were born in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, while both grandmothers were Irish. It means wherever he goes, he seems to fit in. “I could be from anywhere,” he admits.
This helps in the multi-ethnic enclave of L8, especially when running a football team. In a conversation that lasts longer than an hour, he is regularly stopped by passers-by, many of whom are young lads who have played for him at Kingsley, where the club’s badge — a black and white hand clasping — reflects the area’s diversity.
The club was formed as a merger between Stanley House and Tiber FC and were named by the players after the road that used to divide them. While Jenkins had been involved with Tiber, Gayle led Stanley House.
According to Jenkins, Gayle should be thanked for “using his name” to bring organised youth football into L8, giving players a platform that was not there previously to express themselves.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here now having this conversation if it wasn’t for Howard,” he recognises.
The Toxteth riots of 1981 scarred Liverpool (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Yet Gayle, who later represented Birmingham, Sunderland and Blackburn Rovers, carried scars with him from his experiences at Liverpool.
It was his view that footballers from L8 should avoid the club he loved and instead test themselves at lower levels before working their way up.
Jenkins thought that by placing a ceiling on ambition, you were limiting opportunity: that any experience at either of Merseyside’s biggest clubs would act as a platform for growth elsewhere.
Jenkins simply wanted to get kids off the streets through football, but Gayle wanted an academy that had more control over the future of the players in L8.
After Gayle stepped aside, Jenkins was asked by Liverpool to start working informally as a scout by the club’s former academy head, Frank McParland. By this point in the early 2000s, Lee Peltier and Ralph Welch had emerged from L8 into the academy system, with Peltier — a versatile defender — reaching the first team.
Jenkins was wary of cementing his involvement at Liverpool because it might have limited the opportunity for players to join Everton, Tranmere, or other professional clubs from outside of the city.
An agreement followed, whereby Liverpool would get to see any players Jenkins really liked first, with the provision that if Everton liked them too and offered a better deal, there would be no hard feelings.
Jenkins is a Liverpool supporter but he takes great pride in some of Kingsley’s biggest success stories being at Everton: Hope Akpan, who played in the first team before embarking on a long career in the Championship that led to international recognition with Nigeria; Aristote Nsiala, who played for clubs in each of English football’s professional divisions, as well as DR Congo; and Ibou Touray, who is expected to be selected in Gambia’s squad for the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations.
Though an Onuora cousin in Victor Anichebe is the locally-raised black Everton player with the most appearances — and he came from Crosby — Jenkins says Kingsley is not just about football development. Players have become school teachers, architects, police officers and independent business owners. The organisation around the club, and its centre on Tiber Street, has been boosted by the input of Trent Alexander-Arnold and his family, who have helped set up a Saturday morning league at the facility which is free to play.
Yet, as Jagne stresses, L8 still feels separate from the rest of Liverpool. Even though there are more non-white faces in other parts of the city than there were even 10 years ago, the fact that its major football clubs relationship with the Black community can still be found in exactly the same place it once ignored is evidence that things have not changed as much as some would like to think.
(Top photos: Trent Alexander-Arnold and Howard Gayle; Getty Images
