This week's Royal Blue column sees Chris Beesley discuss the decision to award Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium five games at the 2028 European Championships
Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium will host five matches at the 2028 European Championship - the same number as Goodison Park had for the 1966 World Cup finals
Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium will host five matches at the 2028 European Championship - the same number as Goodison Park had for the 1966 World Cup finals
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Five games for Hill Dickinson Stadium at the next European Championships – not bad for a venue that many, including plenty in this city, said would never be built.
Unlike in 1966, the only time that England has hosted the World Cup, the 2028 European Championships will be staged jointly with Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, but Everton’s new home, the most recently built of all the venues and only one not completed when the bid was placed, was one of just four English provincial grounds to get the nod.
The fact that the nation that gave birth to modern football and whose top flight attracts the biggest global audiences and largest aggregate attendances has still only hosted one World Cup could be the subject of an entirely different column all together, especially when you consider that Mexico will next year be a host nation for the third time, Italy, France, Germany and Brazil have all hosted twice with the USA joining them in 2026, while the last two tournaments have been in Russia and Qatar.
The latter, which on top of a dubious track record over human rights, saw a competition played almost entirely in a single urban area in a nation with next to no football pedigree in the middle of the season seemed a particularly dubious call from FIFA who have subsequently pushed through something of a repeat performance by returning to the region in 2034 with Saudi Arabia being awarded the finals last year after a fast-track uncontested process. England, in turn, along with the rest of their co-hosts, dropped their own bid for the centenary 2030 World Cup to focus on securing Euro 2028.
When the 1966 World Cup came to these shores, Everton’s long-time home Goodison Park was the pre-eminent club venue in the country and had been so for much of its existence. The first purpose-built football ground in England when it opened in 1892, just two years later it became the first club ground to host an FA Cup final as Notts County defeated Bolton Wanderers 4-1, while it also staged an FA Cup final replay in 1910 when Newcastle United overcame Barnsley 2-0 after a 1-1 draw at Crystal Palace five days’ earlier.
To this day, Goodison remains the only English club ground to be bestowed the honour of hosting a World Cup semi-final as West Germany beat Soviet Union 2-1, although until a controversial switch was made less than 48 hours earlier, it was supposed to be welcoming Alf Ramsey’s England for their last-four encounter against Portugal. The first ground with double-decker stands on all four sides, the first to have a triple-decker, the first to have undersoil heating and first to have a scoreboard, ‘The Grand Old Lady’ led the way for a long time, but as Manchester United are finding out now with Old Trafford, which missed out on the Euros to ‘noisy neighbours’ Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, the problem when you build the best is that you have to keep moving with the times or else you rivals will catch up and eventually eclipse you.
As well as its five games at the World Cup finals, Goodison staged a dozen internationals in the British Home Championship, 10 England home games, and two for Northern Ireland due to civil unrest in Belfast; three England friendlies, including their first home defeat to opponents from outside the United Kingdom when they lost 2-0 to Ireland in 1949. However, its final international came 30 years before Everton’s departure as world champions Brazil overcame Japan 3-0 in the Umbro Cup in 1995, with the decision having already been made to stage European Championship matches across Stanley Park at Anfield the following summer.
That will have served as a warning to Blues top brass with chairman Peter Johnson already looking into ambitious plans to relocate to a bowl at an unspecified location that would have been the largest stadium in the Premier League at the time. Who knows where Everton might have ended up both on and off the pitch with rumoured sites outside the city’s boundaries ranging from the likes of Kirkby – which of course would raise its head again in the following decade – and even Cronton, a village which is closer to Widnes than Liverpool.
Having returned earlier this month to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light where this correspondent produced his first Everton match report on New Year’s Eve 2005, I can confirm that the first wave of new English football stadia built in the 1990s in the wake of the Taylor Report, are now looking rather dated. As it turned out, after being pioneers with Goodison, the long and winding road to find a successor – having already had one failed project on the Mersey waterfront at King’s Dock, now the site of the arena – can hopefully prove a case of ‘the best things come to those who wait.’
Financial experts have calculated that Hill Dickinson Stadium should be bringing in an additional £60million annual income for Everton. This month started with the rugby league Ashes test at the venue, its first major non-football event and from next summer onwards it could start rivalling Anfield when it comes to attracting the world’s biggest musical artists for concerts.
Normal service has been resumed as it were and that’s only right for a club of the Blues’ size and heritage in the game and the same goes for Liverpool as a city. As David Moyes proclaimed ahead of Everton’s first Premier League game on the Mersey waterfront against Brighton & Hove Albion on August 24: “We’ve built a brilliant stadium, now the job is to try and build a brilliant team.”
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