The threat of relegation is real for Everton, although I
think they will just about survive. However,
if they did go down, it would be a big blow to their status and finances. What it does show is that having a benefactor
owner who spends big can be a route to failure as well as success.
Everton have flirted with the threat of relegation from
the Premier League, 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
(later a great player for my club, Charlton) 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.
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”.
Between 2002/3 and 2013/14,with Moyes as manager for most of
that period, they 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
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. Owner Bill 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.
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. Once again, it is the fans who suffer. Good intentions are not enough. Football is a unique business and you need to listen to people who understand it.
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