Everton need new vision to get back on the right side of history
Allardyce takes his struggling side to Anfield with the club at a watershed. Is the Spurs model the way forward for a club who have slid backwards for the last 30 years?
The only derby goal Wayne Rooney has scored at Anfield was more than 21 years ago: an audacious lob over the head of Neville Southall when the boy-prodigy had been invited, as Everton’s 10-year-old match-day mascot, to hit a few gentle shots at the goalkeeper before kick-off.
The story was told by Rooney himself, in the first volume of his memoirs published in 2006, when he was just 20 years old but a literary property hot enough to command upwards of 300 pages of school reports and teenage indiscretions. “What I did was chip Neville Southall from outside the penalty area,” Rooney recalled. “I’d been practising all week, knowing what I was going to do, just to be different. But Neville wasn’t at all amused and, I think, called me a flash b------.”
Rooney returns to Anfield today in an Everton shirt for the first time since Jan 31, 2004, and it would be right to say that he has not missed much in the interim when it comes to his childhood club’s derby record. They have lost eight and drawn five of their league fixtures at Anfield since then, an utterly dismal record, marginally improved by four cup and league derby wins in that period at Goodison Park. To put it in perspective: Queens Park Rangers have won more games against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the 21st century than Everton have at Anfield. There is always one club in every big-city rivalry who measure their success relative to the other, and on Merseyside that club have been Everton for decades. They won their first league title before Liverpool FC even existed, and when they won their seventh, in 1970, eight decades on, it put them level with their neighbours. By the time Everton won their ninth and most recent league championship, in 1987, Liverpool had 16 and would win two more in the next three years.
Of course, there have been no more league titles for Liverpool in the 27 years since 1990 but there have been nine major domestic and European trophies compared to one FA Cup for Everton, and as they go into today’s derby it will be hard for them not to look at the bigger picture. The Farhad Moshiri revolution has delivered them one false start in Ronald Koeman and what is statistically the Premier League’s least original back-up plan, with all respect to Sam Allardyce and his record seven top-flight club jobs.
What happened along the way to Everton? They are the big club most consistently on the wrong side of the historical details that make the difference, right back to 1892 when they left Anfield over the rent and built a stadium hemmed in by houses, a school and church. They were denied their own run at the European Cup by the Heysel ban which might have given them the global footprint that is the golden legacy of Liverpool and United. If the legend is correct, Sheikh Mansour bought Manchester City over Everton in 2008 because the former had a new stadium.
As for the attempt at the correction, it is hard to tell how much Moshiri’s funds, or even Alisher Usmanov’s money, if that is the way it goes in the future, will be able to transform Everton. It used to be the case that £100million could turn you into a Champions League club, but now you probably need £500million for a seat at that table. There is a new stadium to finance at Bramley Moore dock, the kind of project neither Chelsea nor City attempted in their empirebuilding days.
There are at least a dozen other European teams that want the best players in the world, too, and last summer Everton were still a selling club – losing their best player to Manchester United, just as they had done in 2004. If there is a way out for Everton then it is surely the Tottenham Hotspur model, a club whose modern progress has been built on developing young players along with astute investment and the serendipitous appointment of a manager who can deliver value way above his wages budget.
Moshiri might not be able to buy every player his ambitious plans demand, but he should be able to keep those Everton develop themselves. Before the Abu Dhabi transformation, for instance, City were like any other preyed-upon club and the day in July 2005 when Shaun Wright-Phillips became a £21million squad player at Chelsea was a sobering reminder of their then powerlessness. In those days, every club was one that either bought other teams’ best players or sold their own, but Spurs have shown a third way, a robustness that you can keep good players for longer.
That is a way of building, and while it lacks the more instantaneous impact of Chelsea, and then City’s breakthrough to win Premier League titles, it is at least a step forward.
Everton are coming from a long way back in what they hope will be a new era: the years of inertia over a new stadium and the debilitating sales of leading players. It had become so ingrained that, even in the Moshiri era, there was no persuading Romelu Lukaku to stay any more than Everton could Rooney 13 years earlier. The last Everton derby team in which Rooney played in January 2004 was still a side with one foot in the old game: only four non-British and Irish players in a squad of 16 up against a much more cosmopolitan Liverpool side six months from the arrival of the radical moderniser, Rafael Benitez.
Since then, people say Everton have punched above their weight, relative to their resources. But this is a club with nine league championships, behind only United, Liverpool and Arsenal, who cannot afford to make decisions any longer that put themselves on the wrong side of history.
They were denied their own run at the European Cup by the Heysel ban