Bootle

New Bucks Park holds 2,500, a capacity that has followed Bootle down through the non-league pyramid rather than up towards it. The name on the gate answers a question the ground itself raises: this is not the club that once shared Liverpool's football landscape at the top level, but a successor formed under Bert Trautmann trained here in 1948, before Manchester City signed him instead.

The current club began life in 1953 as Langton F.C. and only became Bootle F.C. in 1973, twenty years after its founding and eighty years after the original Bootle F.C. had folded out of the Football League Second Division. That earlier club, a founder member of the Football Alliance, had beaten this one to the Liverpool Senior Cup in 1883, 1888 and 1889; the modern Bucks did not add their own until 2012–13, closing a gap of well over a century between the two sets of winners' medals.

Between those two dates sits a run through the Merseyside leagues rather than the professional pyramid: nine Liverpool County Combination titles across the 1960s and early 1970s, Lancashire Combination championships in successive seasons either side of 1976, and a Cheshire County League Division Two title in 1979. Promotion to a higher level of the non-league game came later, with the North West Counties League Division One won in 2008–09.

Lee Steele went the other way, leaving Bootle for a career that ran through Shrewsbury Town, Brighton, Oxford United, Leyton Orient and Chester City. City of Liverpool FC provide the derby now, a rivalry built on shared streets rather than shared history, since it is the 1953 entity, not the nineteenth-century original, that both clubs actually know.

The line runs back, in the end, to a name that no longer exists: Langton F.C., before Bootle borrowed the town's older, vanished club for its identity.