Goodison Park awaits tomorrow, a first visit of the new season. It should be the lousiest of places for a working journalist — the legroom in the press box would shame a budget airline, while a pillar blocks the view to the goal at the Gwladys Street End — but somehow it remains a thrill.
It is one of those grounds, so rare in the era of the homogenised matchday experience, that still has atmosphere inside and out. It has soul. Walking down Goodison Road, the Dixie Dean statue at one end, St Luke’s Church at the other, you are struck not just by the smell of fish and chips, from Lucky’s Blue Dragon, or ale, from the Winslow Hotel, but by the intoxicating whiff of history, mapped out by the photographs that chart Everton’s existence — 135 years and counting.
One by one, English football’s old cathedrals are disappearing. Ayresome Park, Burnden Park, the Baseball Ground, the Victoria Ground, Roker Park, The Dell, Maine Road and others have been bulldozed to make way for housing developments, often with barely a nod to the monuments that stood there before. Highbury, at least, has been tastefully preserved, with apartments built into its art deco stands, but Upton Park will be vacated next year, White Hart Lane will be entirely redeveloped and in time Stamford Bridge, the City Ground and perhaps even Goodison might go too.
There is something terribly sad about this characterisation of Goodison and, by extension, Everton, once one of the great aristocrats of English football, as some kind of crumbling relic. We lament so much that is distasteful about the sport these days — the growing number of ignorant, uncaring, carpet-bagging owners, the detachment of clubs from their communities, the avarice that sees owners regard brand-exploitation and money-making not as a means to an end but as an end it in itself — then we see a proud old club lambasted for being weighed down, supposedly, by the twin millstones of local ownership and an old stadium with little scope for redevelopment.
Unless they can maintain an extraordinary show of defiance, Everton will end up selling John Stones, the young England defender, to Chelsea between now and September 2. Unless something has changed since the days when they sold Wayne Rooney, Joleon Lescott and Marouane Fellaini, Everton can repel the advances of the richest clubs only until a certain valuation is reached.
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The same depressing principle applies to all but a handful of clubs in world football these days, when, in the most recent accounts, Manchester United earned £129 million more than Arsenal, who earned £48 million more than Liverpool, who earned £75 million more than Tottenham Hotspur, who earned £60 million more than Everton.
Those figures reflect the wretched inequalities of the football business as it has evolved since those five clubs, the “Big Five” as they were at that time, led the breakaway to form the Premier League in the early 1990s. If that new era has been unkind to Liverpool and Tottenham — with Chelsea and Manchester City, with wealth from Russia and Abu Dhabi, spending their way towards the top of a new elite — it has been far crueller to Everton and, for example, to Aston Villa, to say nothing of clubs such as Leeds United, Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday, languishing in the Championship, yet to recover from the calamitous mistakes they made about the turn of the century.
Some Everton supporters resent the Bill Kenwright regime. They look, for example, at what Chelsea and City have become and ask why those clubs won the lottery and Everton, with a richer history, did not. They lament not just the bigger capacities but the better corporate facilities at other grounds — even at a similarly landlocked Anfield, which, even before the new Main Stand expansion, generated £51 million in matchday revenue to Goodison’s £19 million in 2013-14. They look at Everton’s commercial activity and they ask why their sponsorship deals (Kitbag, Crabbies, Flannels, EZTrader and Stubhub, an exchange company that allows fans to fleece each other by trying to sell tickets far beyond face value) seem so parochial compared to the global companies lining up to associate themselves with United, Liverpool and others.
These are legitimate gripes; something has gone wrong, dating way back to the 1990s, if Everton’s commercial income is lower than West Ham United’s and four and a half times lower than Tottenham’s. Goodison is severely restrictive, though the Kenwright regime cannot be accused of sacrificing Everton’s dreams at the altar of sentimentality. Soon after buying the club in 1999, they set their sights on a new home at King’s Dock, but failed to raise enough cash to remain preferred bidders. That remains Everton’s great missed opportunity — it seemed the perfect location — but even since then there have been attempts to move to new sites in Kirkby (too cheap and cheerless, involving a tie-in with Tesco and thrown out by the government) and, more appealingly, but still tentatively, at Walton Hall Park, less than a mile from Goodison.
It is clear that something must change if Everton are to remain a club who look upwards — as they always have done in the Kenwright years, albeit never quite through the glass ceiling, while developing their own players and playing the transfer market shrewdly under the astute management of David Moyes and now Roberto Martínez — rather than anxiously over their shoulders.
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What will that change be, though? New ownership? It is wildly overrated. For every Sheikh Mansour (desperate to build a club, even if the motives remain questionable), there is a Fenway Sports Group, a Randy Lerner, a Mike Ashley and an Ellis Short (unashamedly in it for profit, not to strive for excellence) and a Massimo Cellino, a Tony Fernandes, a Fawaz Al-Hasawi and a Vincent Tan (well intentioned in a couple of those cases, but dangerously misguided when it comes to football).
Everton’s supporters, more than most, like to regard themselves and their club as special. “We are chosen,” goes the slogan on the club’s quite brilliant season-ticket advert (which they really could do with pitching to potential commercial partners rather than preaching to the converted). “We are born, not manufactured.” That might sound self-righteous, but it speaks of an authenticity and — that word again — soul that is increasingly rare at a time when, even across Stanley Park, Liverpool fans lament how the atmosphere at Anfield is being sanitised by the club’s eagerness to attract a different demographic.
Football’s landscape has changed. Everton have not. They are one of precious few clubs who remain under local ownership, playing in a ground that reverberates with history. Is that a curse or a blessing? No doubt there are times when it is a cause of immense frustration, but, in other ways, it is a virtue. It is certainly part of what makes the club unique. Would Everton retain that uniqueness under overseas ownership or in a different ground or with a renewed focus on money-making? It rarely seems to work out that way, which is one reason why Goodison Park, cramped press box and all, remains an exceptional place to visit.