Everton open their pre-season schedule this weekend just as they ended their Premier League campaign just 56 days earlier with a game against Arsenal but while their latest overseas meeting against one of their domestic rivals promises to be a high-profile money-spinner, that hasn’t always been the case. Having attracted a capacity crowd of 71,203 for Chelsea’s 2-1 friendly win over Milan in 2009 in which current Blues boss Frank Lampard and first-team coach Ashley Cole both played for the Londoners, organisers at the M&T Bank Stadium, home of NFL side Baltimore Ravens, are hopeful of another bumper attendance this time around as English football’s two longest-established clubs take to the field in an eagerly-anticipated exhibition.
Everton claim to be the first English club to go on an overseas tour, some 117 years ago when they visited the then Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1905 for a seven match schedule that included fixtures against compatriots Tottenham Hotspur –who still played in the Western League at the time, although they’d already won their first FA Cup in 1901 – recording victories of 2-0 and 1-0 in Vienna and Prague respectively. Whether it was another brace of encounters against Spurs in Buenos Aires during the pair’s pioneering trip to South America in 1909; a 3-2 success over Newcastle United in Barcelona in 1924; defeating Manchester United 3-1 during the Mitsubishi World Soccer tournament in Kobe, Japan in 1989; or their last foreign encounter against Arsenal, a 3-1 loss in the 2015 Premier League Asia Trophy final in Singapore, none of the Blues globetrotting jaunts perhaps match their 1993 excursion to Mauritius in terms of sheer exoticness.
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