In the House of Lords, Lord Barry Jones felt it was time to plead for divine intervention.
Looking across the chamber, the 83-year-old peer asked one of the bishops on the opposite bench whether he might “use his considerable influence to persuade the Lords Spiritual to pray hard for my own team, Everton Football Club”. Everton, he explained, are “in trouble and may go down to a hotter place”.
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There was laughter, as there invariably is when football allegiances are raised in the Palace of Westminster, and then came an awkwardly earnest response about how the prayers of the Lords Spiritual would be “ecumenically directed” — which seemed like a polite way of saying it would not be ethical to pray for Everton at the expense of, say, Burnley. Yep, fair point.
Essentially, then, Lord Jones’ plea was no more successful than Everton’s latest submission to Professional Game Match Officials Ltd, asking why they were not awarded at least one penalty during their 2-0 defeat by Liverpool in Sunday’s Merseyside derby.
Sometimes, PGMOL will concede that a mistake was made, such as the Rodri handball that was missed during Everton’s 1-0 loss to Manchester City in February, but it cannot change the past and it cannot change the future. Even if it can feel otherwise when events are conspiring against a team in the tightening, terrifying grip of a relegation battle, only Everton can save themselves now.
That is how it has generally transpired during those years when Everton have flirted with the threat of relegation from the Premier League. At times they have looked ready to succumb to that cold, unforgiving embrace, but they always managed to find a way out: most famously on the final day of the 1993-94 season when they looked doomed, 2-0 down at home to Wimbledon, only to win 3-2 and stay up by the skin of their teeth (at Sheffield United’s expense) thanks to a brace from Graham Stuart and the goal of a lifetime from Barry Horne. Four years later, Gareth Farrelly’s strike earned Everton a nerve-fraught 1-1 draw with Coventry City, sending Bolton Wanderers down instead on goal difference.
On other occasions, intervention has come earlier via a change of manager (the timely appointments of Joe Royle in 1994-95, David Moyes in 2001-02 and Carlo Ancelotti in 2019-20) or an inspired new signing, such as Kevin Campbell in 1998-99. Even in their most trying seasons, Everton have always ended up finding just about enough inspiration, from somewhere, to save themselves.
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They will hope for something similar over the next month and, even if the January transfer window looks like yet another wasted opportunity, there have been moments — Alex Iwobi’s stoppage-time winner against Newcastle United, the backs-to-the-wall operation to secure a 1-0 victory over an admittedly feeble Manchester United, even Richarlison’s last-gasp equaliser against Leicester City last week — when it has felt as if Frank Lampard has instilled at least some of the spirit and purpose that disappeared from Everton’s game in the final months under short-lived predecessor Rafa Benitez.
But, as Lord Jones quite rightly put it, Everton are in trouble. Real trouble. For weeks, it seemed they could be saved by others’ shortcomings, but Brentford have found a second wind, Leeds United have been re-energised by Jesse Marsch and Burnley, having gambled by sacking Sean Dyche, seem to be enjoying the same kind of bounce. Suddenly, Everton are in the bottom three, two points behind Burnley and five adrift of Leeds, albeit with a game in hand on both.
Jamie Carragher asked on Sky Sports on Sunday whether Everton were at risk of becoming the biggest club to be relegated in the Premier League era. Graeme Souness, sitting alongside him, suggested Newcastle and some would propose Aston Villa or, in terms of a swift fall from grace, Blackburn Rovers (in 1999, four years after their title success) or Leeds (in 2004, three years after reaching a Champions League semi-final), but the case for Everton — or rather the case against Everton, given the context — is a compelling one.
Everton have been a top-flight club since 1954. Indeed, they have been a top-flight club for all but four seasons since being one of the founding members of the Football League in 1888. When they won their ninth league championship in 1987, only one club (yes, the one across Stanley Park) had won more.
If anything, it is probably an understatement to say they were one of the “Big Five” clubs behind the launch of the Premier League in 1992; few of the chairmen involved pushed harder than their Sir Philip Carter, who said that clubs of Everton’s considerable standing, prestige and appeal deserved a greater share of the revenue the game generated rather than having to “subsidise clubs in the lower divisions”.
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English football’s ruling elite has morphed over the past three decades, largely due to the impact of ownership changes at Chelsea and Manchester City, but none of the original “Big Five” (Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham) have ever been relegated. In fact, other than a real scare for Tottenham in 1998, only Everton have come close. As for trophies, Everton have only won one, the FA Cup in 1995, since the Merseyside duopoly of the mid-1980s.
