It was bad all around.


"Barnes had signed for Liverpool in the summer of 1987, but newspaper reports had linked him instead with a move to Arsenal, who did not end up making an offer. It meant he was not exactly welcomed with open arms at Anfield, where racist slogans promoting the National Front were daubed on the walls of the stadium’s car park to greet him.
In his 1999 autobiography, Barnes remembers other messages like “White Power”, “No Wogs Allowed” and “Liverpool are White.” He says he expected it, partly because some people thought Liverpool was his second choice, but also because of the history of the city, which had grown powerful through the slave trade."

Immediately after signing, Barnes received hate mail at the Moat House, and he’d sometimes spend his evenings reading the letters. One read: “You are c**p, go back to Africa and swing from the trees.”
Barnes’ response was to laugh at the grammar and pass the letters around to his team-mates, “imagining the pathetic types of people who’d written them”. He would learn later that these were only a small percentage of the racist letters written about him. His new club received many more but opted not to make him aware of them, worrying they would upset him. "



Athletic on Barnes