A parlous financial state, 132 days since a home win at Goodison Park… but down by Bramley Moore dock there’s still hope Everton won’t sink
- Everton are being faced with significant problems both on and off the pitch
- But, they are in the process of building a state-of-the art stadium right in the city
- Listen to the latest episode of Mail Sport’s podcast ‘It’s All Kicking Off’
Take a mile’s walk up Liverpool’s old Dock Road, leaving the Liver Building behind, and you get a vivid sense of how Everton will take a place in the historic fabric of the city, if they manage to make it to the stadium being built for them.
Carved into the historic, listed dock wall, built by French prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars, are the names of the mighty old shipyards, Trafalgar, Victoria, Nelson, with the year, ‘1848’, and there is the moving simplicity of the turquoise plaque marking the 150th anniversary of Ireland’s Great Famine. ‘Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled the famine and “took the ship” to Liverpool, in the years 1845-52.’
Other great clubs who moved to a purpose-built stadium trade soul for space but Everton’s Bramley Moore Dock stadium, where glass panels were being delicately placed on the main entrance as contractors’ wagons rolled through in the sunshine on Wednesday, is at the City of Liverpool’s spiritual core and great seafaring past.
Coffee places and a micro-brewery have already sprung up amid the redbrick warehouses on the Dock Road but if Everton make it, they will be the heartbeat of the most significant regeneration plan since the legendary rebirth of the Albert Dock, three miles south, in the early 1980s.
All those hopes and aspirations are shrouded in uncertainty this weekend. The club are financially imperilled, surviving on external lines of credit despite selling their best players to bring in £120million this summer – and now living with the consequences of that on the field.
Everton are currently building their state-of-the-art new stadium at Bramley Moore dock
But, it’s uncertain if the club, who are facing financial uncertainty, will even make it there, amid an ongoing takeover by 777 Partners (pictured – 777 managing partner Josh Wander)
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It’s been 132 days since the euphoria of a 1-0 win over Bournemouth at Goodison Park which kept the club up on the last day of last season – prompting vows of ‘never again’ after the club’s Premier League future went to the wire for the second successive year. Everton, who entertain Bournemouth again on Saturday, have lost every game at the stadium since.
Goodison used to give out the electricity that the team could plug into when all hope had gone. But there’s an unmistakable weariness now, evident in the very fabric of the place.
The waterproof seals on the images depicting the club’s greatest moments, wrapped around the stadium exterior, are begin to decay. Images of the great wins over Bayern Munich and Rapid Vienna which brought the European Cup Winners Cup home in 1985, no longer have full protection from the elements.
The agonies carry over inside the stadium, too. A friend of one of last season’s squad witnessed the player lumping a ball long when he would always have expected him to bring it down and play. ‘I was afraid of the reaction if I got it wrong,’ the player told him when they discussed this. The negative energy is understandable in a fan base who last weekend witnessed a new nadir in the home defeat to Luton Town. Everton had 14 big chances against Fulham, Wolves and Luton combined. They scored one of them.
Defeat to Bournemouth is unthinkable after losses to Fulham, Wolves, Arsenal before Luton, though Sean Dyche – hardly to blame for his forwards’ litany of missed chances – was struggling for new ways to frame the significance this week. He was asked if this was a ‘must-win’ game. ‘I’ve heard that so many times since I’ve been at this club,’ he reflected. ‘Every game is a must-win. We are trying to change a two-year-old story.’
At the city centre Denbigh Castle pub, one of Liverpool oldest such establishments, publican Fiona Hornsby reflected the general mood of deep uncertainty on Wednesday. ‘So much is unknown and we’re going through managers like water,’ she said. ‘We’ll sell out that new stadium but where’s the money to finish it?’ An image on the pub wall, of Pele at Goodison Park in 1966, spoke to the club’s history.
It doesn’t help that the spectre of the prospective American company called ‘777’ looms over the club. The private equity investor is the only prospective buyer that has come close to the £500million price being demanded by seller Farhad Moshiri. But there is deep uncertainty about the motives and financial resources of 777 chief Josh Wander, who turned in in his trademark baseball cap for the Luton game – his feet already very much under the table.
