With the Friedkin Group on the cusp of arriving at Everton, thoughts will likely, at some point, turn to the departing owner and his legacy at the club.
Moshiri, the long sought-after billionaire, arrived with grand aims of transforming Everton, to deliver a club fit to compete in the age of Modern Football. Amongst the raft of lofty promises, how many were actually fulfilled?
At the time of writing, it does look as though Moshiri got one thing right. After numerous false dawns under previous regimes, our outgoing owner finally got the stadium built. And he just about did it without completely destroying the club in the process. This will likely form the basis of ‘Moshiri-Revisionism’, a trend that will undoubtably emerge once Bramley-Moore Dock opens for business. Believers will point out, with some justification, that the Herculean process of enabling a club of Everton’s limited resources to build and move to a new stadium should not be underestimated.
Successive owners, going all the way back to Peter Johnson in the 1990s, have rightly pointed out that despite its emotional appeal to Evertonians, Goodison Park has held the club back. It remains, in its current state, a handbrake on the club’s ability to compete with former peers. Moshiri was the man who not only agreed with this analysis but who was also, tellingly, willing to do something about it.
Article continues below video content
What’s more, this is no London Stadium, no Destination Kirkby, a cut-price semi-solution that sacrifices the fans sense of place and emotion on the altar of bargain basement capitalism. This is a proper football ground, constructed to recreate what makes Goodison so special, to transport our home at its intimidating best (in theory at least).
Once ensconced within BMD, Everton’s capacity to compete financially within the Premier League will be transformed. We may, as fans, decry the increased commercialisation of the English football experience, bristle at tourists flocking to our clubs, chafe at the swelling numbers of ‘prawn sandwich’ supporters, but that is the reality of competing at the top. While it’s hoped that Everton will not bow to these trends as much as our neighbours have, the ability to better exploit the money that is awash around the Premier League will significantly improve the financial position of the club.
It’s seductive when considering the above to see Moshiri in a more positive light. Doubtless this favourable glow will turn even more flattering over time as the horror of recent seasons fade from memory and the solidity of BMD and its impact become more tangible. And to supplement this, ‘Moshiri Revisionism’ will also likely point to the spending of his early reign. It is unquestionable that when the Iranian first arrived, following years of Kenwright induced penury, Everton did splash around the cash. During his tenure, according to Transfermarkt, the Blues have roughly spent £670m on players (while bringing in around £490m). Considering much of this spending was front-loaded, it’s undeniable that the first half of his tenure was characterised by an expansive transfer policy. And those numbers only provide the headline transfer sums. When wages are taken into account (with Everton being particularly generous in those early years), the outlay is even greater. Say what you want about Moshiri but, to begin with at least, this was an owner who put his money where his mouth was.
But as every Evertonian knows only too painfully, the above is far from the full picture. While BMD and that early splurge count in his favour, entries into the ‘cons’ column have amassed with considerable ferocity.
If you want one moment from the Moshiri era to illustrate why our outgoing owner might not be the best person to be involved in a football club, it’s this quote from 2018:
‘Now we are comfortable with Cenk Tosun as a focal point, we have Bolasie back, Sigurdsson, Rooney – we have our own Fab Four!’
The referencing of a 'Fab Four' was used to draw favourable comparisons with Liverpool's own, frustratingly impressive quadrumvirate of Salah, Firmino, Mane and Coutinho. For that alone, Moshiri should probably receive a lifetime ban from every football ground in Europe.
That ‘Fab Four’ quote gives a handy illustration of how disappointing Everton’s recruitment has been under Moshiri. While there have been occasional gems – Richarlison, Pickford, Branthwaite – too much of the spend has been incoherent, profligate, and (in wages and resale terms), hugely damaging. Just because you spend money does not mean success follows, and Everton under Moshiri have been a masterclass in that. Few could argue that the team that currently labours under Sean Dyche could hold a candle to the one that existed under Roberto Martinez when the owner first arrived.
A big reason for this is the palpable sense of chaos that Moshiri introduced into a club that had previously been characterised by stability. More trigger-happy than a military vet with severe PTSD and a heavy Breitbart habit, Moshiri has churned through managers, going through as many permanent bosses since 2016 as the club managed in the three decades before he arrived. He’s done the same with Directors of Football, applying brutal short-termism to a position that only works if you take a long-term perspective. Frequently, despite putting people in charge to run the football side of things, he’s also intervened in transfers. There are stories of players coming to the club because of the owner, and other tales of potentially catastrophic near-misses.
Added to this destructive culture of turmoil, Moshiri also allowed Bill Kenwright to keep his hand on the tiller of the club. It’s ironic that the sole example of the owner applying a sense of consistency to a key position turned out to be the one where he should have been more brutal. Prior to the billionaire’s arrival, Kenwright had spent years overseeing a growing sense of commercial torpor at Everton, as year-by-year the club fell behind its former peers. The ‘FC Cosy’ mentality was allowed to swell and suppurate, with Everton becoming, in many ways, a Football League outfit operating in the Premier League age. The club required an overhaul, a long overdue professionalisation. By allowing ‘Mr Everton’ to remain at the top, that process never began. As a result, the club have been unable to create the kind of revenues required to begin bridging the considerable gap that has opened up between Everton and its former peers. It’s the kind of gap that, within the world of PSR, cannot be bridged through owner investment alone.
