With Farhad Moshiri having entered talks over a potential Everton takeover, boardroom machinations at Goodison Park are a topical theme right now. Less than a week after Mr Moshiri wrote an open letter to Blues fans, in which he apologised for “mistakes” and insisting he was “committed to securing the future success of the club”, reports emerged about his ongoing discussions with a US-based consortium headed by Peter Kenyon, who, are considering buying the club.
It’s been claimed that Monaco-based businessman Mr Moshiri values Everton at a figure in excess of £500million but given that any prospective buyer would also have to guarantee the completion of the club’s new stadium, of which construction costs total a similar amount, currently being built at Bramley-Moore Dock, then the total bill for the Blues could top the billion pound mark. It’s all a far cry from the exploits of legendary Merseyside football figure WJ Sawyer, the man who once turned down the chance to manage Everton but later took a team assembled for just £100 to an FA Cup replay against Tottenham Hotspur.
Sawyer, was not only a revered football administrator at Goodison Park, he was also the driving force behind another club in the region – in both its incarnations either side of the Mersey. Although known to posterity by the initials of his two Christian names (William James), this larger-than-life character who dominated the North West football landscape in the early 20 th century – he also helped play a role in the formation of Wigan Athletic – was known to his friends as “Bill.”
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Attending St Mary’s School in Edge Hill and then Liverpool Institute, ‘WJ’, along with his younger brothers, Walter and Dick, followed his father into the canal trade and was an accountant who rose to the position of secretary at the Leeds-Liverpool Canal Company. A goalkeeper in his youth, a broken collar bone suffered while playing for the Canal Recs team forced him to focus on the administrative side of the game instead.
His great-grandson Rob Sawyer, a well-known football historian and author, told the ECHO: “His son, my grandfather, died when I was about six years old but whenever we’d be driving through Liverpool as a child, my dad would always drop in mentions about WJ’s association with Everton, the South Liverpool club and the fabled WJ Sawyer Cup and what had become of it (the family were later reunited with the trophy through the Liverpool County FA).
“When my mum and dad moved house about a dozen years ago, I came across lots of cuttings in the loft that they’d saved about him. As well as doing his day job as the director of a canal company, he was off to matches every week, busy with his commitments at Everton and he also possessed a waspish sense of humour.
“When it was the 1911 census, for some obscure reason, he decided to list his wife, the long-suffering Sarah as being a pork butcher. By all accounts she was a very serious woman but I imagine he wasn’t the easiest of people to live with, in fact he was a nightmare to be honest!
“His career was at the canal company. He was a chartered accountant but his passion was football, especially the administrative side of the game which led to his association with African Royal, the club that would become South Liverpool.
“There was WJ and another chap at the helm and they had ambitions to turn it into a Football League club. WJ was the secretary-manager, well he was ‘the man’ in that he was just about everything there, including chief publicist.
“If you read some of the glowing profiles in the programmes that survive from that era, you’re always left with the feeling that he wrote them himself. He wasn’t shy of promoting what he was doing.
“He seemed to be a go-getter, very dynamic and energetic and quite the character too. At first there were aspirations for South Liverpool to go on to bigger and better things but in the end it was a case of just keeping them going, which he juggled with his canal work.”
WJ left South Liverpool in 1918 to become Secretary-Manager at Everton (the Blues were one of the last clubs to appoint a modern-style manager when Theo Kelly was handed the role in 1939) but given that competitive football did not resume until a year later, he was not in charge of any official matches in the record books.
Sawyer said: “That kind of work mustn’t have gone unnoticed by people up at Goodison Park though when they went about looking for a new secretary when Will Cuff was standing down. It was an honorary position though, which I think meant that it was unpaid.
“He did have a spell at Everton as secretary-manager just after the First World War but then had a last-minute change of heart so Tom McIntosh came in and did a brilliant job so the rest is history in that respect. Within a year though, he’d been invited on to the board at Everton and remained there for a decade.
“Not surprisingly given that he was an accountant, he was chairman of the finance committee. For any expenditure, including transfers, (which would have included the £3,000 signing of Dixie Dean in 1925) he was the key man.”
Although a shrewd operator with funds when in a working capacity, WJ, who was a well-known ‘bon viveur’ was less inhibited when it came to spending his own money and like many, he suffered during the Great Depression. However, he would go on to reinvent himself ‘across the water’ at New Brighton AFC, formed in 1921 from the ashes of his first club South Liverpool, and elevated to the Football League’s Division Three North two years later, decades before Wimbledon's hugely controversial rebranding as MK Dons.
Sawyer said: “He lived the good life and spent money well. Some of his investments turned out not to be the most prudent and he got hit by the crash.
“Everton’s fortunes also nosedived around that time with a first relegation in 1930 and later that year he tendered his resignation. You get the impression that the diminished circumstances of income plus the pressure at work and with Everton, affected his health. Reading the minutes from the time, it’s clear that the board didn’t want him to resign but he was adamant that he had to step back but not for long.
“He became secretary-manager of New Brighton, running the administrative side of the club, including team affairs. I assume by this point, given he was now in his 60s, he was either retired or semi-retired from his day job, so this became his full-time occupation.
“It was a hand to mouth existence but he had a flair for wheeling and dealing and was very smart, bringing in a couple of players during that period who were sold on at a profit, including Norman Greenhalgh who wasn’t making the grade at Bolton Wanderers. They got him for nothing but within a couple of years he’d been bought by Everton for a tidy sum and went on to become a League Champion.
“They punched above their weight for a time in an area dominated by Everton, Liverpool plus Tranmere Rovers, and in 1938 reached the fourth round of the FA Cup, taking Tottenham Hotspur to a replay before losing 5-2 in a replay at White Hart Lane.”
Sawyer, whose latest publication, ‘Jack Coulter: From Whiteabbey to Goodison Park’ tells the story of a winger who might now be considered as being Everton’s greatest winger had it not been for injury, is also going back to the 1930s for his next project, an in-depth study of Everton’s 1938/39 League Championship-winning side. With a still teenage Tommy Lawton, the First Division’s top scorer for back-to-back seasons, spearheading their attack and a supporting cast including the likes of TG Jones, Joe Mercer, Ted Sagar, Alex Stevenson, Torry Gillick and Jock Thomson, they looked poised to dominate English football before the Second World War broke up the team. Sawyer said: “I know people talk about the 1969/70 team or 1984/85 if you’re more my age but my dad always said the 1938/39 side were the best-ever Everton team.”
