A bar owner with venues across the city centre and on Lark Lane has told the ECHO how football and music led to a "life long love affair" with Liverpool.
Rob Gutmann moved to the city when he was 18 in 1985, initially to study at The University of Liverpool. The main pull was the city's globally renowned export - football.
Rob said: "90% of the reason I wanted to come here is because I supported Liverpool from the age of ten. My dad isn't English, so never took me to the football and I had no affiliation to any London teams. My hero was Kenny Dalglish."
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When it came to choosing universities, Rob said Liverpool was the only place he wanted to go. He added: "I came for football but stayed for the city.
"Even though it was a very economically distressed place in the 80s, it still had vibrancy. The people are fantastic, they were nothing like the people I grew up with down south.
"I loved the energy. The city was smaller and more tangible, you could walk from one side to the other and dip your toe into ten different nightclubs. It was night and day from the big mad city I grew up in.
"The energy and the music scene in the 80s was great with the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen. It was the coolest place to be in the UK at the time."
Rob called Liverpool a "cocktail of strife and struggle, paired with the antiquity and beauty of the architecture". And little did he know, in the 1990s he would change the landscape of the city's nightlife forever.
After university, Rob returned to London but lasted eight weeks before coming back to Merseyside.
He said: "I did bits and pieces, but jobs were hard to come by in the 80s. There was no such thing then as a graduate job. I did all kinds of things, but at 24 or 25 I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and make my own living.
"I cobbled money together here and there from work I'd done and opened a bar in the Lyceum Building with my father in 1994."
Rob said people responded well to the venue and it was bought three years later by Living Ventures. He added: "I then got offered an empty space at the Albert Dock, which had almost zero hospitality at the time. I couldn't afford to open a place on Mathew Street so I took a risk with Blue Bar & Grill.
"I thought it had a chance because of the setting and it ended up doing sensationally well. From there I was able to grow a business."
Rob now owns Metrocola on Leece Street, Papillion on Hope Street, Red Lion on Slater Street, The Vines on Lime Street and Love and & Rockets on Lark Lane.
He is now firmly embedded in the city's DNA. Rob said: "I married a girl from Liverpool 30 years ago and I now have four Scouse children. I feel intrinsically linked to the city. I haven't got an accent, but it's my city now."
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