The Many Heads of Worzel Gummidge

The original title for this article was meant to be Yardstick, Objectivity and Emotion. However, I liked the image of a befuddled Worzel sitting in his shed with a beer, discussing all things Everton with his heads. I think it sums up the way a fan can have several conflicting thoughts and opinions on many things from match to match and month to month.

Anyway, to the article... The idea of yardsticks and measuring our recent progress came to me after the recent derby game. Regardless of whether you like the or loathe them, and there are many reasons to despise them, Liverpool are one of the best ran clubs in the Premier League at the moment, From a starting point some years ago of a club that was being ran into the ground by Gillette and Hicks, they now stand atop the table and possibly well on their way to defending their title.

They were able to afford to spend hundreds of millions of pounds in the summer window, while also raising several hundred million in player sales. (And there’s the small matter of a couple of 400k a week new contracts.) They also got their manager succession issue sorted seamlessly twelve months ago something Manchester United in their pomp couldn’t do when Ferguson left. At present, they are the ultimate yardstick by which we can measure our own progress under new, and more professional and competent owners.

For me, the Friedkin Group has made what seems a solid start in guiding us onto the same path that Fenway Sports have done with Liverpool. They’ve consolidated the debts, made what is a huge sum of money relative to previous windows available for transfers, and have looked to maximise the revenue streams potentially available on the new stadium. When, and how, we can start to see if their tenure has been a success is, in my view, open to discussion. Objectivity will become more like perspective, with each Evertonian having their own idea of how well we’re doing.

This, in turn, will become emotion driven, with each moving part of the club we support coloring our view on the other parts, and indeed the club as a whole. What is the timeline, is it cycles of three years, four years or five years? Will we do a season by season review, will it be a financial year by financial year review, will it be signings and success on the pitch? Should it be a mix of everything? And how do we gauge the club’s development against a perceived superpower like Liverpool, City or Arsenal, without letting emotion rule our thinking?

My starting point is the new stadium. This is an obvious and easy piece of the club’s brave new world that is measurable. I’ve looked at how two other clubs who have built new stadia in recent years, Spurs and Arsenal, have fared. With Arsenal, it was felt that the cost of the new stadium held them back a little in terms of competitiveness on the pitch. Yet, they managed consistent qualification for the Champions League, built the revenue streams from the new stadium, and now have a very solid financial base to work from. This has allowed them to spend big in recent seasons and compete for titles and trophies.

Yet, questions are constantly being asked about a winning mentality at the club. Successive managers and successive squads have not made enough of the vast wealth available at the club compared to others. What have Arsenal not done right as a club compared to Liverpool? How do their fans judge their progress since the stadium was completed? Why have they not managed to get the project fully over the line and lift silverware consistently?

If you were to conduct a poll of Arsenal fans today, you would possibly get a thousand different answers as to who is to blame, as to what went wrong, as to what should have been done instead. Shoulda, coulda, woulda is a phrase that should be embossed on every football shirt in the world for most clubs.

If I were an Arsenal fan, I would be looking at Manchester City as a club and shaking my head in wonder and confusion. They were handed what amounted to a free stadium and a huge pot of money in the very short space of a couple of seasons. While they had a much easier start, and a shorter route, to developing and maintaining success, as an Arsenal fan I would be asking how City were able to install a winning mentality from the outset? How did they manage to put all the right people in all the right moving parts at the right time? Even with the one hundred and fifteen charges, what did they do to make everything click? As an Evertonian, I would ask what could Arsenal have done better, and what can Everton learn from it?

In terms of perspective and emotion, every other Evertonian on the planet would have a different answer to that question as time goes on. Yet, if you ask the older generation of City fan, will their sense of objectivity, of emotion, of success, be skewed in any direction by the accusation from other fans, and perhaps a sense within themselves, that they bought their way to success in a very short period? Will they care that the success in developing the club to where it is now wasn’t ‘earned’ or worked for?

As an aside, United fans split from their club a number of years ago, even while they were still successful, in protest over how they felt their club was going, and Salford was born.

Onto Spurs. They’ve had a chairman in Daniel Levy who has ran the club ruthlessly and efficiently as a business. He has managed to build a fabulous stadium without drowning the club with debt. He balanced the books on the pitch with the same efficiency and the club is now financially on a very secure footing. With Spurs, if you were to ask their fans, objectively, I think the answer would be that relative to other ‘big clubs’, they are still a work in progress. I think they are still some way behind Arsenal, Liverpool and City. (Yet miles ahead of us.)

You can ask a Spurs supporter about their new stadium and all the money they have in the bank. Do they think the trophy win last season has now pushed them onto the next level in terms of progress? Possibly so, but there is that constant niggle that they are still managing to be just that little bit Spursy? The general feeling is that Spurs are capable of self-sabotage, even with being well on the way to being a well ran club. With Danile Levy now gone, will that same general feeling now be amplified and progress arrested? What will Spurs need to do to shake this ‘Spursy image’ off, and keep progress on track under new stewardship? Again, for a Spurs fan, more questions than answers.

For Evertonians, the question right now is what will we need to do under the Friedkin Group to lose the ‘Everton that’ feeling? What do we need to do to maintain our pregress to where Spurs, and then Arsenal and then where Liverpool are? Again, there is the very elusive thing that is a winning mentality. In trying to answer all of the questions, you more often than not end up with a lot of ifs, ands, and buts.

But discussion is fluid in many other ways. It is the nature of fans to get ahead of themselves after a couple of good games, or a decent start to a season for a change. Players are brilliant, tactics and the manager are brilliant, we’re definitely on the up. One poor performance in a derby, and a poor week of games, and the star loan signing is rubbish, the new brilliant permanent signings are now bang average, and we’re no better off than we were twelve months ago, And this is where we come back to yardsticks, both against other clubs and against ourselves. The question for me after seven or eight games of a new season is where are we as a whole compared to us twelve months ago? How have we managed a monied transfer window, a move to a new home, bedding in higher quality players, managing expectations? Indeed, the list of questions plural is endless.

Perspectives and opinions are varied and are never constant. Ask me the set of questions today after the West Ham game last night, you will get a set of answers based on emotion. Ask me again in a month, on Boxing Day, in February and in May, and you will get four more sets of answers based on emotion. Replace questions and answers with heads, and I’ll give you Worzel Gummidge.