Rays of Hope and Winds of Change

For the majority of the Premier League years, it felt as though following a team like Everton, outside of the old “Sky Four” and then the so-called “Big Six”, felt futile. Year after year, the same clubs had a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on the Premier League title, the Champions League qualification places and, to a lesser but still large extent, the domestic honours.

The Toffees are in an ever-lengthening trophy drought — at 30 years going on 31, it outstrips the 24 years between the league titles the Club won in 1939 and 1963 which included the six-year hiatus for World War II — and while much of that lack of success can be placed at the door of the gradual decay and mismanagement under successive regimes since the late 1980s, 1992 ushered in an era where the spoils have almost exclusively gone to the biggest and wealthiest clubs.

Everton were, of course, part of the original “Big Five” behind the creation of the Premier League but where the likes of Arsenal, Manchester United and, eventually, Tottenham, excelled, the Blues stagnated and floundered, surviving two brushes with relegation in the 90s but struggling through year upon year of relative austerity until Farhard Moshiri brought unprecedented wealth but precious little footballing acumen.

The result has been that since Everton finished in the top four in 2004/05, those Champions League places (together with the title) have been claimed exclusively by the old Sky Four (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United) or the Big Six (add Manchester City and Tottenham) in 16 of the last 19 seasons.

In the same timeframe (2004/05 to 2023/24), the League Cup was won by one of those six teams every season bar two (Birmingham City’s triumph in 2011 and Swansea City’s in 2013 being the glaring exceptions) and the winner of the FA Cup came from that same cabal on all but three occasions (Portsmouth, Wigan Athletic and Leicester City upsetting the applecart in 2008, 2013 and 2021 respectively).

If it has seemed as though Everton might never win anything again, who could blame us? It has felt as though we are destined to always be on the outside looking in, pressing our noses to the glass hoping to one day be allowed a seat among the elite. We haven’t been alone but despite the seemingly unalterable trajectory of the modern game and the move in 2020 to establish a European Super League (ESL) that might well have set the hegemony of that select group of teams in stone, things are changing.

In a trend that began, ironically enough, on the heels of the doomed ESL power grab with Newcastle United’s rapid transformation from relegation candidates to Champions League qualifiers and the growing strength in recent seasons of former “small club” also-rans like Brighton, Bournemouth, Fulham and Brentford, hope has been rekindled and the impossible suddenly feels possible.

This season, five years on from a global pandemic that rammed home the notion that football is nothing without the fans, the theme feels very much like the year of the supporter, the underdog, and hope for greater diversity when it comes to the winners of trophies. Evertonians said goodbye to Goodison Park in what appeared to be as much a celebration of Blue fandom as it was about saying farewell to the Old Lady; Crystal Palace beat City at Wembley to win the FA Cup, meaning that Pep Guardiola and his club will be trophy-less for the first time in years; Newcastle won the Carabao Cup to land their first trophy since 1955; in Italy, Bologna won their first silverware for 51 years, while in Scotland Aberdeen ended a 35-year wait by beating Celtic to win the Scottish Cup; Sunderland have ended their painful exile from the top flight with a dramatic Playoff Final victory at Wembley; and while, ordinarily, a Spurs vs United Europa League final would be emblematic of that same old Big Six dominance, that either team made it to the final given their horrendous domestic form was remarkable.

Of course, where the very top honours are concerned, change is a little harder to come by. Liverpool just won their 20th championship, Bayern Munich ambled to their 12th title in 13 years, and the Champions League is still heavily stacked towards the biggest clubs in Europe, with a new league format that is as dull as ditchwater but does as much as UEFA can to appease the ESL clubs in their quest to ensure they get in each year and progress to the knockout phases. And yet someone other than Real Madrid, Bayern or Barcelona (one of whom has won it in 12 of the last 19 seasons) will lift this year’s Champions League trophy and it could be Paris Saint-Germain for the first time.

What’s made this re-emergence of a more competitive landscape, at least in England, has been: a focus on smart recruitment and on being strategic, well-run and agile (with the obvious benefits of being in what is easily the richest league in the world) on the part of clubs like Brighton and Aston Villa; the likes of Newcastle following in the footsteps of Manchester City in gaining overnight riches from deep-pocketed owners that have allowed them to compete for top players; and the profligacy, complacency and chaos that has plagued United, Spurs and Chelsea in recent years and opened the door for other, hitherto less-fancied teams.

Everton should have been one of those clubs to benefit, of course. Moshiri came on board weeks before Leicester gatecrashed the Premier League’s elite with arguably the most improbable title triumph in history but, having spoken of a three-year window within which to get the Blues back to the big time, he wasted the moment and an unfathomable amount of money that, in taking the club to the brink of relegation, almost had the opposite effect to what he intended.

Having survived the four miserable seasons since Moshiri’s gamble on Carlo Ancelotti failed with their top-flight status intact, however, Everton are entering a new chapter in their history and they could, if the new owners play their cards right, be ideally placed to participate in this newly competitive era where the hegemony of half a dozen clubs stands to be disrupted, perhaps for many years to come. The addition of a fifth place for English clubs on the Champions League gravy train can only enhance that prospect for change. 

There has already been talk of the Magpies forming a new “Big Seven”; Aston Villa’s re-emergence as a force perhaps makes it a bloc of eight and if Everton can use the platform of the new 52,888-seater stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock (with a significant naming rights deal with Hill Dickinson, reported to be worth around £10m-per-year, and a doubling of their matchday income), the removal of the PSR constraints that have forced the club to sell its best players, and the significant financial resources of The Friedkin Group, they could eventually muscle in as a ninth power player on an increasingly competitive domestic landscape.

That has to be the vision and the belief and ending this interminable drought of success has to be the goal  as we leave Goodison Park, with the institution and family of Everton very much intact and as much unity among the fanbase as there has been in living memory. David Moyes and the newly revamped recruitment setup have a massive job to do, one that might take a couple of years to accomplish given the turnover in playing staff this summer, but they can set about the task in an atmosphere of renewal, excitement and stability that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago.