Just after 2pm on Saturday afternoon, just as Goodison Park’s grizzled veterans are settling their nerves in the Winslow Hotel, they will be presented with the sight of 400 Everton fans emerging on to Goodison Road, bearing banners and bellowing slogans, on a long, slow march to the ground’s Directors’ Entrance. Once there, the 400 will call for chairman Bill Kenwright, and his board, to go.
To those elder statesmen stiffening their sinews, shielded from the sunlight by the stained glass windows of the Winslow, it will be an alien sight. It is across Stanley Park that fans protest and agitate and call for change, fuelled by a sense of entitlement to success. Not here. This is the People’s Club.
That, though, is the extent of the crisis which has quietly gripped Goodison Park for almost a decade. It has spread beyond simply the financial – how much can they pay, how much can they spend – or the aspirational – where can they finish, what can they win – and into something more serious. This is now a place which has lost its identity, seen a rift driven between People and Club. The crisis is existential.
The Blue Union, the supporters’ group who have called and organised Saturday’s demonstration, insist they stand squarely behind the team and its manager, David Moyes. “Come 3pm, we want Goodison Park rocking,” says Joe Jennings, the group’s spokesman. “Our message is clear. We support the team. We oppose the club’s stagnation.”
That is the paradox. They support the team, but in their undiluted love must attack the club. “It is not a personal issue against the board,” explains Jennings. “We just want the club to be run by someone whose business plan is not simply to cross their fingers and hope for the best. The general consensus is that it is time for change. Some people are happy to tread water. That goes against the club’s motto, Nothing But The Best. We simply want proper Everton values restored.”
Here, another paradox. Everton’s image as the plucky underdogs has been polished and crafted in the Kenwright years; it has become the club’s selling point. They are the standard bearers for the little man, thanks to Moyes’s remarkable success at keeping pace with the Premier League’s princes on a pauper’s budget.
“We have done that using very little cash, wheeling and dealing, selling one biggie and trying to regenerate the cash, keeping it all going,” says the Scot. “In [my] 10 years [in charge], does anyone think Everton could have done better than we have done? I would say probably not.
“In the 10 years I have been here, we have finished in the top 10 seven times. Now if people actually think that Everton should be doing much better than that, then they need to be looking at things. Those positions at the minute for Everton are terrific. If you put it in to perspective, what we have had over the last 10 years has not been outrageously bad.”
Few would disagree. And yet it is worth pointing out at this juncture that Everton are England’s fourth most successful club. When the Premier League started, in 1992, they had won more league titles than Manchester United. Financially, Everton are brave underdogs. Judge them by history, and they are fallen titans. And that, to Jennings, is rather the point.
“I despise that perception,” he says. “Plucky little Everton. That is something that has been invented in the Kenwright era. It sounds odd now but we are one of the sleeping giants not just of this country but of Europe.”
No wonder there is a crisis of identity at Goodison Park. This is a club which has invented a new skin for itself, and found that it does not quite fit. This is a club where, as Moyes admitted yesterday, he is more than just a football manager: “Part of my job is to run a business as well. I have to be a businessman.”
It is a club where, when grilled by a public enquiry into the second proposed move away from Goodison Park two years ago, chief executive Robert Elstone denied Everton were for sale on public record. “Everton Football Club is for sale, despite accusations to the contrary,” Elstone wrote on the club’s official site this week. “This has been the case for three years and will remain the case.”
It is a club which has a chairman whose love for his team has never been in question, but knows it must sacrifice itself on the altar of imported wealth if it is to compete. “Someone summed it up by saying he is living his dream, but ruining ours,” according to Jennings. “There is a lot of romanticism about having a blue in charge, but if we had owners with a plan, who knows what we could achieve.”
Everton is the football club all of those sides – Portsmouth, Birmingham, Newcastle, even – wish they could be, punching above their financial weight, run by a man who used to stand on the terraces, rather than regretting their dances with wolves.
Today’s opponents will look at the protest outside Goodison Park with interest. Aston Villa used to want rid of an owner, too. It worked, eventually, and Doug Ellis was swept from power by Randy Lerner. He seemed the perfect fit. He lovingly restored the stained glass windows at Villa Park, rebuilt the Holte pub. He offered Martin O’Neill money to spend.
This summer, Aston Villa lost Ashley Young and Stewart Downing. “Young accepted he could not win anything with us,” says Jonathan Fear, editor of Vital Villa. “We thought the days of seeing our best players leave were over when Randy took over, but there is only so much he can do. I’d be frustrated if I was him, seeing his attempts to do things the right way rendered useless by silly money spending at Chelsea and Manchester City.”
Villa are one of those clubs held up by Everton as an example of what could be achieved should Kenwright step aside, finally find a buyer, stop suffocating his club with his love. “We do not want a Sheikh,” says Jennings. “We don’t want the club to spend money they do not have. We just know the garden is not always rosy.” The grass, Villa might comment, is not always greener, either.
ENDS
