A NEW BLUE DAWN
Everton plans may put rivals in shade but where is the money coming from?
EVEN amid the euphoria of their last win at Anfield, 19 long years ago, Everton were staring into a deeply uncertain future.
Kevin Campbell’s goal saw them win 1-0, though the reality of the task that manager Walter Smith had taken on was beginning to bite. The cash he was promised never materialised, owner Peter Johnson put the club up for sale and the bank insisted that players must be sold. Smith started that season with 38-year-old and 39-year-old centre halves, Dave Watson and Richard Gough. ‘If anybody thinks that was through choice…’ Smith reflected later. ‘It wasn’t their choice either.’
The club’s latest venture back to Anfield today is accompanied by greater commercial optimism than perhaps at any time in the modern era. The gulf with Liverpool remains daunting, of course — £199million annual revenues compared with the old enemy’s £424.2m. But the days of modest financial deliverance by Bill Kenwright, when short-term loans from opaque off-shore financial organisations in the British Virgin Islands kept the cash flow moving, do seem to belong in the past.
The club’s latest accounts are due to be published any day now, though the last set revealed that new majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri had sunk £150m into the club. The Morocco-based Iranian does not appear either to want the money back or to be asking for interest on it.
The only financial mystery resides in how much his close friend Alisher Usmanov, the Russian who sold his shares in Arsenal in August, is chipping in. The Russian’s USM Holdings already has a naming rights deal at Everton’s training ground, Finch Farm. But new perimeter advertising promoting another of his companies, Megafon, at the home game with Cardiff last weekend, prompted speculation that Usmanov had increased his investment. Everton rejected that suggestion this week. But Usmanov’s sponsorship of Finch Farm was a key part of the 31 per cent increase in revenue which saw Everton break into the top 20 of the Deloitte Money League this year.
Deloitte observed that until Everton built a new stadium, modest match-day revenues would limit the club’s potential to make it much further up the Money League of European clubs, in which Liverpool sit ninth. But that landscape is also changing. Everton will tomorrow conclude two weeks of public consultation on plans to build a £300m-plus stadium on the banks of the Mersey at Bramley Moore Dock. The capital is expected to be provided by a combination of Liverpool City Council, financial institutions or the club’s major shareholders, such as Moshiri.
‘We don’t anticipate the club having any problem raising the money,’ says John Blain, chairman of the Everton Shareholders’ Association and co-host of the influential Everton Business Matters podcast.
The stadium will bring potential for naming rights income and hospitality way beyond Goodison Park’s constraints. But American architect Dan Meis has promised to deliver a signature design, reflecting the heritage of the docks.
Beyond the match-day and commercial revenues, there seems to be potential to create a perception change, where Everton are concerned. They are likely to become the centrepiece of something spectacular in central Liverpool.
The club have already located their HQ to the iconic Liver Building, where Moshiri has become a
co-owner. Liverpool, who rejected plans for a groundshare with Everton at another waterfront site, Kings Dock, could find themselves more hemmed in than Everton. The commercial attractions of the Anfield district are far less substantial by comparison.
Everton’s new world is not imminent. A planning application for a new stadium will not be tabled until next year and it may be 2023 before it is built. And it also remains to be seen how ambitious the club are about stadium capacity.
Some think they will settle for between 52,000 and 55,000. Others want the club to have bigger ambitions. West Ham are about to expand their London Stadium capacity to 66,000. ‘Views differ but we believe we should aspire to a top six capacity,’ says Bain. ‘Our peer group has a 68,000 capacity average attendance.’
With the bumpy Sam Allardyce period behind them and the burgeoning relationship between Marco Silva and director of football Marcel Brands beginning to bear fruit, Everton can at least travel across Stanley Park with optimism. A rare good performance at Anfield would help tide them over while they wait for their stadium.
Nearly two decades without a victory there is humiliating.