The year 2022 should be a truly momentous one for Everton and the city of Liverpool as their new stadium finally starts to take shape before our eyes.
One year on from the club being granted planning permission at Bramley-Moore Dock, the scale of progress Everton have already made on what will be their new waterfront home on the banks of the royal blue Mersey, has already been remarkable.
Before the usual cynics start sniping about the supposed tactic of churning out an Everton stadium story on the back of a bad result, the landmark decision by Liverpool City Council to give the project the green light was February 23, 2021, with the national government rubber stamping it just over a month later on March 26.
The brutal truth behind this season for the Blues is that most weeks have come after bad results with Frank Lampard’s big short-term ask being to guide the team away from the threat of relegation.
Given their proud record of a record 119 seasons to date in the top flight, including an unbroken sequence going back to 1954, the prospect of Everton going down would always be calamitous but it happening so close to when they are preparing to relocate to an iconic, modern, game-changing stadium would be particularly lamentable.
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While the team’s away form remains a major concern, it’s to be hoped that with 15 games still to go, the encouraging signs shown at Goodison Park under Lampard so far can help drag the Blues out of the malaise that Rafa Benitez’s highly-controversial and miserable short reign left them in.
Conspiracy theorists seem to have developed a particular penchant for Everton new stadium stories though to the point of it becoming an unhealthy obsession with some keyboard warriors' mentality totally at odds with something so obviously beneficial for the community.
There are of course some nervous Evertonians who having been hurt so many times in the past, especially when it comes to aborted stadium moves, won’t rest easy until they’re sat in their seat at the new ground, watching their team.
Understandably twitchy by memories of the failure of King’s Dock, one flagged up the warning of Valencia’s Nou Mestalla which broke ground back in 2007 but saw work halted in February 2009 and remains incomplete.
The Spanish club’s financial problems over funding their stadium move are perhaps an extreme example and construction on a scaled-down version has now resumed with a long overdue opening now finally set for 2024, the same year as Everton.
But while on the field inconsistencies continue to dog Everton, it seems that sleepless nights for long-suffering fans should be confined to concerns over the team rather than the new stadium with progress at Bramley-Moore Dock pressing ahead on schedule.
This seemingly irks with the small but vocal gang of oddballs who have nothing better to do than troll articles about the subject.
The reality is that people of the Liverpool City Region, be they of a Blue, Red, other or no footballing persuasion, gave this amazing development a truly ringing endorsement throughout the public consultation stages.
Over 20,000 people took part in the club’s first stage of public consultation with 94% of respondents agreeing that the waterfront site is an appropriate place for Everton to build a new ground.
Of the 20,168 people who responded nearly 2,000 were non-Everton supporters yet the bulk of those fans were still in agreement over the club’s move to Bramley-Moore Dock.
In the second consultation process, the Blues received over 43,000 responses to their survey about the People’s Project (both the move to Bramley-Moore Dock and the legacy for Goodison Park).
Some 96% of people who took part want the project to continue, 98% of all respondents support the design of the stadium with 99% of Everton fans backing US architect Dan Meis’ renderings.
The second stage consultation reached 2,726 non-Everton fans – 24% of who have on interest in football – and included a 19-day touring exhibition that visited 12 locations across all six Liverpool City Region boroughs.
The naysayers had their ample opportunities then to air any grievances but most of them were probably too busy staring at screens in their bedrooms, spewing out more pettiness and paltriness.
When it comes to things that do matter, along with the irritant of well-meaning but desperately out-of-touch bureaucrats at UNESCO who perversely seemed to prefer derelict industrial sites to a huge economically booming venture that places respect for the setting of its waterfront heritage at the core of its design and will pump billions into Merseyside’s economy over many decades to come, the project has already had to survive a couple of major potential pitfalls.
First there was the (ongoing) global coronavirus pandemic.
Given that COVID-19 caused the unprecedented action of all professional matches in England to be played without crowds some 132 years after the Football League first kicked off in 1888, the construction of a 52,888 capacity stadium was always going to be under threat in such uncertain circumstances.
Thankfully after a couple of years of major tragedy and huge disruptions to what we consider to be ‘normal’ life, there’s finally light at the end of the tunnel on that score.
Secondly there was the whole shameful circus of the proposed breakaway European Super League that proposed to be a synthetic private members’ club based on invitation rather than merit and would have trampled on over a century of sporting integrity forged by the organic football pyramid system which exists in various guises across the nations of the continent.
This, rather than what one would hope that even in a worst-case scenario would only be a temporary setback if Everton ever were relegated, could prove a far greater obstacle.
While the six English would-be rebel clubs publicly claimed they remained committed to the Premier League, the prospect of them riding off into the sunset and leaving the rest to wither and die in a ‘rump’ top flight shorn of half a dozen of its biggest outfits did not bode well for the Blues building a new home over a third larger than Goodison Park which when filled would bring in crowds comparable to the club’s highest ever average attendances of the 1962/63 title-winning season.
For now, such worries are for another day though.
Rivals might continue to mock Everton’s faltering form of late.
Such is the nature of the game and nothing will change on that score until results improve.
Back in 1892, a heckler told George Mahon “Yer can’t find one” when he spoke of Everton’s need for a new ground only to be put down by his “I’ve got one (the site of Goodison) in my pocket” riposte.
Perhaps much like him though, those who have scoffed and dismissed the Bramley-Moore Dock stadium as ‘fantasy football’ and a dream that would never happen, might finally be silenced when the stands that will forge the Blues’ riverside home start to be erected before their eyes before this year is out.
