Liverpool’s extraordinary information resource, the LFC History website, has been providing supporters, players and researchers with information for 20 years.
If you’ve ever needed to research any kind of statistic, fact or match from Liverpool’s history, the likelihood is you have visited LFCHistory.net.
The website is an incredible treasure trove of LFC knowledge, stories and, of course, history.
Detailing almost every match since the club’s inception has been a titanic workload, yet founders Arnie Baldursson and Gudmundur Magnusson have managed it all as a hobby.
From the site, the duo have developed books and resources for Reds everywhere, but the most important asset is LFCHistory.net.
The site’s webmaster, Magnusson, told This Is Anfield it took “16 months of work just to get it live.”
Ahead of the website’s 20th anniversary, the site’s webmaster said: “This has always been a hobby, just evenings and weekends for 20 years.”
Magnusson worked as a system administrator around the time of founding the site, but his job is now in programming, something that he developed working on LFC History.
The website’s success has been so big that the football club used their stats for a few years. While they officially don’t now, Magnusson knows that his site is still visited frequently by those at Liverpool and beyond.
“In 2009, we got an email from a publisher in the UK who asked if we were interested in creating a book called ‘Liverpool: The Complete Record’,” he said.
“We did that, then we did the second edition, then we did what is called ‘The Liverpool Encyclopedia’, which is a really big book and heavy.” That opened another set of doors, with guests appearances on LFC TV following.
“We’ve sat down with [Jamie] Carragher and those guys on TV shows, showed them the book as well as the website, so they know about all this,” the Icelandic supporter added.
LFC History’s database has been so far-reaching that Magnusson said: “I don’t think I see a book being released without the author, or someone who’s working for the author, going onto our website and checking the results. I think almost all of them!”
Magnusson and Baldursson have an interesting background when it comes to supporting Liverpool. Both are Icelandic and involved in the country’s official supporters club.
In the early 2000s, Magnusson was Chair of said club. “We had always had this thought that in the back of our minds to do something like for this for bigger audience because we had been working with the Icelandic Supporters Club website for a few years,” added the webmaster.
“We were thinking want to switch over to English, we want to do something internationally. And the thing was, back in those days (2001), there were a number of sites out there but they all had this same scope: news, forums, articles, and the forum was a big part of them.
“We thought to ourselves that if we go down that line, we will be just like everyone else; we need to find a bit of a niche market if we want to stand out.”
And stand out they did.
LFC History is still going strong and developing year on year to provide the public with an incredibly accessible database of Liverpool records, statistics and information to keep you endlessly occupied.
I think on behalf of all supporters, and journalists especially, we hope LFC History keeps going for at least another 20 years!
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