Liam Gallagher has picked a fight with an entire city, and he has dragged the Beatles into it. On Tuesday morning, UK time, the Oasis singer posted on X that Oasis “have done more for the city of Liverpool than they will ever do,” before adding the line that has had music fans arguing ever since: “OASIS put the BEATLES back on the map which they no doubt directly profit from UNGRATEFUL little SODS.” He signed it off “MCFC LG x.”
It reads like a music argument. It started as a football one.
How a football verdict turned into a Beatles row
Gallagher is one of Manchester City’s most famous and most vocal supporters, and City have had a rough few weeks. In late September, the Premier League’s independent commission found the club guilty of almost all of the 115 financial charges it had faced. According to Al Jazeera, the commission upheld 114 of the 115 charges, which related to the club’s finances between 2009 and 2018. City deny any wrongdoing.
Rival fans have not been shy about enjoying it, and Liverpool supporters, whose club fought City for the biggest prizes in English football for much of the last decade, have been among the loudest. Far Out Magazine reports that it was criticism from Liverpool fans in the wake of the verdict that set Gallagher off. Rather than defend the club on the facts, he went straight for the one thing Liverpool holds closer than its football team.
The reaction was immediate. Replies quickly piled up arguing that the Beatles never needed anyone to put them back anywhere, and Far Out did the homework for them: Liverpool’s International Beatles Week has been running since 1977, and the Beatles Story museum on the city’s waterfront opened in 1990. Oasis did not form until 1991, and did not release a record until 1994. Not everyone took it seriously, though. Plenty of fans read the post as Liam doing exactly what Liam does, winding people up for sport.
Liam versus the Beatles: a long history
This is not the first time Gallagher has measured Oasis against the band that inspired them, and it is far from the most extreme version of the argument he has made.
In 2022, during City’s title run-in, he got into a Twitter exchange with former Liverpool defender turned TV pundit Jamie Carragher. Carragher told him City would never win the Champions League and that “Oasis are shite compared to the Beatles.” Gallagher’s reply, as reported by NME, was that “oasis piss all over the Beatles,” pointing to the band’s record-breaking 1996 shows at Knebworth.
According to Brazilian rock journalist Igor Miranda, Liam had already claimed back in 2016 that Oasis achieved in three years what took the Beatles eight, and has described Oasis as “very superior” on social media since.
What makes it all the stranger is how openly the Gallaghers have worn the Beatles influence. Liam named his son Lennon. Noel’s songwriting borrowed so openly from the Fab Four that critics spent the 1990s pointing it out. And Noel, at least, has backed away from the comparison. Far Out notes that he came to regret his own infamous 1996 claim that Oasis were bigger than the Beatles, admitting he had been intoxicated when he said it, and Miranda reports that Noel later called the whole Oasis-versus-Beatles comparison “embarrassing.”
Does he have a point?
Strip out the football and the insult, and there is a narrow version of Liam’s argument that people do make. In the early 1990s the Beatles were, to a lot of teenagers, their parents’ band. Oasis, alongside the wider Britpop scene, made sixties guitar music sound current again, and a generation of kids went from “Definitely Maybe” back to “Revolver.” The Beatles’ own Anthology project, which arrived in 1995 at the height of Oasis-mania, rode that same wave.
But “put them back on the map” is a far bigger claim, and the numbers are against it. The Beatles were never off the map. Their catalog never stopped selling, Liverpool’s Beatles tourism industry was established long before Oasis played a note, and the city’s cultural identity has been tied to the band since the 1960s. Liverpool fans would also point out that the city’s football club has its own anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and its own history, and needs neither Manchester band to explain it.
The “directly profit from” line is the part that will sting most on Merseyside, because it frames a whole city’s relationship with its most famous sons as a cash grab. Coming from a band whose own sound owes so much to Liverpool’s finest, that is a bold accusation to throw.
What happens next
On the football side, City’s fight is far from over. According to Al Jazeera, an appeal process and a separate hearing on sanctions still lie ahead, and possible punishments range from fines and points deductions up to the stripping of titles. As long as that drags on, expect the rivalry, and Liam’s part in it, to keep flaring up.
As for the music, at the time of writing there had been no public response from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr or the Beatles camp, and history suggests there will not be one. Liam, for his part, has never been one for walking things back.
So the question is the one he has been asking for thirty years, just louder this time: did Oasis really give the Beatles a second life, or did they simply ride the wave the Beatles built?
