There wasn't much between us in the sixties. We won the League in 64, then United won it in 65. We won it in 66, they followed in 67.
They won the FA Cup in 63, we won it in 65. We almost won the European Cup, they went all the way.
It was pretty much neck and neck between Sir Matt and Sir Bill.
But by another measure, we were miles apart.
Towards the end of every calendar year, the magazine
France Football asked journalists from all over Europe to vote for the best players of the last 12 months. It's now known as the Ballon D'Or, but then it was called the 'European Footballer of the Year' award.
There were three British winners in that decade - Denis Law in 1964, Bobby Charlton in 1966 and George Best in 1968. Yes - the award went to Old Trafford three times. It didn't once come to Anfield. They won that battle comfortably.
All that is fairly well known. But behind those facts is a different, quite astonishing statistic.
With each journalist voting for their top five, quite a wide spred of players ended up in the final list. There were usually between twenty and thirty players who received votes every year. Many of those names would now bring a bemused 'Who??' from even the most obsessive connoisseur of European football history.
Players like Ezio Pascutti, Manfred Kaiser and Ole Madsen. I could list dozens of others - but you get the idea.
So which Liverpool players received votes in the 1960s?
The answer is - none of them did. Not a single one. Just like Kevin Phillips Bong in the Monty Python Election Special, we polled no votes at all.
To spell it out even more starkly, this is the head to head for the whole decade:
Manchester United 436
Liverpool 0
Players from Everton, West Ham, Leeds, Chelsea, Man City and Tottenham received at least a few votes. As did players from Leicester City, Sunderland, Burnley, Cardiff City and Fulham.
But Liverpool, absolutely nothing.
So Busby's and Shankly's teams were almost inseparable in terms of success on the field, but for individual recognition there is this utterly bizarre disparity.
What would Shanks have made of that statistic, had he been aware of it? (Who knows, maybe he
was aware of it). Would he have felt a sense of anger? A sense of injustice?
Actually, I suspect he'd have felt a sense of pride. He would have embraced that big, fat zero. He would have seen it as a validation of the principles he brought to the club. The club where, every day in training, it was hammered into the players by Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Reuben Bennett and Ronnie Moran. There are no stars here. Just everybody working for each other. That was Shankly's ideal for football. That was his ideal for life.
The European Footballer of the Year Award simply wasn't a sophisticated enough measure of what's really important.
There was another list of names that came much closer to the truth. That was the one on the birth certificate of this beautiful baby in 1966:
That's Paula St John Lawrence Lawler Byrne Strong Yeats Stevenson Callaghan Hunt Milne Smith Thompson Shankly Bennett Paisley O’Sullivan.