Episode 1 - The House That Houlding Built (1892–1923)

It begins with an argument about rent. In January 1892, Everton Football Club voted to leave their Anfield ground rather than accept a rent increase from their landlord, John Houlding. They walked across Stanley Park to Goodison Road and never came back. Houlding, left with an empty stadium, did the only logical thing: he founded a new club and filled it.Episode One covers Liverpool's first three decades — from John McKenna's scouting trips to Scotland that assembled the "Team of the Macs," through Tom Watson's seventeen years of professional ambition that produced two league championships, to the post-war back-to-back titles of 1921 and 1922 that should have launched a dynasty and were instead its end. Why Liverpool spent the next twenty-four years winning nothing is one of the game's great unanswered questions. This episode asks it.Player of the Era: Alex Raisbeck — the Stirlingshire half-back who captained the 1901 champions and gave Liverpool its first identity, at a time when the club was still trying to prove it deserved to exist.