The Friedkin Group and David Moyes
The Friedkin Group and David Moyes
The answer to whether The Friedkin Group’s time at Everton has been a success is clearly complicated. If success means taking a club weighed down by expensive debt, completing the stadium transition and putting Everton back on a more stable financial footing, then TFG have a strong case.
TFG put Everton up for sale having not finished the job. They may, however, have built the foundations for the future. Perhaps the fact that Everton is a sellable football club is their biggest success?
Like all football fans, Evertonians don’t dream about refinance packages and loan structures. They want statement signings, European nights and signs of ambition. The reality was less glamorous but it is a platform Everton badly needed and TFG feel pride for their time at Everton.
Everton’s 2025 accounts showed a comprehensive financial reset. Existing borrowings were repaid, £450.7m of shareholder loans were converted into equity and the club secured a £350m long-term stadium financing package repayable over 30 years.
Dan Friedkin
Dan Friedkin
Under TFG, Everton gained breathing space. The accounts also showed net assets rising to £393.3m, a significant improvement on the previous year.
Everton fans won’t want to hear this, but stability had to come before ambition and for that the club does owe thanks. BUT….
Why Everton fans will be happy to see the back of The Friedkin Group
The big problem with modern football now is that it regularly eats itself. Billions of pounds are spent every year just to stand still. Football is a working-class sport, Liverpool is a working-class city, we pay well above the odds to follow our club, so we have little time for billionaire owners and football clubs pleading poverty. Especially when these owners who make these decisions are given the green light by the same league that dishes out punishments.
Fans don’t see the balance sheets behind the scenes, they see player signings and the squad performances. Everton supporters accepted that the club needed repair. They understood that years of mismanagement could not be fixed in one transfer window. But after the move to Hill Dickinson Stadium and the refinancing work behind the scenes, many fans expected the summer to show a clear step forward.
What it actually did was fuel the whispers amongst the fanbase that they had bigger priorities than Everton Football Club, most notably AS Roma, who spent nearly €125m. This sale confirms those concerns.
David Moyes was left disappointed with a squad of just 18 players with a single fit striker, on left-back and one right-back. In September, he said: “We’ve not got European football this year, so maybe we can find a way of getting through with what we’ve got at the moment?
“I do think sometimes having a tight group can work. I’m not saying it will and if I had my choice I’d have more numbers obviously, but I certainly wasn’t somebody who needed 24 or 25 outfield players, it wasn’t that I was looking for.”
Pocketing more than £100m just fanned the flames of asset stripping claims. The proposed sale of academy midfielder Harrison Armstrong also struck a nerve. For fans, selling young homegrown talent while failing to land the right reinforcements felt like a kick in the teeth.
Perhaps this is the right time to close the door on the TFG era and bring in somebody who is here for the long haul. Maybe in years to come TFG will be remembered as the group who did the dirty work required to allow the next guardians of Everton to lead a successful period in the club’s history.
READ MORE: Multi-billionaire has already admitted he’d love to own Everton as club put up for sale by TFG
But whoever that is will need to answer one question. The infrastructure is there to complete at the top end of the Premier League. What else is left to invest in if it isn’t the playing squad?