Everton have been punchline and punchbag. Life in limbo has brought points deductions and the loss of players, annual profits in the transfer market alongside escalating debts, talk of relegation and administration that have constituted an existential threat. Takeovers have collapsed, periods of exclusivity agreements elapsed. Certainty, stability and security have felt elusive, the better future they were promised forever out of reach.
If the light at the end of the tunnel was actually rising on the skyline by the banks of the Mersey, Everton’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock provided the possibility of salvation. It was why their debts seemed mountainous and yet constituted part of the appeal to buyers; even if some of them lacked the actual funds to buy the club.
Now, after a start to the season shrouded in pessimism comes a sudden ray of optimism. In the space of 48 hours, Everton acquired a point – their first of the campaign – and an owner. The takeover by The Friedkin Group (TFG) is subject to regulatory approval but that is not expected to be a problem. By the end of 2024, a full sale should be completed, the previous owner Farhad Moshiri consigned to their past. They may be left with a lone worry: relegation.
That TFG, the business owned by the American billionaire Dan Friedkin, resurrected a deal it called off in the summer represented the best-case scenario for a club accustomed to fearing the worst. Everton spent nine months with 777 Partners as prospective owners, amid increasing evidence they were utterly unsuitable. The Premier League is scarcely popular on the blue half of Merseyside but it might have helped rescue Everton from 777’s clutches, setting conditions for the takeover to proceed – including repaying a £160m loan Moshiri took out and depositing a further £50m in an escrow account – that the overstretched, crisis-hit investment firm could never fulfil.
Friedkin is a far more credible figure. The owner of Roma may have lost popularity in the Italian capital, especially after the dismissal of the Giallorossi icon Daniele de Rossi as manager, but if budgets have been cut in the eternal city, it is partly a consequence of Jose Mourinho’s overspending. Roma have not been an unqualified success under the Friedkins but there has been ambition. There is coherent thought behind their interest in Everton: they were not the only prospective bidder who felt it was the last great English institutional club on the market. The deluxe stadium they will occupy next season added to their allure. A takeover that values the club at around £500m nonetheless reflects a reality in which, in some respects, Everton were insolvent.
But there was long a recognition that Moshiri would never recoup much of the £450m he was owed in shareholder loans. The owner has had an unfortunate habit of making the wrong choice. In opting for TFG, and reducing his asking price to do so, he seems to have finally taken the best option.
And after a traumatic time, the stadium will form the best part of Moshiri’s legacy. The last few years have threatened to be ruinous; certainly the time since his former business partner Alisher Usmanov was sanctioned following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and when Moshiri then stopped funding Everton.
Debts incurred while building a ground are around £600m now and will increase in the short term, with the Friedkins adding to their own £200m summer loan to cover some costs, including furbishing the new stadium. Yet then they will reduce: some of the loan to Rights and Media Funding, a sports and entertainment-focused lender, will be repaid.
But one debt was more complicated than others: it was the reason TFG had walked away from their initial exclusivity agreement in July. They had deemed the £200m debt to 777 unresolvable: not in its size, but in attempting to untangle the wreckage of their collapsed empire. But the Friedkins negotiated with A-Cap, the insurance company that had underwritten 777’s expansion, to restructure the debt. Leadenhall Capital, who were suing 777 for $600m (£450m), said they would not stand in the way of a sale, providing the proceeds were protected.
Everton might finally escape from 777’s toxicity, in a way the clubs they bought are yet to. A full sale will swallow up Moshiri’s 94.1 per cent shareholding (he had initially looked for minority investment but there was an understandable reluctance to sign up while he retained a majority stake). With a power vacuum at Goodison, one of Friedkin’s early tasks will be bringing in a management structure.
If Everton’s off-field issues are finally over, the focus will be firmly on the field. A wretched start to the season has given Everton the kind of peril they had hoped to avoid. Manager Sean Dyche has seemed a common-sense solution at points, but a problem at others. In his defence, he has worked through traumatic times. They have felt neverending. The Friedkin Group will take over a club at a low ebb; but if the depths plummeted do not entail a first spell out of the top flight in seven decades, there is a platform for progress.
Because now there is now an injection of both funds and hope. And there have been times in the last two and a half years when it has felt that Everton have been starved of hope as well as money.