West Ham United Football Club is an English professional football club based in Stratford, East London. They compete in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The club play at the London Stadium, having moved from their former home the Boleyn Ground in 2016. The club was founded in 1895 as Thames Ironworks and reformed in 1900 as West Ham United. They moved to the Boleyn Ground in 1904, which remained their home ground for more than a century. The team initially competed in the Southern League and Western League before joining the Football League in 1919. They were promoted to the top flight in 1923, when they were also losing finalists in the first FA Cup Final held at Wembley. In 1940, the club won the inaugural Football League War Cup. West Ham have been winners of the FA Cup three times, in 1964, 1975, and 1980, and have also been runners-up twice, in 1923, and 2006. The club have reached two major European finals, winning the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1965 and finishing runners-up in the same competition in 1976. West Ham also won the Intertoto Cup in 1999. They are one of eight clubs never to have fallen below the second tier of English football, spending 61 of 93 league seasons in the top flight, up to and including the 2018–19 season. The club's highest league position to date came in 1985–86, when they achieved third place in the then First Division. Three West Ham players were members of the 1966 World Cup final-winning England team: captain Bobby Moore and goalscorers Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters.

Liverpool Football Club is a professional football club in Liverpool, England, that competes in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The club has won six European Cups, more than any other English club, three UEFA Cups, four UEFA Super Cups (both also English records), one FIFA Club World Cup, eighteen League titles, seven FA Cups, a record eight League Cups, fifteen FA Community Shields and one Football League Super Cup. Founded in 1892, the club joined the Football League the following year and has played at Anfield since its formation. Liverpool established itself as a major force in English and European football in the 1970s and 1980s when Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish led the club to a combined eleven League titles and four European Cups. Under the management of Rafael Benítez and captained by homegrown player Steven Gerrard, Liverpool became European champions for the fifth time in 2005, before a sixth title was added under Jürgen Klopp in 2019. Liverpool was the seventh highest-earning football club in the world in 2019, with an annual revenue of €513.7 million, and the world's eighth most valuable football club in 2019, valued at $2.183 billion. The club is one of the most widely supported teams in the world. Liverpool has long-standing rivalries with Manchester United and Everton. The club's supporters have been involved in two major tragedies: the Heysel Stadium disaster, where escaping fans were pressed against a collapsing wall at the 1985 European Cup Final in Brussels, with 39 people – mostly Italians and Juventus fans – dying, after which English clubs were given a five-year ban from European competition, and the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, where 96 Liverpool supporters died in a crush against perimeter fencing. The team changed from red shirts and white shorts to an all-red home strip in 1964 which has been used ever since. Red has been the main shirt colour ever since 1896. The club's anthem is "You'll Never Walk Alone".