It is tempting to say Everton have been left behind by the Premier League era, losing out to clubs who found their feet (or a mega-rich benefactor) at a time when success and income started to become self-perpetuating for those at the top. But it is not as simple as that.
Everton’s decline had actually set in earlier. Their fans will always wonder what might have happened had Howard Kendall’s great team of the mid-1980s been allowed to compete in the European Cup rather than miss out due to the ban imposed on English clubs after the Heysel Stadium disaster. Kendall was lured to Spain by Athletic Bilbao and decline — gradual decline — set in.
After winning the league twice on a shoestring budget under Kendall, Everton broke the British transfer record in the summer of 1988 to sign Tony Cottee for £2.2 million, only to finish eighth.
In the title-winning campaign of 1986-87, their average league attendance was 32,935 (the third highest in the top flight). By 1992-93, the inaugural season of the Premier League, it had dropped to 20,457, the sixth consecutive year it had fallen — and this over a period when crowds elsewhere were beginning to pick up from the dark days of the ’80s.
Without question, though, the 1990s were a decade of regression for Everton at a time when the game’s new elite began to take shape.
Peter Johnson was a multi-millionaire chairman who pledged to rival the big-spending owners at clubs such as Blackburn, Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Leeds, never mind the established elite, but instead his regime brought stagnation and rancour. His previous allegiance to Liverpool didn’t help him in the popularity stakes, but the reality is that the FA Cup final success of 1995 was a blip in a decade of decline. Both on the pitch and off it, Everton had lost their way.
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To a large degree, though, they recovered. Under the ownership of Bill Kenwright and particularly the astute management of Moyes, the club stabilised and progressed in the 2000s. But by now, that modern elite was beginning to ossify, helped by consistent access to Champions League revenue, the huge and growing global exposure that came with it and, of course, the ability to make vast sums through capacity crowds and corporate facilities of a type incompatible with the confines of Goodison Park.
Between 2002-03, Moyes’s first full campaign, and 2013-14, the season after he left for Manchester United, Everton finished in the top eight of the Premier League 10 times out of 12 (and the top five on four occasions) but could never quite overcome the Champions League elite. Nor could anyone else at that time, unless they had a sheikh willing to bankroll the club. Some saw it as a lack of ambition from Kenwright or a reflection of Moyes’ limitations (or both), but most saw it for what it was: a well-managed team frustrated by a financial model that served to entrench the new establishment and, looking at the bigger picture, a historic club falling victim to the elitist attitudes they had helped to create.
Moyes often wondered aloud what he and his players might achieve if Everton had the resources of others. But so much talk about new ownership or a new stadium — or both — came to nothing and, as the years went by, it was possible to wonder whether being “the best of the rest” suited Everton more than anyone dared to admit.
Of course their fans wanted more, longing to be part of the big time again, but this was a time when making the great leap forward in English football seemed to require a certain trade-off in terms of ownership — the richest owners always coming with certain entanglements — and commercialisation. Everton were a throwback, owned by a local boy done good, with a hard-working team playing honest football in an atmospheric stadium, which admittedly had seen much better days. For all their supporters’ frustrations, Everton retained an identity and a sense of soul that others appeared to have lost somewhere along the way.
Then, in 2016, along came Farhad Moshiri, a wealthy Iranian businessman who said he had the money and the ambition to make Evertonian dreams come true. Kenwright had spent years grilling prospective investors, cautious about selling what he called “the family silver”, but Moshiri won him over with, he said, “his football knowledge, financial wherewithal and ‘True Blue’ spirit.”
Football knowledge? Moshiri has shown terrifyingly little of that over the subsequent six years, in which Everton, in stark contrast to the Moyes years, have become synonymous with wild, ill-judged excesses in the transfer market and a lack of hard work and unity on the pitch. As Moshiri has leapt from Roberto Martinez to Ronald Koeman to Sam Allardyce to Marco Silva to Ancelotti to Benitez to Lampard, the lack of a clear, consistent football vision, in terms of both recruitment and playing style, has been bewildering. Embarrassing, even.
In other ways, Moshiri has gone far beyond the call of duty.
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In the five years to June 2021, he was reported to have invested more than £450 million in Everton via shareholder loans and share issues. This January, he announced the conversion of a £100 million loan into equity. After nearly two decades of Everton stadium ventures that never got beyond the drawing board, Moshiri quickly embraced plans for a new 52,000-capacity home at Bramley-Moore Dock. Construction started last August and is scheduled to be complete by the summer of 2024. Even those staff members exasperated by his impulsive football decisions applaud his ongoing commitment to the cause.
