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Everton chairman Dan Friedkin plays golf at Kingsbarns in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship on Friday
Everton chairman Dan Friedkin plays golf at Kingsbarns in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship on Friday
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For Everton, it’s a tale of two Americans, two Dans in fact, and Hill Dickinson Stadium.
For Blues, Goodison Park was Everton and Everton was Goodison Park. Since before anyone could remember, some 133 years, longer than an entire human lifetime.
But then last summer that changed as, having been based in Walton since 1892, the club made the two-mile journey to the Mersey waterfront in Vauxhall. The new 52,769 capacity base that has enabled the Blues to play in front of the biggest regular crowds in their history and look forwards instead of backwards, is Dan Meis’ vision.
Despite being born in Colorado and calling the suburbs of Los Angeles home, Meis now considers himself an Evertonian. He believes they are unique group in world sport, despite having also worked with what he describes as “some pretty rabid fanbases.”
When this correspondent wrote the book On the Banks of the Royal Blue Mersey: Inside Everton’s First Season at the Dockwhich was released last week, Meis therefore seemed the obvious choice for the foreword while there is also an entire chapter devoted to an exclusive interview with him from his office in New York’s Third Avenue.
Hill Dickinson Stadium is his baby and he’s justifiably proud of the creation he has produced. The location, which puts it at the forefront of Liverpool’s maritime cityscape combined with Meis’ eye-catching design of brickwork, sympathetic to its dockland surroundings, the contrast of the shimmering barrel roof plus an interior that features steep banks of seating in close proximity to the action all come together to make this the best football ground in the land.
It’s an honour and a privilege to watch the Blues play there or indeed attend any of the other major sporting events it has already hosted, including football, rugby league and rugby union internationals. Yet the man who now owns all of this, has never once set foot inside it and given how long he has now gone without doing so, it appears increasingly unlikely that he ever will.
Some 654 days have passed since The Friedkin Group completed their takeover of Everton from Farhad Moshiri and were handed the keys to the new stadium by construction contractors Laing O’Rourke. But chairman Dan Friedkin has never watched them play at Goodison Park, Hill Dickinson Stadium or anyway else – including a trio of fixtures last year when they took part in the Premier League Summer Series in his native USA.
When TFG purchased the Blues, there were fears at Roma, the other major European football club that they owned, that their new baby might start to get all the attention. After all, while the teams are of a similar stature within the game’s food chain, despite Serie A being the sport’s most lucrative destination for most of the second half of the 20th century, since the turn of the millennium, the Premier League has moved firmly ahead in the financial stakes.
But Everton’s ‘Cinderella’ story has so far lacked a fairytale ending and instead they’re still waiting to go to the ball while their parent continues to treat their ‘sibling’ in this football family very differently. By now, we’ve all surely seen those photographs of Friedkin senior laughing and joking with Roma coaching staff and players on multiple trips to their training ground.
Yet David Moyes revealed that the chairman has never even spoken to him. The Glaswegian gaffer steered the Blues to nine top-eight finishes, including their highest ever Premier League position of fourth during his first spell in charge but he is now in the final year of his current contract.
Having returned to the team he dubbed ‘The People’s Club’ back in 2002, Moyes is now older and wiser having picked up more Premier League points than anyone other than serial title-winning pair Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and Arsene Wenger at Arsenal. Believing himself to be a better all-round manager now, he still feels he has plenty more to offer.
But who makes the decision over his new deal? The man who has never uttered a word to him or attended an Everton match?
At times, Friedkin’s approach of being so close but yet so far feel like he has gone out of his way to avoid watching the Blues. Last October, he was playing golf in Scotland the day before Jack Grealish netted the first-ever stoppage time winner at Hill Dickinson Stadium as Everton completed a dramatic 2-1 comeback victory over Crystal Palace.
It was the chairman’s loss to miss out on that but instead he was en route to Rome where some of those aforementioned snaps were taken while the Eternal City hosted the European Football Clubs (ironically EFC) General Assembly, of which he is a member of the executive committee.
Having just come back from this year’s meeting in Copenhagen where he purred over Roma’s position at the top of the Serie A table and the green light finally being granted for a new billion-pound stadium, he’s now once again swinging his clubs with son Ryan at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship which has become something of an annual pilgrimage.
Also this week, Manchester City finally faced the music for disguising secret funding of more than £830million with “sham contracts” as well as “relying on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs.” They have now won 10 league titles – one more than Everton – but only two of these were collected in the 128 years before Abu Dhabi United Group came on board.
If there is any justice in the world, from 2027/28 onwards, there won’t be any Premier League football being played at what is currently called the Etihad Stadium for a long time, and based on the evidence that has been presented, the owners should also be removed from the sport.
The Blues aren’t exactly primed to take their place but with the £60million additional revenue that financial experts predicted Hill Dickinson Stadium would bring them, they are finally well-placed to capitalise on a potential opening if only they were given some proper investment and leadership strategy from above.
More fans than at any previous point in their history are now watching Everton on a regular basis in a stadium that Meis told me for the book has been created to produce “the ultimate home field advantage.” The past generation has been the Blues’ toughest – it’s surely no coincidence that their longest silverware drought corresponds with the period in which Goodison Park became no longer financially viable – but still only Liverpool and Manchester United can top their longevity of success when it comes to lifting major trophies across nine separate decades.
Everything is set up for the sleeping giant to be awoken but while the Friedkins have put Everton on a much surer financial footing, the club made a trading profit in the transfer market this summer, leaving Moyes with a squad of just 18 outfield players with a solitary striker, right-back and left-back and the owners appear reticent to even give it a nudge, which in terms of merely protecting their asset is a dangerous game.
Reports of a search for new investors will hardly fill loyal but long-suffering supporters with confidence either at a time that TFG explore bringing a potential NHL (ice hockey) franchise to Texas. Blues are grateful for being taken on by what seems to be a safe pair of hands, but it feels like they’re being ignored and in a distant second place when it comes to priorities – a position nobody wants to be in.
If only Mr Friedkin would open his heart like his namesake Mr Meis. As that Dan told the ECHO on Thursday when speaking on the Royal Blue podcast: “Never before had I come across a fanbase that was so clearly in ownership of the club, every bit, good and bad. I became infected by that, very early on it became clear I wasn’t just designing a building in Liverpool, I was designing a home for people who I now felt part of, like my family – it’s unique, without a doubt.”
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