Everton are under new ownership, and there's a lot of work to do to steady the ship at Goodison Park.
Finally, the feeling of torment may be coming to an end. Everton are under new ownership, and the chaotic reign of Farhad Moshiri has come to an end. It’s a story that feels very much like a parable for the ills of the modern game in this country, and a salutary reminder that while a place among the gilded twenty that is the Premier League exists as a very thick comfort blanket, it can’t completely protect from shoddy ownership.
It’s been five and a half years since Everton finished above halfway in the Premier League, and in recent years their scraps with relegation have become an increasingly familiar fixture of the annual calendar. There hasn’t been anything quite as dramatic as the last day of the 1992/93 or the 1997/98 seasons, but every time they do this dance with the devil, the likelihood of relegation actually happening continues its slow rise towards 1.
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Even at the time of writing, there is a considerable amount of work to be done to keep them in the Premier League, come the end of this season. They have failed to score in five of their last six games and at the time of writing they’re still only three points above the relegation places. It’s now been 70 years since they last played below this level, the second longest unbroken run in the top flight below Arsenal, but it isn’t assured yet.
The January transfer window is looming and the question hanging over the heads of the new owners won’t so much be how much can they afford to spend at that point as can they afford not to? And that leads to other questions. How satisfied are the new owners with the performance of manager Sean Dyche? It’s only been two years since Moshiri allowed Rafael Benitez to spend in the transfer window but then sacked him in the middle of the month, bringing in Frank Lampard at the end of January to inherit Benitez’s group of players rather than actually have a hand in the window himself. It was a moment ofpeak Everton.
Dyche is, at the time of writing, second in the betting behind long odds-on favourite Julen Lopetegui in the race to be the next Premier League manager to be sacked. Goals have to start coming from somewhere, and this is a problem, because Everton’s run of league fixtures to the end of January is absolutelyhorrendous. Between now and the end of the transfer window they play: Chelsea, Manchester City, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Aston Villa Spurs and Brighton; to put it another way, seven consecutive matches against teams in the top half of the table. So… how many points is he expecting to pick up from those matches?
Then there’s the stadium. Bramley-Moore Dock will be an obvious upgrade on Goodison Park, with a 53,000 capacity and completely unobstructed views from anywhere, a sharp contrast with the pillar-filled and rickety place they call home. But there is concern to be had at football bulldozing yet another piece of its architectural past in the pursuit of stained glass and steel, although it is obviously already clear that the needs of the present will always overpower heritage and memories of the past. Will it be ready for the start of next season? Stay tuned to find out.
And then, of course, there’s the socio-political angle to it all. ‘Main sponsor’ Alisher Usmanov was hoiked out in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and this came at potential cash flow costs for both the football side of the business and the construction of the new stadium. The signs for his businesses being taken down at Goodison Park was one of the more striking images of that strange period when it did at points feel like the whole world could combust at any point following that invasion.
Moshiri and Usmanov have been in business together for a very long time indeed. How he feels about these tens of millions of pounds having been poured into a football club to no appreciable benefit is just about anybody’s guess. Moshiri, meanwhile, has had to write down hundreds of millions of pounds by converting into equity in the club, which is, if nothing else, extremely funny indeed.
When Moshiri did find someone to take the club off his hands, the potential new owners came with more red flags than a Chinese military parade. 777 Partners were already the owners of several clubs across Europe and were putting money into the club in loans, but their collapse earlier this year confirmed the long-held belief among many that they were a bullet best dodged. The same has also been suggested about John Textor, who had an interest at the end of the summer but was then elbowed out of the way by the Friedkin Group.
There was something of the zeitgeist about the protests which erupted when they were deducted points last season for breaches of Profit & Sustainability rules being directed at the Premier League rather than against the owner who’d got them into such a pickle in the first place. There were also protests against Moshiri, but these were rules that they had voted for in the first place, and that they breached them was ultimately down to some dreadful financial profligacy, which ran straight through mismanagement and into the realms of neglect.
Most people with a modicum of knowledge about the finances of football could see this coming. Everton’s scattergun policy of appointing managers apparently drawn from a top hat with the names of people Moshiri heard of written on slips inside it was extremely striking. New arrivals were layered on new arrivals as the spending of these managers was followed by them getting the boot, the squad becoming increasingly incoherent looking as the manager after manager headed for the exit door. They jumped from Sam Allardyce to Marco Silva to Carlo Ancelotti to Rafael Benitez to Frank Lampard to Sean Dyche inless than five years. That’s not running a business. That’s performance art.
So farewell then, Farhad Moshiri, with your baffling managerial hires and your apparent addiction to spending vast amounts of money on vastly mediocre footballers. It is unlikely that he will be particularly missed, at least by the blue side of Merseyside. And all hail the new uber-capitalist overlords. It seems reasonable to say that you’ve got a lot of work to do.
Accompanying image licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0. Attribution:Rob Farrow/Liverpool - New Everton Stadium CC BY-SA 2.0
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