Football fans are football fans – and that means they’re sold for life on teams that become emblematic of all their hopes and dreams. Anyone who has ever marvelled at a grown man crying because another grown man failed to kick an inflated pig’s bladder into a net, or because a man wearing shorts and a jumper was unable to catch a ball another man kicked at him, simply doesn’t get it. Football is life in miniature.

Every test, every hope, every dream, played out on a few square metres of green and watched over by 50,000 screaming fans. Liverpool memorabilia and Manchester United memorabilia are a testament to this urge – to the unbridled love and emotion that so many attach to a game that used to be nothing more than a fight in the street.

Football has come a long way since Shakespeare – where hundreds of players on two opposing teams fought each other for the chance to kick a piece of pig, just once, between two buildings in Elizabethan London. The roiling masses have been pared down to two teams of eleven men; the screaming mobs have been relegated to the smart plastic seats of post 1989 terraces; and the object of those team’s efforts has become a lot more legislated and defined. That said, the feeling behind it all is the same: a feeling of solidarity, of hope and joy shared by hundreds of people whose backgrounds blur into nothing as soon as the whistle blows for kick off. No wonder Manchester United memorabilia and Liverpool memorabilia command such fierce adulation. Two of the greatest teams ever to don long sleeves and short trouser legs and attempt to work that inflated bladder between the opposition keeper’s goal posts, the twin prides of Northern England have epitomised everything glorious about the working Briton’s game since before most people under 35 were born.

Liverpool, who dominated the 80s in tandem with their blue shirted rivals, have brought some of the most exciting (and upsetting) sporting nights in history to the unblinking viewers on terraces and in front rooms all over Britain. Names of Liverpool players past and present roll off tongues in every pub in the land, and adorn Liverpool memorabilia in the homes of fans and aficionados alike. Manchester United, whose late 80s flowering led to a period of dominance that has still not really ended, offer the same emotions to slightly younger fans – and the old stalwarts who stood at Old Trafford for years waiting for their time to come. Manchester United memorabilia is as popular as the stuff from across the Mersey – it symbolises a working class town pulling itself up by its boot straps and making something lasting out of its own pride and commitment.

This is what football is – and this is why Liverpool memorabilia, or the signed mementoes of the Manchester lads, still holds its value in the 2010-2011 season period. There’s always been something about football: with Manchester United memorabilia and Liverpool souvenirs reminding us all just what, there always will be.