New Year holidays at Manchester and Liverpool

In 2025, we decided to spend Christmas in Greece as we’ve been doing recently but then go to England for New Year’s. Why you may ask would we give up the warm weather of Greece (60s while we were there) for the much colder weather of England (it was in the high 30s/low 40s while we were there and also snowed multiple times). Soccer of course. My son is a Manchester United fun and I’m a Liverpool fun so we decided to go to visit both towns and see a soccer game in each.

We used Manchester as our base. We were able to get a pretty inexpensive hotel at the center of Manchester (about 88 English pounds per night). Manchester is a relatively pretty city but I must admit that if it weren’t for the soccer team we would not be visiting. There were a lot of old style buildings like you would expect for an English town and several canals with skinny long boats that you can take a tour of I believe (it didn’t look interesting enough to try). It took us about a day to walk around throughout the center of town. The most interesting sections were the Northern Quarter, Spinningfields, Castlefield, Deansgate, Market Street, Piccadilly Gardens,  and the area around Albert Square. We pretty much walked it all in a few hours and then were pretty much wondering what else there is to do.

The most interesting aspect of the visit outside the soccer game was the Christmas Markets. There were several of them and they gave a very festive spirit as you can see in the picture below. The best part for me was some of the food you could try and some of the drinks. Hot chocolate and mulled wine were my favorite. I don’t drink much alcohol but the mulled wine in a cold evening is an experience worth trying.

We were getting a bit bored but my son came up with the idea of doing English breakfast and afternoon tea which were both pretty entertaining. We went to “The Koffee Pot” for breakfast which is one of the best places in Manchester for authentic English breakfast. My son was the only from our family that actually enjoyed the English breakfast. I actually chickened out of the authentic one because it has too many meats and went for the vegetarian version which was decent. However, beans is the staple of the breakfast (for both the authentic and vegetarian version) which is a bit too much for me for breakfast. We had much better luck with the afternoon tea though. We went to the “Richmond Tea Rooms”. I must say the visit there was one of the most memorable and unexpected experiences of the trip. We were served some really tasty treats (sandwiches, scones, and sweets) as you can see from the pictures, some wonderful tea and the whole experience was very special. It was pretty pricey, but we would leave that aside.

The soccer game itself was a fun experience although not unique for us since we had done that before as day trips from London. I was lucky to get tickets directly from the club because I booked early (in early September) for only $80 per ticket (and decent seats – around the 30 yard line top level but not too high up as you can see from the picture).

We visited Liverpool twice during our Manchester stay. Once to see the Liverpool game and once to tour the city and do a tour of the stadium. Liverpool is only a 50 minute train ride away from Manchester and the tickets were very inexpensive. Liverpool as a city was not much different than Manchester. The center was pretty boring. Access to the streets for car was limited and it looked basically like a big outside shopping center. It got a bit more interesting once we walked further out from that area. The port is unique to Liverpool (relative to Manchester) but it was too cold to enjoy while were there. We did get a picture of the statue of the Beatles (not my best picture) which is a must. We also visited the Royal Albert Dock which was pretty but again would have been much more enjoyable on a warm sunny day.

The game at Anfield (the stadium of Liverpool FC)  was much more interesting because it was my first visit there and also because that is my favorite soccer team. Getting to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” which is the Anthem of the team at the stadium with 60,000 other fans is a very memorable experience. Surprisingly the fans of the visiting team were very loud and much better organized than the home team supporters (at least in the area where we were seating). I think it would be a lot of fun to do a game like that. We run into the fans from the visiting team (Leeds United) on the train ride back to Manchester (our train’s final destination was Leeds) and they seem to be having a blast (their team tied Liverpool in the game which helped). To be honest, where we were seating for both the Liverpool and United games, there were a lot of tourists (you could hear German, French, Italian etc.). But even the Liverpool fans didn’t seem to be very loud. I’m not sure if it was the weather. I had similar observation at the United game. On top of that the seats are very tight. At the Liverpool game the seats were not wide enough. The person next to me was pretty big and with all the heavy jackets it made it pretty uncomfortable. At the United game, the gap with the seats in front of us was too narrow and there was no way around my knees touching the person in front of me (I’m relatively tall – 6 foot one – but not extraordinarily tall. If you add the fact that it was freezing, I’d say it’s very unlikely I’ll be doing this again. On top of that, getting the tickets was a lot more expensive. I was not able to get tickets directly from the club even though I tried around the same time as for Manchester. It was probably because Liverpool at that time was doing much better than United. I ended up getting the tickets through StubHub for about $250 per tickets and the ticket were in a much worse spot (behind the goal line and about the same level – top level but not all the way up). The only consolation was that when I first looked for the tickets they were selling for $450 but I was not willing to pay that much. I was “lucky” enough that the team starting not doing as well and the tickets were less desirable reaching a price I was willing to go for.

Even more interesting than the actual game was the tour of the stadium that I took with my son on a separate day. Tickets were only 25 pounds each and that included us getting to tour the locker room, go through the tunnel onto the side of the pitch, and even seating on the seats where the coaching staff and subs seat. That was well worth the time and cost and much better return for the experience than going to the actual game. We also got the opportunity to try one of the most popular foods for soccer games: pies. We went to a place called “Homebaked” that has the best ratings on Google Maps for a pie around the Anfield stadium. We were not disappointed. It was one of the most memorable experiences of the trip. I highly recommend it.

Since we had one more day at Manchester with not much to do, we decided to take a trip to Wales and visit one of the famous castles there (Castell Conwy). You can buy a bus tour for about $100 per person but we decided to rent a car since the cost of the car was much more affordable than paying for 4 people. I did have to deal with driving on the wrong side of the road but I rented an automatic which made that a bit easier and I didn’t have too much trouble in particular with the help of the rest of the people in the car. I thought the one and a half hour drive to the castle would be interesting but it turned out to be pretty boring. The visit to the castle was actually interesting. Even more interesting was the visit to the town enclosed by the castle. I imagine it would be even more interesting during a warm day but we ended up enjoying the walk through the town and by the water. We also had a very nice lunch in one of the restaurants there. A pretty enjoyable visit.