In the first of a four-part special, Chris Beesley looks at Everton’s long journey in building a new stadium to replace Goodison Park.
As we move into the summer months of 2022 and the club approach their first anniversary of moving in on site at Bramley-Moore Dock, Everton’s new stadium is starting to take shape before our very eyes. But in some ways the Blues’ future home by the banks of the Mersey is a culmination of a vision that stretches back over half a century. With Everton only securing their top flight status for another season with a dramatic 3-2 comeback victory over Crystal Palace in their final home game after what was the joint lowest equivalent points total in their 134-year Football League/Premier League history, owner Farhad Moshiri, now on his seventh manager since 2016, has found building a successful football team rather difficult but off the pitch his ambition is at least close to bringing the Blues’ dream to find a worthy successor to Goodison Park to fruition.
Since formally taking control at the waterfront on July 26 last year, Everton have completed the infill of Bramley-Moore Dock using 450,000 cubic metres of fluidised sand and piling the foundations to make the site suitable for building upon and the four concrete cores that will form the corners of the 52,888 capacity stadium are also in place along with the first tower crane as construction gathers pace on the three-year build with the Blues scheduled to play their first game there during the 2024/25 season. For long-suffering Evertonians though, the move has been a long time coming with the idea of a new stadium stretching back to the 1960s.
When it was completed in 1892, Goodison Park was the first purpose-built football ground in England. Everton of course had already won their first League Championship the previous year playing at Anfield but back then the venue that would become Liverpool FC’s home was still pretty basic and the famous Spion Kop wouldn’t be constructed until 1906. A couple of months after Everton’s first game after crossing Stanley Park, a publication entitled ‘Out of Doors’ would proclaim: “Behold Goodison Park! No single picture could take in the entire scene the ground presents, it is so magnificently large, for it rivals the greater American baseball pitches.”
In 1913 it became the first Football League ground to host a reigning monarch when King George V and Queen Mary watched a display by local schoolchildren on the pitch and by the time of another royal visit in 1938 when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth – the parents of our current Queen – it had become the only ground in Britain to have double-decker stands along all four sides. When England hosted the World Cup in 1966, Goodison, as the pre-eminent club ground in the country, was chosen not only to host reigning champions Brazil’s three group games but a semi-final, alongside Wembley, although the two games were controversially switched at the last moment with Everton’s home originally scheduled to welcome Alf Ramsey’s side for their last-four match against Portugal.
The larger capacity of the national stadium in London (100,000) compared to Goodison’s, listed as 50,151 for the tournament was supposedly a key factor in the decision to keep the host nation down south and during the 1960s, some Merseysiders were already clamouring for a larger ‘super-stadium’ to be built in the North West given its de facto status as the capital of English football. Given that Goodison and Anfield were both fairly landlocked at the time, surrounded by densely-packed Victorian terraced housing, much of the talk about new grounds tended regard the idea of a shared ‘super stadium.’
As early as the 1962/63 season – when Everton secured their sixth League Championship while enjoying their record average attendance over the course of a campaign, topping 50,000 for the only time to date (51,603) – the ECHO’s Leslie Edwards revealed on February 28 1963 that a visionary businessman “not particularly interested in football” had visited his office with a revolutionary scheme to construct a 100,000 stadium which actually sounds like he was almost predicting a hybrid between the Premier League and Liverpool One several decades before their time. He wrote: “The plan calls for a completely new stadium to be sited in the Custom House area, capacity 100,000 plus, with restaurants and shops incorporated and an underground car park capable of taking the bulk of the thousands of cars which bring fans to the ground.
“This super stadium, with running track and facilities for field events, is to be used by both clubs, thus halving the overheads at Anfield and Goodison Park, and more important, drawing revenue six days a week from the parking space available to lorries on non-match days. The proposer of the plan suggests that the ground should include every comfort, every facility and that charges should be increased to meet all these costs.
“He says that the majority of people will pay almost anything to see football if they get comfort and safety. The stadium could be used throughout the summer for ‘spectacle’ promotions, including athletics and it would be paid for not by the clubs, but financed by land developers.”
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However, Edwards revealed that having spoken to John Moores, the Everton chairman poured cold water over idea. He wrote that Mr Moores thought the plan had possibilities but feared that the cost erecting such a stadium would run into many millions, the rent to Everton and Liverpool would be in the region of £60-70,000 a year and he did not see this sort of money “in football.”
It seems a seed had been sown though in the minds of ECHO readers and just six weeks later, Brian Holder of Bampton Road, Childwall, called for the building of a ‘super stadium’ with a six-figure capacity to be built in the stadium, in a letter to the newspaper in which he wrote: “Liverpool is being favourably compared with Italian cities for football fanaticism. This is true, but Italian spectators can watch their football comfortably, in modern super-sized stadiums with seats for most people.”
Back in 1966 with the League Championship at Anfield and FA Cup at Goodison, Reds secretary and later chief executive Peter Robinson suggested to the ECHO that neither ground was big enough and the local rivals should build a purpose-built arena for them both to use with a larger capacity. Despite receiving support for the idea from high-profile MPs in the area such as Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Bessie Braddock, Mr Robinson would later admit: “I was pilloried on the letters page the following Saturday.”
Others would make the call though and the following year, Liverpool forward Ian St John, penned a column in the ECHO insisting that a new ‘Wembley’ should be built in the north while later in 1967, a letter with no fewer than eight signatures on it (J Bews; DB Lyons; P Johnstone; J Driver; AB Collins; EJ Caldwell; W Taylor; G Bathurst), again proposed that “Liverpool needs a super stadium” on the back of a proposal from Alderman Sir Joseph Cleary. The correspondence suggested: “The most effective way to finance the running of such a stadium would be to enlist the support of both the Liverpool and Everton clubs who between them attract over a million supporters yearly to their home games.
“We are disgusted and yet not surprised to read the short-sighted comments of the chairmen of the respective clubs regarding even the possibility of such an idea for the reasons that the clubs would lose their individual identities. The jealously guarded identities of the two clubs would not be jeopardised, and it is about time the respective boards showed consideration to their supporters who after all are their very existence.”
