Liverpool magic XI, Salah and Gerrard, Balotelli and other football facts we simply don’t believe

We did a whole thing about football stuff that never happened and exists only in our brains.
It is quite the window into our general state of unwellness if you want to check it out. But also, we totally understand if you want no part of that. It does raise the question of what you’re in fact doing here instead, but never mind that.
You know how this works by now. When we come up with one really stupid feature idea, we will always feel duty bound to complete the yin and yang of it. Because what’s better than one stupid feature? That’s right, two stupid features.
So here’s a list of football things that did happen but that we simply refuse to believe and/or accept. You can’t make us.
The Liverpool starting XI from the 2019 CL final and other similar tales
You’ll all have heard this one and others like it, but we remain convinced it’s all just a big joke and everyone else is in on it. The story goes that the iconic Peak Klopp Liverpool team that started the 2019 Champions League final in 2019 never started any other game before or since.
That team was Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Robertson, Van Dijk, Matip, Henderson, Wijnaldum, Fabinho, Salah, Firmino, Mane. It absolutely rolls off the tongue, because it is a team we all know and we all remember from the agonising near miss in the Premier League that season to the triumphant dominance of the following season.
It was a team that at that time contained 11 of the 12 most-used players by Klopp across his entire Liverpool reign.
And yet we are supposed to believe it only ever existed as a starting line-up this one time? We’ve tried and tried to debunk this but can only assume it is a conspiracy that runs so deep that thousands of Liverpool team-sheets across thousands of websites across several seasons have all been changed to protect this piece of surely bullsh*t trivia. And yes, we also think the same thing about the Man United Treble team and the Leeds 1970s team. We don’t believe any of these stories.
We don’t know why or how this conspiracy happened, but it makes far more sense than the entirely absurd notion that any of these teams only existed that one time. We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Mo Salah being on the pitch for Gerrard’s Slip
This honestly feels like the most cursed piece of football knowledge we’ve ever discovered. It makes us doubt the entire existence of the Gerrard’s Slip game and even that whole season, frankly. Because if this didn’t happen – and it surely didn’t – then nor did Crystanbul. And really, the universe in which these ridiculous events don’t exist makes far more sense than the one in which they do in fact exist.
And that’s even before you consider the eerier foreshadowing and ghosts of the past involved in Gerrard’s Slip.
Seriously, think about it. That Gerrard Slip game is just too perfect a dream/nightmare scenario. And even beyond its central turned-up-to-an-exam-naked-and-haven’t-revised-and-now-all-your-teeth-have-fallen-out horror it just has far too many dreamlike qualities where people with genuine connection to the club turn up in ways that don’t quite make sense.
A future Liverpool legend being 20 yards away with a perfect view of the current Liverpool legend suffering the most agonising of career-defining moments just feels wrong.
And just to complete the circle of off-kilter wrongness, Fernando Torres was also playing in that game. Talking of which…
Fernando Torres playing more games for Chelsea than Liverpool
At least the so-called ‘official’ records aren’t going around claiming he scored more goals for Chelsea, but this really does show how huge parts of a player’s career can exist in technicolor and other parts just fade to grey in the background.
Even Torres’ most memorable and iconic moment at Chelsea is better remembered for Gary Neville’s goalgasm than the actual quite significant goal Torres scored.
This one isn’t even close by the way. In terms of Premier League games there’s not much in it (110 v 102) but when you bring in all competitions – including that Champions League success – it swells to a 30-game margin.
Again, that’s all according to official statistics and records and we’re still not at all sure we’re ready to accept those.
Mario Balotelli’s only PL assist
The idea of Balotelli, crazed lunatic of a player/human that he was, only having one Premier League assist across his career is already mad enough before these trivia types expect us to also accept it being the AGUERROOOOOO goal. i.e. probably the single most famous goal in all of Premier League history.
Just not a chance this could possibly be true, and again the several hours we’ve lost in an increasingly deranged pursuit of the evidence to debunk it is neither here nor there. It is too ludicrous to be true, and that’s the end of the matter. We don’t need actual evidence, not when we feel it so deeply in our bones.
David Beckham and David Moyes being team-mates
Look, you can show us the dates of David Beckham’s loan spell at Preston and you can show us the dates when David Moyes was a Preston player, but frankly it’s pics or GTFO. It’s another one that causes our brain to just sort of fizzle a bit and then shut down rather than accept no matter how often the internet tells us about it.
Just before our brain gave up for the day altogether we did find a few other examples of this phenomenon. There are other pairs of team-mates where it just doesn’t seem right that they co-existed as players in the same era. Wayne Rooney and David Ginola. Ruud van Nistelrooy and Son Heung-min.
Then there are the combinations that just spin your head out because you just wonder how on earth the football universe could have contrived a situation where these lads were in the same team.
Adel Taarabt and Kaka. Sergio Ramos and Dani Alves. Pretty much any combination of players from the heroically batshit 2001/02 PSG squad (Gabriel Heinze, Mauricio Pochettino, Mikel Arteta, Jay-Jay Okocha, Laurent Robert, Sylvain Distin and Actual Ronaldinho).
Danny Ings playing for Aston Villa or West Ham, whichever’s funnier
Our first thought here was to put Danny Ings’ Liverpool career which we had forgotten about until someone reminded us of it. But then we could remember it happening, you see, and that’s no good.
But it set us off down the road of thinking about Danny Ings and our familiar Aston Villa-West Ham confusion. ‘Which one of those claret-and-blue chancers did he join after Liverpool?’ we found ourselves thinking. We couldn’t remember for the life of us and would have absolutely accepted either answer. But both answers? No he didn’t. Don’t be ridiculous.