Mrs H and I had a day out at New Brighton recently. "A day out at New Brighton" used to be a big thing on Merseyside. I'm pretty sure there was a photo of me as a baby with my parents on New Brighton beach, though I haven't found it so it might be a false memory. There's still three-quarters of a mile of sandy beach around the tip of the Wirral and, according to Wikipedia, it has the UK's longest promenade. You could get the ferry directly to New Brighton from Liverpool's Pier Head but declining passenger numbers brought an end to that in 1971 and the ferry now shuttles straight across the river to Birkenhead Woodside. (OK pedants, there is also the Seacombe terminal which, like New Brighton, is in Wallasey but right at the Birkenhead end and anyway it's currently out of action for refurb).
We went to New Brighton for the Fawlty Towers dining experience, which did full justice to the characters of Basil and Sybil Fawlty and their hapless waiter, Manuel.
Our day out was very windy, with larger waves than I can recall seeing on the river sending spray splashing over the promenade by the Floral Pavilion. My photo above, looking towards the cranes of the north Liverpool docks - the container terminal I think - doesn't really do justice to quite how stormy it was.
The construction site for Everton's new stadium is somewhat off the right of my photo. The early stages of the work are progressing well. The dock has been filled in and construction has started. Here is the only real heritage feature of the dock, the hydraulic tower, in the process of being preserved notwithstanding the bollocks we heard from UNESCO about the impact of the project on the once world heritage site of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile city:
However, nothing much else about Farhad Moshiri's project for Everton is progressing well right now. I couldn't help reflecting that Everton have a stormy passage to navigate a way through to being a Premier League club when they move into the stadium in 2024, assuming of course that it is completed. Everton say the funding for the project is in place, notwithstanding the club ending its sponsorship from sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
The Sunday Times threw up a farrago of innuendo about Moshiri and Usmanov last weekend. Moshiri has distanced himself from his even wealthier friend, for whom he was a financial mentor, having first met him while working as an accountant at Deloitte in London in 1989. By 1993 Moshiri was helping to manage Usmanov's investments in metals, mining, telecomms and technology and they remained close until Moshiri cut links a few weeks ago.
Usmanov rewarded Moshiri with shareholdings in several companies. This might sound unusual but is fairly normal in privately owned companies, the lead shareholder wanting a small number of his main men to have, in that unpleasant phrase, "skin in the game" and a strong incentive for the companies to do well. Usmanov, who Moshiri has described as a "crazy fan of Arsenal" bought into the Gunners with Moshiri but was denied a place on the board by American owner Stan Kroenke. Moshiri funded his purchase of Everton by selling his Arsenal shares to Usmanov. However, the leaked Panama Papers suggested Moshiri's stake was originally a gift from Usmanov in the first place. I'm not sure why this would be materially different to how Moshiri "earned" his wealth but according to Jonathan Northcroft it raises the possibility that Usmanov ultimately paid for Everton. Moshiri has dismissed the documents as a "mistake" and his representatives have said very clearly that Usmanov never had any equity in Everton. Indeed when Everton terminated the sponsorship contracts from Usmanov's USM Holdings I had a good holler at sloppy reporting on the BBC TV news when they described Usmanov as an "investor" rather than a "sponsor" of the club.
It's not clear that any of this presents a problem for Everton from the point of view of sanctions. After all Moshiri isn't Russian - he's Iranian. He came to the UK with his family as a young man before the 1979 revolution, studying at UCL and is usually described as a British-Iranian businessman. Moreover, all the time Moshiri was working with Usmanov the latter was the opposite of persona non grata with the UK government. I have some philosophical difficulty with politicians who have traded throughout with Russia (and still do) suddenly retrospectively deciding that individuals are beyond the pale for their connections about which we know little more than we ever did. We were buying their oil and gas and, in the case of EU countries particularly Germany and France, selling significant quantities of arms to Putin's regime.
A bigger problem for Everton and Moshiri is that they have wasted so much money during his tenure. Northcroft reported that Moshiri has "probably injected £450 million into Everton, by far the highest owner funding in the league and double what Roman Abramovich put into Chelsea over a similar period". Some commentators think Everton is at real risk of breaching the Premier League's financial fair play rules. Now FFP is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned as it is actually designed to keep the current bunch of "elite" clubs at the top forever by preventing speculative investment. Be that as it may, it seems that Moshiri has sunk getting on for a quarter of his fortune into the club which has, unbelievably, spent £668 million on transfers and £40 million paying off a succession of managers in Moshiri's six year stewardship. Unbelievably because the squad doesn't look suffused with quality. They seem to have been a soft touch for agents, who were frequently entertained on Usmanov's yacht for talks about players and managers.
The result is that Everton recorded a loss of £140m in 2018/19 and £112m in 2019/20, losses that were in the top seven recorded by any English club in history and which totalled more than the combined losses of the nearest two Premier League clubs in the same peiod, Southanpton (£117m) and Manchester City (115m).
Everton say they are confident of being able to show they have operated within the profit and sustainability rules partly because the club has suffered high covid related related losses and have significant new stadium related costs to offset (both permissable). They were praised for maintaining the pay of their casual staff when there were no matches, in contrast to clubs like Arsenal and they have one of the best community programmes in the UK, if not Europe. All laudable but not great for the business when cash is haemorrhaging. They have apparently been in close contact with the Premier League throughout the season and spend in the summer and January transfer windows was deliberately modest.
All this is a concern but nothing remotely like the situation on the pitch.
I had another couple of days out on Merseyside over the last ten days with my first visits to Goodison Park since pre-covid. (Thanks, mate, for the loan of your season ticket!) It was also quite like seeing Basil and Manuel though not for me, or most of the crowd, remotely as funny as they tamely lost to a competent but hardly effervescent Wolves team 1-0 in the first match.