Nowhere in the Miami outfit’s loud Merseyside PR drive has there been any sense of what 777 will bring, beyond a Tesco-fication which will see them flog financial products to Blues fans. The stories continue to rack up from other clubs 777 own. Reports from Brazil yesterday suggested 777 had paid only 35 per cent of a schedule payment instalment due for the Vasco de Gama club and that last year’s takeover of the club, which may take back control.
Farhad Moshiri agreed a deal to sell Everton to the US investment firm for £500m last month
Times are tough, with Everton having not picked up a point at Goodison Park in 132 days
Small shareholders at Sevilla described how their investigations found that 777 were discreetly building up a shareholding in the club under an anonymous company name, Sevillistas Unidos. Those fans campaigned to get the American’s representative removed from the management board.
The Washington Post this week detailed in a 5,000-word investigation based on interviews and court documents, how 777’s core ‘structured settlement annuities’ business had persuaded a vulnerable woman to sign over future monthly damages payments worth $800,000, in return for a $180,000 lump sum when she was desperate for cash.
Though 777 have undertaken a series of meetings with concerned parties at Everton, no evidence has emerged of how this outfit might resurrect Everton and get the new stadium completed. Dave Kelly of Everton’s fan advisory board, who had an introductory ‘meet and greet’ with 777 Group CEO Don Dransfield said: ‘There was very much an element of dancing around the handbags as they weren’t able to talk about Everton-related things.’
But though these are without doubt the club’s darkest days, a view is strengthening that 777 must not be allowed to hold the club to ransom. Within months, if not weeks, the club will be at risk of heading into financial administration if a buyer is not found. That threat, which would mean Moshiri walking away with nothing, would force him to reduce his vast asking price for the club and deal with credible buyers.
The cost of building the stadium is vast, with an estimated £300million to find, but that project could conceivably be something that central Government helps to fund, if it can be shown that it is critical to the city of Liverpool’s regeneration. One Whitehall source notes that the spectacle of the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport bailing out a Premier League club might jar with many, yet the regeneration argument could be compelling – and potentially worth an approach to the Department for Levelling Up.
This could entail the Liverpool City Region local authority, which drives regeneration, buying and completing the stadium for the region, which would then become an asset for the city which Everton happened to play at. This is the model which saw Manchester City Council sort out a new home for Manchester City.
Liverpool City Region Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram, who leads that authority, says the stadium is critical to a fundamental part of the City of Liverpool’s regeneration.
‘This is a massive opportunity for that area to be properly regenerated and Everton and that stadium would be an anchor to that renaissance,’ Rotheram tells Mail Sport. ‘The uncertainty (over the club’s ownership) is the problem. If we knew one way or the other, we could say, “Perhaps we can step in here and see if we can find some solutions.” At this moment in time the club are not asking us to do that.
Goodison Park is a famous old stadium but it is now showing several signs of decline
Sean Dyche is remaining optimistic despite the challenges he is facing on and off the pitch
‘No government would just say, “Here’s £300million. Here you go and good luck.” But there may be well be ways we could structure something with the assistance of a national government. We haven’t had any of those discussions and neither would we, without the permission of Everton Football Club. It’s a private company. If we had a car manufacturing company or engineering company and there were question marks over that, would we interfere before we were invited?
‘It’s got all the raw ingredients to being a similar catalyst to the Albert Dock in the early 80s. That’s the sort of thing that this could potentially become.’
Goodison is not a place for the faint-hearted at the moment. Merseyside Police stickers on windows of houses warn that it is a Burglary Hotspot – which somehow seems symbolic.
A win on Saturday would not change much in the broader scheme of things, but it would be cherished. ‘We have to turn performances into wins,’ said Dyche, ever the optimist. ‘It’s not to do with the fans. It’s a team thing.’
IT’S ALL KICKING OFF!
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