A combination of managerial churn, commercial sluggishness and profligate/directionless spending is always a dangerous one, at any football club. This is especially the case when it also delivers a deterioration on the pitch, which has clearly been the case at Everton. Moshiri arrived at a club with a recent history of playing in Europe and finishing in the top eight, with the financial benefits that delivers. Under his watch, Everton have transformed into a club nowhere near the European conversation, and rather than top eight, have morphed into regular recent battlers of relegation. The arrival of the new owner was supposed to usher in a fresh dawn, the shifting of Everton's footballing parameters. The club's conversation was meant to be about the Champions League and upward progression. Instead, talk has turned to the Championship and downward momentum.
This was most keenly felt during the 2023/24 season when Everton’s ongoing financial problems led to two breaches of PSR, resulting in an eight-point deduction from the Premier League. Regardless of the political dimension of the punishment, the judgements, in many ways, represented totemic illustrations of how mismanaged Everton had been. As a result of what was handed down, the Blues spent most of the campaign mired in the bottom six, only achieving escape velocity via some miraculous end-of-season form (and the fact that the ‘Best League in the World’ was blessed with some truly awful football teams).
If things weren’t tough enough on the pitch that season, Evertonians also had to contend with the material future of the club coming under threat. Moshiri’s mismanagement had only been tenable while he underwrote the club’s losses. This began to change a few years ago when it became evident that the Iranian was no longer willing to sink money into the club. It was a decision that seemed influenced by the UK Government’s sanctioning of Alisher Usmanov (Moshiri’s long term financial partner and rumoured backer). Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Uzbeki oligarch was forbidden from investing in the country. As a result of this, and possibly a growing disinterest in a project that was going so awry, Moshiri began to pull back. It meant Everton became increasingly reliant on loans to function, amassing considerable debt in the process.
Moshri’s growing disenchantment with the club and it’s rapidly expanding financial problems, inevitably led him to put Everton up for sale. For those indulging in some favourable ‘Moshiri- Revisionism’, what occurred next stands as a great counter to the argument that he was someone interested in the long-term financial health of the club.
How else to explain the decision to sell the club to 777 Partners? Currently facing a winding up order and under investigation for money laundering by the US Department of Justice, 777 already possessed a questionable reputation within the game when Moshiri announced his decision to sell to them. It was one characterised by footballing failure and rumoured financial malfeasance. From the very beginning, it appeared that 777 were unfit, an early red flag being the propensity for head honchos, Steve Pasko and Josh Wander to rarely be seen without wearing baseball caps. Despite Evertonians’ manifold grievances against the Premier League, the football authority did the club a great service by taking so long examining the takeover, in the process providing 777 with enough rope to hang themselves, effectively unspooling as a corporate entity before the takeover was complete.
Aside from enabling Everton to dodge a potentially fatal bullet, the Premier League’s lengthy process of due diligence also allowed, what appears to be, a more suitable bidder, the Friedkin Group, to enter the conversation. By accident rather than design, the club is now on the cusp of ending the Moshiri era the right way. Rather than handing over the reins to owners potentially more catastrophic than him, the transition should hopefully see an improvement in how Everton are run. Although this being Everton, there are always caveats. No club is better at striking out on a new path only to find that they have turned into a cul-de-sac. After all, did we not as fans greet Moshiri as the great saviour? He was the longed-for billionaire who was meant to restore Everton to the pinnacle of the game. And look how that turned out.
When it comes to our departing owner, as all of the above illustrates, the picture isn’t great. It is undeniable that with the exception of the stadium, Moshiri did not get a single thing right at Everton. In every other aspect, commercial performance, the structure of the club, transfer policy, and what has happened on the pitch, his reign has been one of palpable failure. It’s telling that when he arrived at the club, Everton were trying to hang on to the coattails of the Big Six. We have fallen so far since, that now the challenge for the new owners, to begin with at least, is to keep up with the likes of Villa, Brighton and West Ham.
Few owners depart football clubs affectionately. It is a difficult game to succeed in and the pyramid is littered with failure. Here at Everton, it’s been some time since we loved our owners, Moshiri joining the less-than-esteemed company of Kenwright and Johnson. While you can probably say that his intentions were good, it’s the execution that matters. And here, Moshiri has largely been a disaster. It is hoped that the Friedkin group can learn from the mistakes of those who have come since John Moores and finally turn Everton into the kind of club we think it should be. Nil Satis Nisi Optimum, has to mean something, on and off the pitch. For too long it hasn’t.
Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer ()
There are no responses so far to this article. Be the first to offer a comment using the form below.
How to get rid of these ads and support TW
© ToffeeWeb