There are so many unanswered questions, though.
What is in it for Moshiri? Just how significant, in terms of influence behind the scenes, was his business partner Alisher Usmanov, one of the Russian oligarchs who have been sanctioned by the UK government following the invasion of Ukraine? How serious is the shortfall in commercial revenue now that deals with Usmanov’s various companies have been suspended? Are the Premier League really going to look sympathetically upon Everton’s estimated £255 million losses over the previous three-year period (when, under its profit and sustainability regulations, a maximum combined loss of £105 million was permitted)? The club insist they are in a “secure financial position”, but, given all of these issues, just how disastrous would relegation be?
Everton hope to persuade the Premier League that a colossal £170 million of their losses over the past two financial years can be attributed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond that, investments in infrastructure (notably £59 million spent on the new stadium) can be deducted from the losses in the financial fair play calculations. Despite all that seemingly reckless spending, with gross spend under Moshiri’s ownership in excess of £600 million (more than £320 million net) and with last season’s wages equating to 88.6 per cent of turnover, they hope to avoid sanctions from the Premier League.
It is almost unfathomable that a club can spend on the scale Everton have done — and this with the help of one or two sponsorship deals that had been frowned upon by rival clubs even before Usmamov was sanctioned by the UK government — yet find themselves at risk of relegation.
It might be different if this was a club that had been run as poorly as Newcastle were under Mike Ashley’s ownership. But pre-Moshiri, Everton were a solid, stable Premier League club that just needed sensible investment and, yes, a solution to the stadium issue.
They were certainly in a stronger position than Newcastle were when bought by a Saudi-led consortium last October, but the surge in optimism on Tyneside over the months since arguably exceeds anything felt by Everton’s supporters over the past six years. Newcastle spent £95 million in January, but it looked more measured and calculated than just about any Everton transfer window under Moshiri, who has repeatedly been seduced by big-name players and big-name coaches with impressive CVs (and persuasive agents) and, in many cases, their best years behind them.
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Newcastle went for Eddie Howe, a manager Everton had repeatedly passed over (most recently last summer) amid concerns that he lacked charisma and big-club experience. The fact Howe was a boyhood Evertonian should be neither here nor there, but, along with the way he has approached the challenge of invigorating Newcastle, that minor details adds to the sense of another open goal missed while Moshiri was starstruck by players and coaches who had fallen off the Champions League carousel.
Everton’s playing squad was not as strong in 2016 as it had been when Moyes left for Old Trafford three years earlier, but it was a mid-table squad which, with new money invested sensibly, could feasibly have threatened the more vulnerable among the Big Six, push for European qualification and challenge in the cups. And yet a distant seventh place under Koeman in 2016-17 remains their best finish under Moshiri’s ownership. Since then? Eighth, eighth, 12th, 10th, and whatever fate awaits them at the end of this sorry campaign.
Everton have lost eight of their 12 Premier League games under Lampard. Ten points from 12 games (three wins, one draw, eight defeats) sounds undeniably grim for a team in a relegation battle. But before that, it was six points (one win, three draws, 10 defeats) from the previous 14.
Benitez told Alan Shearer in The Athletic this weekend that he had just needed Everton’s board and supporters to be patient and that, “I’m still convinced … we could have made it better.”
It is not easy to buy that. Yes, they were 15th when they sacked Benitez in January, six points clear of the relegation zone, but performances and results had deteriorated at an alarming rate. So too had the mood around the whole club. Benitez’s successes at previous clubs are rightly lauded, but he never seemed the right fit for Everton.
Is Lampard, though? Questions will persist about that appointment even if they stay up, but at the very least the mood in the dressing room is more optimistic and more unified than it was under Benitez. Lately, with one very costly exception, they have looked more organised too. The first six of those 12 Premier League games yielded just three points, four goals scored (three of them in the same game against Leeds) and 12 goals conceded. The last six have brought seven points, six goals scored and eight goals conceded — a tightening-up which is also reflected in the xG calculations (6.3 xG for, 7.0 xG conceded). It was just so damaging that they conceded three soft goals to lose from a winning position at half-time away to Burnley three weeks ago, a game they dominated for long periods.
Since then, it has been that 1-0 win over Manchester United, a 1-1 draw with Leicester City and Sunday’s loss at Liverpool in a derby from which no Everton fan realistically expected anything. The post-match discourse at the weekend was about unsuccessful penalty appeals and laughably bad possession stats; Everton made fewer passes than Thiago did for the home side on his own, with their midfielder Allan completing just one pass (from the kick-off) in 72 minutes of action.
