Reclaim The Kop

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Reclaim The Kop, often referred to as RTK, is a campaign among fans of Liverpool Football Club to improve the matchday atmosphere within The Kop specifically, and Anfield more generally. It was established by a group of Liverpool fans in October 2006, and publicly launched in January 2007, since which time it has attracted significant levels of press attention.

1 Formation
2 Activities
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Formation

The website of the Reclaim the Kop campaign attributes its origins to a UEFA Champions League match between Liverpool and Bordeaux on October 31, 2006, at which the group's instigators felt disappointed with the formulaic and disrespectful nature of the chants and songs used by Liverpool supporters.^[1] The campaign was subsequently formed as a means of promoting and disseminating traditional Liverpool fan songs, and generally campaigning for an improved atmosphere at Anfield, with greater levels of fan participation. In particular, the campaign claims that it intends to educate supporters about the uniqueness of Liverpool fan culture, and to offset the influence of sources of generic football fan culture, in particular the Sky Sports show Soccer AM.

[edit] Activities

Since its launch in January 2007, the group and its aims have been actively promoted by the official Liverpool F.C. website,^[2] which has published a series of "Reclaim the Kop" articles highlighting and encouraging the uniqueness of Liverpool's support through features such as photographs of homemade banners, poems, and recordings of fans singing various traditional Liverpool football songs, with karaoke style displays of the words to help visitors to the site to "learn and sing" and join in. The launch of the campaign and its goals attracted the attention of Liverpool's local press,^[3] and was reported on and discussed on local radio stations such as Radio City.

On January 6, 2007, Reclaim the Kop organised a protest during the third round FA Cup match between Liverpool and Arsenal,^[4] which was broadcast live on the BBC. The intention of the protest, which was dubbed 'Truth Day', was to highlight the anger of Liverpool fans that the BBC had employed Kelvin MacKenzie as a presenter, in spite of his comments during late 2006 that he did not feel any regret that while working as editor of The Sun he had published an article in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster which fabricated claims about the behaviour of Liverpool fans- including that fans had urinated on police and stolen from the bodies of the dying. The claims made in the story were subsequently found to be untrue and dismissed by the Taylor Report. On the day of the protest 12,000 fans in the Kop were given cards to hold up, forming a mosaic spelling out the words "The Truth". The mosaic was visible while Liverpool supporters chanted "Justice for the 96" for six minutes, signifying the length of time that the Hillsborough game played on for before being abandoned. In addition to being visible during the BBC's transmission of the match, the protest was widely reported in national newspapers,^[5] and comments by organisers from Reclaim the Kop were published in the local press.^[6]