We had two days, a rental car, and a list of grounds we'd both talked about visiting for years but never actually mapped out properly. Here's the route we ended up with — and what we'd change.
The video version of this trip is the highlight reel. This is the actual logistics — the version we wish someone had written for us before we tried to plan it ourselves.
We started early, deliberately, because Merseyside's grounds are closer together than most people assume but parking and matchday closures can eat your whole morning if you're not ahead of them. First stop was a walk around the outside of Anfield itself with no match on — genuinely a different experience seeing it empty, quiet, just the stands and the gates with nobody in them. Worth doing at least once even if you're a regular, because it puts the noise of a full house into real perspective.
From there it's a short hop to Goodison Park. Whatever your allegiance, it's a proper old-school ground worth seeing in person — tight to the surrounding streets in a way modern stadiums almost never are anymore.
We built in deliberate downtime for the Liverpool FC museum and stadium tour, and it's worth building your own schedule around its opening hours rather than trying to squeeze it in around everything else — it's easy to lose two hours in there without noticing, and that's a feature, not a problem.
This is where we'd change our own route if we did it again. We tried to fit in a second full stadium tour the same afternoon and ended up rushing it. If you're doing this over two days, we'd now recommend spreading the tours across both mornings instead of stacking them, and using the afternoons for the parts of the trip that don't run on a fixed schedule — pubs, local shops, wandering the surrounding streets.
The stadiums are the reason you come. The streets around them are the reason you remember it.
Day two we widened the radius, using Liverpool as a base and driving out to a couple of smaller non-league grounds in the wider region — the kind of grounds where you can stand pitch-side for the price of a coffee and hear individual players getting shouted at by name. If you only ever watch top-flight football, it's a genuinely useful reset on what the sport looks like without the production budget.
Immediately. If you're planning your own version of this trip and want the specific route, timing, and where we actually ate, the full matchday vlog has the day-by-day breakdown we couldn't fit here.