Howard Kendall, the most-successful of all the club’s managers, famously said on his return to the Goodison Park dugout that his relationship with the Blues was like a marriage so are Evertonians now experiencing the seven-year itch with Farhad Moshiri? Everton are about to kick-off their seventh season since Moshiri took ownership of the club and it’s stating the bleeding obvious to say that over this period, things have not gone to plan.
Frank Lampard – the seventh manager employed by Moshiri – will be starting his first full campaign in charge. If he’s still here this time next year then he’ll have made history as none of his predecessors have lasted longer than 18 months under the current regime.
Following a traumatic 2021/22 season, in which the club posted the joint lowest equivalent points total in their 134-year Football League/Premier League history, coming perilously close to a first relegation in 71 years, Moshiri apologised to Everton’s long-suffering supporters in an open letter in which he admitted the following points: The team had underperformed; Mistakes had been made, it had not been good enough and the club needed to do better; The fans’ incredible support helped the team over the line when they most needed it.
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He acknowledged “we must repay that support and show that lessons have been learnt”, adding that: “More than any other club in England, Everton is the club of its people, its community and its fans, and always will be.”
Looking forward, Moshiri also insisted: “I am committed to securing the future success of the club.” At the time it must have seemed a fair assumption that such sentiments would be with him at the helm but while it’s often said that a week is a long time in politics, the same seems to apply to the football world as just five days later, reports emerged that a US consortium were not only in takeover talks but hoped to have an arrangement in place to buy the club by the time Everton arrived in Minnesota for the second leg of their American tour on July 21.
However, as June ended, so did the period of exclusivity for the Kaminski group and while they claimed at the time the situation hadn’t changed and they remained what they called “the only show in town”, sources close to Moshiri stated that “the deal is now dead.” Come July 14 and another email from the owner was dropping into the inbox of Evertonians which started: “There has been much talk of investment in our football club recently – even takeovers – but I want to clarify that there is no ‘for sale’ sign currently hanging outside Everton Football Club.”
The latter point is factual in the literal sense but it was well-documented that at some point in recent times, Moshiri had seriously considered relinquishing his controlling stake in the club. Perhaps, as regular guest Gavin Buckland pondered in the ECHO’s Royal Blue podcast, the owner may have been “spooked” by Everton’s brush with relegation or a change in the global economic climate caused by the war in Ukraine but whatever his reasons, for the first time since he bought the club at the end of February 2016, the prospect of him selling up had entered the public domain.
Buckland also wondered whether Moshiri’s first open letter of the summer was some kind of “farewell note” to the supporters but when his second bulletin arrived – just before the 27 Campaign’s own open letter calling for him to listen, engage and act had been planned – he stated: “I want to reassure all of you that Everton Football Club is not for sale” and that “my commitment to the club remains strong.” While those of us outside of the owner’s inner circle are not privy to the details of the discussions that developed from the prospect of helping with the funding on the new stadium to the potential of a full blown takeover – it’s understood that even some other senior club officials only became aware there could be a change of ownership shortly before the initial reports – they presented the prospect of an Everton without Moshiri in charge.
Given that things have gone so badly on the pitch under his tenure – by Moshiri’s own admission – the prospect of an alternative regime, although shocking when the news first broke, quickly became an intriguing one for some. Seldom has a football club spent so much to become so bad as Everton have since 2016 and they’re now paying for those mistakes with Financial Fair Play restrictions forcing them to draw in their horns when it comes to transfer outlays.
Whatever you think about him and his suitability to run a football club, Moshiri cannot be accused of a lack of ambition on this score, ploughing half a billion pounds into the squad, even if large amounts of this have unfortunately been squandered. Lessons to be learned indeed.
In this respect, it’s to be hoped that if Moshiri is, as he says, still strongly committed to the club then he does not go the way of Randy Lerner who, after several seasons of spending, realised that no matter how much money he was throwing at Aston Villa, they weren’t going to force their way into the Champions League, and pulled the plug. Although Moshiri was previously a shareholder at Arsenal – selling his stake at the Emirates to take control at Everton – he had no previous experience of running a football club and has already learned the hard way how difficult it is to try and break the stranglehold on power of the Premier League’s established elite.
While the ECHO’s articles are sometimes challenged with suggestions that we’re somehow in the club’s pocket or wary of losing our access when commenting on the Goodison Park hierarchy, we remain fiercely independent and committed to providing our readers with what we consider to be a fair-minded assessment from as well-informed a position as we can and we're asking our readers to share their views on different facets of the club in our latest big forum survey. When critiquing the current owner, the available alternatives must be considered as the days of a Jack Walker-style, local lad done good – the benefactor whose beloved Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League in the same year that Everton last lifted the FA Cup – are now long gone and while Peter Kenyon previously held posts at Manchester United and Chelsea, those proposing to provide the funds for a potential Blues takeover had no pedigree in the game and ultimately did not prove their credentials.
That’s not to say that either ourselves as a voice of Merseyside football nor a browbeaten Everton fanbase in general should accept the recent failings. The club’s motto Nil Satis Nisi Optimum should serve as an inspiration rather than burden and as John Moores said: “Everton expects success. We’ve a very good crowd and our crowd are very loyal. But, of course, they pay money and they expect to see us do well. If we don’t do well then something should be done about it and something will be done about it.”
Although they have known little but success in the business world, men of great wealth like both Messrs Moores and Moshiri have to varying degrees found out that attaining dominance in English football is often far less straightforward. The squad investment from the former’s Littlewoods fortune prompted the Blues to be dubbed ‘The Mersey Millionaires’ but while there were successes early in his reign, he still lived through a period of a major power shift which corresponded with neighbours Liverpool’s dramatic assent to domestic and continental pre-eminence.
There almost seems to be two Evertons right now and in many ways they appear poles apart. On the one hand there’s the under-achieving patchwork quilt of a squad – assembled by Moshiri’s wildly varied half dozen appointments – who limped to Premier League survival last term and then there’s their other £500million project, the new stadium, which for all the potential pitfalls of recent times such as a proposed breakaway European Super League, a global pandemic which forced matches behind closed doors and a much-changed economic landscape caused by the war in Ukraine, remains on track and ultimately delivering on this score, where so many others have failed before him, could prove to be the owner’s legacy.
As tempting as it might have seemed to be a timely opportunity to sell up and cut his losses because of the aforementioned factors and Everton’s relegation near-miss, from a cynical, hard-nosed business sense, the club will surely be a far greater saleable asset after the move to Bramley-Moore Dock is complete. Regardless of how long he wants to retain ownership though, it remains in Moshiri’s interests to ensure that, despite spending now having to be somewhat curbed, Everton stay as competitive as possible and have a team fitting of their iconic future home as a repeat of last season cannot be tolerated.
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