The accounts of Everton's parent company provided fresh details of the December 2024 sale of the club from Farhad Moshiri to The Friedkin Group
Farhad Moshiri, former majority owner and board member of Everton, during the pre-season friendly match between Everton Legends and AS Roma Legends at Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images
Farhad Moshiri, former majority owner and board member of Everton, during the pre-season friendly match between Everton Legends and AS Roma Legends at Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images
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Farhad Moshiri received an upfront fee of £25m for the sale of Everton, newly released documents show.
The former Blues owner, now a regular attendee of home games since selling the club, is also due future payments to the value of £42.3m. In total, he will therefore receive just shy of £68m from the deal.
With The Friedkin Group also clearing just over £250m of debt in their December 2024 takeover, the US outfit essentially bought the club for a figure of £331m once other costs were taken into account.
The figures, until now shrouded in secrecy, have come to light through the publication of the accounts for Roundhouse Capital Holdings, the parent group through which the Friedkins control Everton Football Club, for the 2024/25 financial year.
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With the takeover having been completed on December 18, 2024, the accounts provide a glimpse of a transaction that brought much-needed stability to a football club that had fought through chaos on and off the pitch through the previous years as Moshiri sought an exit route.
The biggest indication of the problems that undermined any quest for stability falls on the penultimate page of the 50-page document, where reference is made to a “goodwill” figure of £473m within the calculations used to value the club and its assets at the time of the sale.
That figure meant TFG picked up the club for considerably less than the value of its assets and was essentially a formal recognition of the wider debt being taken on by the group - and that they were taking on a business that was making significant losses that, even in the best case scenario, would take several years to correct.
That was evident in the club accounts released two weeks ago. Covering the first six months of TFG’s reign, they showed the new owners inherited a club that would have lost almost £60m that year had it not been for the one-off, internal sale of Everton Women for £49m.
Work to improve that picture is well underway, helped by the move into Hill Dickinson Stadium and the associated commercial benefits.
The Roundhouse and Everton accounts confirmed that £450m of interest-free shareholder loans owed by the club to Moshiri were converted into equity as part of the sale, removing a significant concern from the balance sheet as well as solving a potential regulatory headache ahead of new rules about how such loans were to be treated under Premier League spending conditions.
When taking on Everton, TFG paid off existing lenders and restructured the club debt on more favourable terms with JP Morgan Chase, with whom they entered a 30-year, £350m funding package in order to cover payments for the new stadium.
TFG also has a separate five-year credit facility of £130m with the same bank to meet "working capital needs of the club."