Everton 2-0 Southampton (Ndiaye 6′, 45+2′)
GOODISON PARK — There She Goes. Goodison Park, as a stage for Premier League football, is no more.
As the stadium announcer declared moments before kick-off: “This is it, after 133 years and 2,790 matches, the end of an era.”
This has been the most nostalgic of times at this most nostalgic of clubs. And here was the last act. The match itself, No 2,791, was incidental though a first-half double from Iliman Ndiaye ensured a victorious farewell against relegated Southampton.
This was a celebration wrapped in sadness. Goodison will remain as the home of Everton Women from next season, but for David Moyes’s team, the future is at a new 52,888 home at Bramley-Moore Dock.
It's all getting a bit real now. 😢#EndOfAnEra pic.twitter.com/8qiKLifqwX
— Everton (@Everton) May 18, 2025
At 9.30am, the air was already thick with blue pyro smoke on Goodison Road. Fireworks flashed in the sky. Oxton Street, one of the terraced streets leading up to the Main Stand, was decked out with blue bunting.
“Goodbye and good luck: 1892-2025” read posters in windows. Indeed, with so many people packed onto Goodison Road, the team buses had to abandon their usual course and enter the ground via the Bullens Road entrance instead
This was a family coming together to say goodbye. At the Goodison Road foodbank, the offspring of Everton’s 1970 title-winning Holy Trinity, Simon Kendall, Jimmy Ball and Melanie Harvey, posed for a photo.
There, too, was Dave Kelly, a driving force behind the “Keep Everton In Our City” campaign which helped resist the club’s plans to move to a new home in Kirkby in the late 2000s. A stranger had just given Kelly two free tickets and the request to give them to a couple of his Fans Supporting Foodbanks volunteers.
Discussing what Goodison meant to him, Kelly remembered coming here in a wheelchair not long after breaking his back. Nothing would break his ritual. Similarly, it was that sense of ritual that brought me here on a dank day last October, two days after my mother’s passing, for a 1-1 draw with Fulham.
Goodison then was a place of refuge, its familiarity – after four and a half decades as a fan – bringing some faint comfort. There was deep emotion then, and the same applied Sunday. How could it be any other way with a dear old lady you love?
Everton's Senegalese striker #10 Iliman Ndiaye (L) celebrates scoring the team's second goal during the English Premier League football match between Everton and Southampton at Goodison Park in Liverpool, north west England on May 18, 2025, Everton's final premier league fixture played at the stadium, their home since 1892. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or 'live' services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No video emulation. Social media in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No use in betting publications, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Iliman Ndiaye bagged a brace to cap off a special day at the famous old ground (Photo: Getty)
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - MAY 18: Former Everton footballer Wayne Rooney acknowledges the fans following the Premier League match between Everton FC and Southampton FC at Goodison Park on May 18, 2025 in Liverpool, England. Goodison Park, home of Everton Football Club since August 24, 1892, will play host to its final Men's First Team fixture today ahead of the clubs move to the Hill Dickinson Stadium for the 2025/26 season. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Wayne Rooney was in attendance to watch his former side take on Southampton (Photo: Getty)
The stadium was packed to the rafters as supporters marked the end of an era (Photo: Getty)
Of course, this has been the longest of goodbyes. It was a year into Moyes’s first spell, in 2003, that a planned move to a new home at Kings Dock collapsed.
In the meantime, a stadium which once set firsts, which hosted a World Cup semi-final, suffered neglect. (That the only new stand built at Goodison in the entire Premier League era was the £2.7m single-tier Park End is testament to that.)
One thing never not lost, though, was the “collective vindictiveness” that Arthur Hopcraft cited as specific to Merseyside football crowds in his 1968 book The Football Man.
“You’re a tough bunch,” Ashley Young said in a farewell post on social media on the eve of this fixture. In an age when football stadiums are destinations and every match an experience, there was a magnificence to Goodison’s moodiness.
In the match programme, captain Seamus Coleman spoke about that “edge”, saying “something can spark the atmosphere, like a bad decision from the referee, and you feel that noise and hostility”.
Pat Nevin, in the press box, used the word “egalitarian” when telling me Goodison didn’t have a quiet part. Even the folk in the 12 executive boxes “aren’t posh”, he said, which would help explain the occasional cascade of cushions from the Main Stand in the 70s and early 80s.
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But this was not a day for Goodison groans – the only boos were for the police officers who filed around the perimeter of the pitch before the final whistle to deter any potential pitch invaders.
The match itself was settled by the dancing feet of Ndiaye, scorer of two first-half goals – one either side of a couple of disallowed Beto strikes. The way Abdoulaye Doucoure waved to the crowd on his substitution midway through the second half suggested he may not be staying – and his survival-securing winner against Bournemouth on a Sunday in May two years ago was surely Goodison’s most important goal of the last decade.
In the stands, there was a blue scarf emblazoned with “Goodison Park” on every seat. The Gwladys Street led the songs for favourites of old – including the late Kevin Campbell – as well as to Coleman, whose inclusion as skipper for his first start since Boxing Day was a sentimental gesture from Moyes to the man he bought from Sligo Rovers for £60,000 in 2009 (albeit he lasted barely 20 minutes).
Then came the post-match party. Video messages from figures ranging from Carlo Ancelotti to Sylvester Stallone were the prelude to a parade of old boys on the Goodison pitch – favourites from the 1960s through to 21st century icons like Tim Cahill and Duncan Ferguson. For them the day had begun with a champagne breakfast at the Titanic Hotel, a long throw from Everton’s new home on the docks.
Sunday, though, was about one place only, the club’s home for the last 133 years. As 1980s hero Andy Gray told the crowd: “We may all be leaving Goodison Park, but Goodison will never leave us.”