Frank Lampard's team selection was strange, with two right backs in the line up. Officially Coleman was ahead of Kenny in midfield but they adopted a curious tactic. When the left back (Ukrainian Mykolenko) went forward the rest of the back four shuffled across with Coleman dropping to right back. This meant that a full back, a winger and two orthodox midfield players were up against the midfield five of Wolves, with predictable results. Neves and Moutinho (who is so old he was coveted by Moyes when he was at Everton) bossed the show and Marcal stood out wide on their left side, offering an almost permananently available out ball when Everton attacked down their left and Coleman vacated that position. Wolves were able to keep the ball and Everton weren't.
Everton's truly awful recruitment policy was illustrated when Mykolenko was substituted by Dele as Kenny moved across to left back. Everton acquired two full backs in January. One, Patterson, has been trusted to play half a game against non-league Boreham Wood. Right footed right back Kenny, who had hardly been able to get a game for three seasons and had been farmed out on loan with a view to a sale, is now preferred to not only Patterson but also left back Mykolenko. That's how much Lampard thinks can trust the new players.
The fiasco was compounded when Kenny got sent off for two yellow card offences within a few minutes, though at least it meant that, for the second game against Newcastle, Lampard only picked one right back. Instead he picked two left wingers, Gray and Gordon. To be fair Gordon is doing well and has become the fans' great hope, even though it wasn't clear at the start of the season whether Benitez would trust him with many minutes on the pitch. He can operate down either flank, but he was deployed more like a no 10. To see such an inexperienced player trusted with that role was curious, but inevitably he did tend to drift into the same space occupied by Demarai Gray, hence my comment.
In the first match Everton adopted a measured and fairly cautious approach, which meant the crowd never got very animated. By the end there were some boos but the atmosphere was one of resignation. In the second match, under the Goodison lights, the crowd were full throated in desperate support. The team either responded or were sent out to be more pro-active and gave a high energy and determined performance, albeit lacking in much gumption. When ref Craig Pawson gave Allan yellow for a professional foul, VAR categorised it at serious foul play and Pawson upgraded it to red. The offence was pretty much what you see Manchester City do week in week out when they stop the opposition breaking by, in Mikel Arteta's barely English phrase "making a foul".
It produced lots of noisy indignation as the crowd shouted the team on. They played more sensibly with 10 than they had with 11, defending effectively and breaking when they could. It was almost ironic when Alex Iwobi showed great composure to score the winner after being released by substitute DCL, whose presence made a huge impact. Ironic because, at half time in the Wolves match the chaps in front of me were chatting about Moshiri and Everton's transfer "policy". I interjected that we had bought two full backs who, while they might be "ones for the future" the manager didn't trust now. and that Moshiri, while he had a big wallet and his heart was in the right place, didn't have a clue. One of them thought and responded "that's right but just think, without Moshiri we wouldn't have Alex Iwobi".
We all looked thoughtful at this bit of biting sarcasm. The much maligned Iwobi (at least much maligned by me) is thought to have been a personal transfer pick by Moshiri and cost a whacking £30m plus. But he was a hero on Thursday and the stadium was rocking at the end.
Everton gave their fans that very dangerous emotion, hope. My hope is tempered by the fact that, while Everton have games in hand, they have a tough fixture list.
With their morale improving win Everton now have 3 wins in 21 league matches (and only 3 draws as well). More to the point, they have won only one away game all season. It's all very well doing it with that crowd behind you at Goodison - though that can be a mixed blessing in terms of composure as they get too fired up. Two red cards in those matches I saw and, against Newcastle, my heart was in my mouth when both Gordon and Richarlison "went down easily" when already on a yellow. But as Alyson Rudd said recently "on the pitch they are suffering an identity crisis and their away form threatens to land them in big trouble". She wrote that before the 5-0 embarrassment at Spurs.
When you play with commitment at home but are lacklustre away I feel that shows a certain lack of character. (I exclude Richarlison and one or two others from that remark). Everton's upcoming confirmed fixtures, with games to rearrange, are: West Ham (A), Burnley (A), Man U (H), Leicester (H), Liverpool (A) and Chelsea (H). Yes they had a win but Leeds got two, making the table look very much like 3 to be relegated from 4. Not great odds. The Burnley game is huge. If they don't get something out of that I could see them getting 'nil points' from that run of games, putting them deep in the mire by 1 May.
I haven't seen Everton play league matches in any other than the top tier: they last got promoted when I was two years old. The nightmare scenario is that they have a shiny new stadium but have been relegated, haven't bounced back at the first opportunity and then run into the far stricter Championship financial fair play rules. We know where that can go: just look at Derby County.
Farhad Moshiri could be the living embodiment of that old joke: how do you get a small fortune? Answer: start with a big one and buy a football club.
P.S. According to a quotable quote by American academic and author Brene Brown hope is "not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or cognitive process". I doubt she knows much about sports fans!
Jonathan Northcroft's column "As if relegation scrap wasn't bad enough Everton are beset by links to oligarch Usmanov and runaway financial losses" was in the Sunday Times 20 March 2022
The Sunday Times reported that the Investigate Europe project had found that EU countries, mainly France and Germany, supplied Russia with €346m of military equipment including missiles, rockets, torpedoes and bombs between 2015 and 2020 - after Russia had seized Crimea!
Alyson Rudd's column "So much of what Everton do off the field makes them a role-model club. But on the pitch they are suffering an identity crisis and their away form threatens to land them in big trouble" was in the Sunday Times on 6 March 2022
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