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Both the positives and the negatives should be emphasised. Ultimately the story was of a technically impoverished but tactically disciplined performance that might, with more luck, have yielded an unexpected reward against a much stronger team.
There has been a growing frustration at Everton about refereeing decisions, but conspiracy theories are for the birds.
They are in a relegation battle because, after five years of dispiriting drift, this season has seen them paying a heavy price for repeated mistakes at boardroom level. Injuries have indeed been a problem, but the lack of cover for Dominic Calvert-Lewin and others has been in part due to the desperate need to bring down the wage bill in order to comply (however loosely) with the financial regulations — again, paying the price for the failure to build anything of substance, with any kind of plan.
Denise Barrett-Baxendale, the chief executive, said early last year that Everton’s “strategic vision is competing at the top of the league, to win trophies and we want Champions League football”. Great. But what was the strategic vision of how that the long journey would progress?
That was around the time they agreed new long-term contracts with director of football Marcel Brands and France international full-back Lucas Digne. Then, after Ancelotti left for a second spell Real Madrid, they hired Benitez against Brands’ wishes. Then they let Brands leave and, on Benitez’s recommendation, sold Digne to Villa. And then, inevitably, they sacked Benitez three days later. And still we await, with great interest, the findings of the club’s “strategic football review”.
There have been hints at a more considered approach with the appointment of Kevin Thelwell as director of football and Kevin Nicholson as coach educator, but for the first six years of Moshiri’s ownership Everton have called to mind my colleague Carl Anka’s recent description of Manchester United as a club vaguely aware of their destination but with little idea — and even less appetite — as to how get there.
And so, far from looking upwards to the Champions League and a gloriously bright future at Bramley-Moore Dock, Everton find themselves haunted and understandably terrified by the threat of relegation to the Championship and the severe financial consequences that would come with falling off the precipice that English football has inexplicably allowed to open up between its top and second tiers.
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Yes, there would be parachute payments, but it would still be a long way to fall and there would be no happy landing. Everton fans will not be fooled into thinking relegation would be a blessing in disguise, a chance to rebuild and refresh.
The Championship is not some detox retreat. It is a pressure cooker — a hotter place, as Lord Jones put it. Even when clubs win promotion at the first attempt, as Newcastle have done twice, they rarely come up back up looking healthier for the experience. In the best cases, the post-promotion glow can wear off very quickly. In the worst cases, post-relegation trauma lasts for years.
Everton will desperately hope it doesn’t come to that.
If divine intervention is not on the cards, then inspiration must come from within — perhaps from another unlikely hero like Horne in 1994 or Farrelly four years later. Much was made of their difficult run-in prior to the last three matches against United, Leicester and Liverpool, but they took four points out of nine and now they turn their attention to a run of Chelsea, Leicester again, Watford, Brentford and Crystal Palace, then Arsenal away on the final day of the season. Everton can’t afford to worry about how many more points Burnley or Leeds might pick up. They need to help themselves.
Whatever the club’s fate over the weeks ahead, Everton’s experience in the Moshiri years should serve as a cautionary tale.
Just as another of the founding members of the Premier League, Oldham Athletic, ceded their Football League status in abysmal fashion at the weekend, so too could Everton drop out of the breakaway league they were so instrumental in establishing three decades ago. The mismanagement at Oldham has been on another scale entirely, but Everton have shown that, at Premier League level, it is not enough to have money. You need to invest smartly.
It is a reminder that nothing in football is permanent. Or at least that nothing should be permanent — that the game ought to be a meritocracy, rather than becoming as stratified as it is now (which of course is still not stratified enough for the liking of those clubs who feel they deserve Champions League football and Champions League revenue, regardless of how they perform on the pitch).
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For years, Everton were among those clubs who were determined to take governance of the game into their own hands. Then, after a traumatic decade, they re-emerged as the one club who looked ready to keep fighting the good fight against an elite that had somehow shown the temerity to leave them for dust.
The bitter irony is that, having finally secured the financial backing that should have helped take them back towards the elite, Everton, so far at least, have squandered the opportunity.
That last part was never going to be easy, bridging the great divide that the Champions League elite had built over the course of many years of domination. But nor should it ever have been this hard.
It has taken mismanagement on a huge scale to take Everton to this point: Deep in the relegation mire once more and hoping — and praying — for salvation.
(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Sam Richardson)
