When the final whistle blew and Manchester City got their hands on the Champions League trophy for the first time, BT Sport’s commentary told us: “The greatest story in club football has an ending” but while that’s a heavily-loaded comment in itself, could this have possibly been Everton’s tale of glory instead had potential investors looked in a different direction some 15 years ago?
Many Kopites looked on with both envy and even disgust at City’s triumph and while no Evertonian needs reminding that the Blues have not enjoyed the same kind of love affair with the European Cup as their neighbours, Everton’s greatest side were denied their place dining at European football’s top table in 1985 because of the post-Heysel ban in an era when English clubs had won seven out of the previous nine finals, including six in a row between 1977-82. It was only last month when securing their seventh Premier League title – providing they don’t get any retrospectively expunged for their 115 alleged Financial Fair Play rule breaches – that City actually moved level with Everton on nine League Championships overall and while they look set to leave them firmly in their wake going forward, before their 2008 takeover by the Abu Dhabi United Group, their achievements paled in significance to the other Blues at Goodison Park.
For many years before that watershed moment, the pair would be lumped together as the loyal but long-suffering fans of the ‘other’ club in a footballing hotbed city and it was a tag that many Evertonians resented when their own team were a beacon of consistency and an outfit who had enjoyed success over a prolonged period while City were often up and down like a yo-yo. Oh how times have changed…
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There but for the grace of God go I though. When the Abu Dhabi United Group first considered taking over an English football club, Everton were rumoured to be very much on their radar.
The private equity company were believed to be looking at a project that would involve an historic club in a big city with a significant fanbase that had the potential to be built up after spending decades in the shadows of their local rivals. Everton very much also fitted the bill but perhaps crucially, their King’s Dock project to relocate to the banks of the Mersey had failed earlier in the decade but thanks to inheriting the already paid for centrepiece venue from the 2002 Commonwealth Games, City already had their new stadium in situ.
The rest as they say is history but for some Blues it remains a tantalising prospect of what might have been. When Everton published their answers from the extensive list of questions submitted to them by the Fan Advisory Board in January, one query placed in the ‘Uncategorised’ section caught the eye.
It was asked: “Did Sheikh Mansour make an offer to buy EFC? Was there a requirement for Bill Kenwright to remain as Chairman/on the Board of Directors?”
The official reply simply read: “There was no offer by Sheikh Mansour to buy Everton Football Club. There has never been a requirement as part of discussions with any party relating to the sale of the club for Bill Kenwright to remain as Chairman.”
When Kenwright finally found his billionaire of choice some eight years later in 2016, Farhad Moshiri became Everton’s new majority shareholder. Unfortunately, unlike at City where huge investment has turned them into the best team in the world, great swathes of the funds that the Monaco-based businessman has pumped into the Blues has been squandered.
Surely no team in football history has lavished so much to become so bad and last summer Moshiri apologised to supporters and admitted: “We have not always spent significant amounts of money wisely.” With FFP restrictions now biting – Everton also have their own alleged breach of profit and sustainability rules, which has been referred to an independent commission by the Premier League although unlike City it is a single charge – the ECHO understands that doubts over the availability of funds contributed to the Blues not signing anyone in January, despite director of football Kevin Thelwell having been looking to bring in a couple of new attacking players and Anthony Gordon being sold to Newcastle United for £45million.
Everton were the only club fighting for survival not to strengthen in the winter window and despite narrowly avoiding what would have been their first relegation in 72 years, after Abdoulaye Doucoure’s goal gave them the victory they required to survive on the final day, they posted the lowest equivalent points tally in the club’s 135-year history in the Football League/Premier League. Moshiri himself has not attended at game at Goodison Park since the 5-2 capitulation against Watford on October 23, 2021 and many are now waiting with bated breath regarding the prospect of fresh ideas and investment from MSP Sports Capital after they reached an exclusivity agreement, but while hopes remain high that the deal will get done and matters are moving in the right direction, an announcement might not be as imminent as some might expect.
The absence of a new Everton stadium may have been pivotal to Mansour and company looking elsewhere back in the noughties but the current construction of the club’s future riverside home at Bramley-Moore Dock they are set to move into during the 2024/25 season is the one area in which Moshiri’s current regime has unquestionably delivered, with both his wealth and vision ensuring that something that has been a pipedream for at least a generation has now become a reality. Last September, Everton’s Director of Communications, Revenue and International Growth, Richard Kenyon told the ECHO: “We believe that the new stadium will be a game-changer in terms of how the club is viewed globally,” but even once the Blues’ revenue streams are increased by their move from Goodison Park and even if they’re able to re-establish themselves as a major power who is looking forwards rather than backwards, is there now any realistic hope at all of replicating even a fraction of what City have achieved?
Back in January 2017 at his first General Meeting since becoming Everton’s majority shareholder, Moshiri spoke of a supposed window of opportunity but the fear is that ship has already sailed for them because of the poor decisions they have made throughout his tenure. The Blues are further away than ever from breaking into the elite with Newcastle United’s subsequent takeover by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and their return to the Champions League making the scramble for places at the sharp end of the Premier League even more intense, even if Everton were able to get their act together.
Club football has always been about the survival of the fattest in terms of spending power ever since day one when Lancashire factory owners were luring Scottish professionals south of the border back in the Victorian era and the Blues themselves were dubbed “The Mersey Millionaires” when they benefitted from John Moores’ fortune. However, the mind-boggling figures involved in the game now are such, that when it comes to being any kind of serious force, there’s increasingly little room for anyone not backed by a sportswasher with a petrodollar-fuelled sovereign wealth fund or an American tycoon looking for the latest franchise they can acquire before eventually selling it on for a profit.
More fans are watching Premier League matches than ever before – Everton’s new stadium will hold 52,888, enabling them to play in front of the biggest average crowds in their history – and players are fitter and faster than they’ve ever been, but is the sport actually any better? From a competitiveness point of view, most certainly not.
The ‘Big Six’ have already threatened to join a breakaway European Super League in 2021, an abhorrent and unwelcome mistake that would have seen them declared football’s masters in perpetuity while the rest were left to wither and die. Everton to their credit were amongst the most-vocal dissenting voices to a dastardly scheme that threatened to trample over a century of sporting integrity created by football’s organic pyramid system based on merit but even as things stand, we already have a system that enables those with the greatest resources to prosper.
Manchester City, the club who Sir Alex Ferguson once dubbed “The noisy neighbours” have become the only team to have matched his Manchester United treble of 1999. It’s a laudable sporting achievement for the players within Pep Guardiola’s side but in reality it’s just another sign of the times in an era of great discrepancies in wealth on an uneven playing field rather than anything close to resembling “The greatest story in club football.”
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