Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 90/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
At the Church of St Luke the Evangelist on Goodison Road, the regular Sunday service starts at 11am. This week the congregation filed in to worship an hour later, but not into here. For the church with its own football ground, things will never be the same. The same goes for everybody crammed in next door.
St Luke’s is also the home of the Everton Heritage Society. Since 2008, it has been researching and chronicling the history of the club. Every home matchday, upstairs in the church becomes an Aladdin’s cave of Everton treasure. There are exhibitions and stalls displaying or selling shirts, programmes, prints and match tickets. Sport and religion coexisting, the two pillars of English culture over the last 200 years.
Ahead of the final Premier League game at Goodison on Sunday, the Heritage Society unsurprisingly expected to be busier than ever before. Plenty of supporters came to make purchases, walking up the twisting wooden steps and queueing patiently if asked. Each seemed desperate to make a downpayment of nostalgia tax, one more memento. Others are just wandering around, taking a look at the old place for one more time. I speak to a couple who don’t have match tickets. For them today, St Luke’s is the Goodison replacement.
When a football club moves stadium, the ephemera moves with it. Everton Heritage Society will have a new home near to Bramley Moore Dock and St Luke’s will be left to a religious congregation of the more typical kind. For a while the shirts pinned up high and the tables of black-and-white programmes won’t sit right. They belong to tradition.
This was a move more than 60 years in the making. In February 1963, a plan was first put forward to build a new 100,000-seater stadium, although it fell dormant. In 1997, 85 per cent of Everton supporters surveyed voted to leave Goodison for a proposed new stadium (a plan abandoned in 2003). In 2006, the unpopular Kirkby option was raised. In 2010, Walton Hall Park was the intended option.
But Sunday, even with an impossibly long run-up, generates unexpected emotions. In St Luke’s, fans speak of being caught off guard by the lump in their throat when they entered through the door: the smell, the feel, the fact that everyone else seemed to be having an identical revelation. Another is less upbeat: he describes his mood as funereal. To stretch that analogy, it’s often not until the day of the service that the loss hits home.
On Goodison Road, the consensus is that, if this is a wake, it should be a celebration of life. It is 9am and the cans and flares are out. Outside the Winslow Hotel, a blue flag is waved on repeat and the songbook exhausted before recommencing from the top. Blue fireworks explode into a bright blue sky and everybody pretends that they can see them in the sun.
The aesthetics are of a street party, but I think that’s wide of the mark. Instead, these people are simply trying to live their longest day to stretch out the farewell. Bacon butties at 8am, beers at 9am, match at 12pm and then back out into the world at 3pm to wish you could do it all over again, one last time.
Everton 2-0 Southampton (Sunday 18 May)
- Game no: 91/92
- Miles: 219
- Cumulative miles: 17,670
- Total goals seen: 237
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: All of it. I’ve never been part of saying goodbye to a football stadium before and it is one of those football experiences that I’ll never forget.
In his seminal book The Football Man, Arthur Hopcraft describes a stadium: “Football grounds are not often attractive places in the ornamental sense. Their beauty is a special, environmental kind appreciable only to people who relate the setting to their emotional attachment.”
To half of this city – and to many other traditionalists outside it – Goodison is the embodiment of Hopcraft’s description. It’s the minutiae that sticks out and thus gains inordinate importance: the bricks in the wall spelling out the club’s name, the letters atop the Sir Philip Carter Park Stand, the cramped wooden seats, St Luke’s and its wares upstairs.
This speaks to the crucial difference between old grounds and new. Vast, cavernous stadiums contain magnificent sightlines, glorious acoustics and the best facilities any sports fan could want. But all of them are calculated exactly.
At Goodison, as at so many old grounds, some or none of that may apply. But the brilliance comes from an organic process without calculation. Nobody thought that they would build those letters in the wall to provoke nostalgia 50 years down the line. It’s like one of those old recipes of your grandmother’s, that even though written down still refers to “pinches”, “splashes” and “to taste”. You can never replicate its intangible elements: time, care, experience, love.
Can losing Goodison from the Premier League ever be something to be comfortable with, even if it is surviving demolition at least in the medium term? Change is eternally sold as progress by those who coincidentally seem to profit from its continuous creep.
History will be lost; pretending otherwise is a distraction tactic. There will be well-meaning attempts to take some of it with them, but a football ground is an amalgam of hundreds of thousands of individual matchday experiences and Bramley Moore Dock starts on nought. The pubs, the corner shops, the burger vans, the walking routes and the people you meet along the way, literally and figuratively; all will change.
The Hill Dickinson Stadium (that’ll take some getting used to), will get more supporters in and make more out of each one of them on average. It will also eventually cause ticket prices to rise, potentially chip away at the percentage of season ticket holders and thus inevitably welcome day-tripper supporters with a higher spend-per-capita. None of this is on Everton – it merely represents the new reality.
Whether this is all good for Everton is a more complicated question that may shift according to which stakeholder you speak to. The principal focus is on expansion in the form of revenue, an argument that has gained greater credence in the age of Profitability and Sustainability Rules. The basic equation is true: more seats = more money = more spending power. Everybody is happy with that.
But we should remember why that revenue is needed so desperately. Everton’s spending power was rarely held as a concrete ceiling on their success when they had 15 straight years of finishing no lower than 11th in the Premier League. That has been replaced by four bottom-eight finishes in five years, not because Everton haven’t been able to spend but because they spent appallingly.
That is one of the great laments of modern Everton. In 2017, when Bramley Moore was confirmed as the most likely destination, Everton finished seventh in the Premier League under Ronald Koeman and qualified for Europe. That also marked the point at which decline began to set in. The entire stadium project has been played out in front of desperate decay.
As a result, Goodison has increasingly been sold as unfit for purpose. I’m not so sure. It is true that Everton need more revenue, because they must escape from a cycle of their own self-imposition. What was once a luxury has been warped into a necessity. The purpose changed more than Goodison did.
Losing history creates psychological uncertainty that is impossible to escape. Over recent seasons, Goodison has been parodied as the natural home of mutiny and discord towards everything that was breaking: bad football, bad results, bad investments by bad leaders. But the familiarity of home was subconsciously reassuring. Lose in the same way in a new place and there is a danger that nothing feels real.
In that context, Goodison remaining open is an interesting development. It is to be celebrated as an immediate show of faith in Everton Women. But, as one season ticket holder who will come here next season to watch WSL games told me on Sunday, there’s a clear danger of it casting a shadow in the short term should results at the Hill Dickinson start slowly. You know that weird feeling you get when you go back to an old home or school? That but with 40,000 seats.
We should also reflect the potential within this move; if there are regrets then they are accompanied with great excitement. Coming so relatively soon after the Friedkin takeover, this is a unique chance for a new start that Everton desperately needs. Bramley Moore Dock brings with it uncertainty, but so what – there is a clear argument that familiar elements of recent life at Goodison have been objectively negative. An excellent environment can breed excellence.
This move also comes laced with gratitude – that plays into potential. In their final home game two years ago, Abdoulaye Doucoure scored against Bournemouth and Everton clung onto a lead that kept them in the top flight at Leicester City’s expense. Had they gone down then, what of the financial emergency, the potential takeover and of the financing of a new stadium?
Everton stared their own oblivion square in the face. That changes you. It also means that when somebody very rich comes along, removes the most unpopular figure within a club and then commits to your move away, you find it more easy to interpret that move as a shot at a better life.
It all makes this a monumental summer at Everton. There is an extraordinary amount of change planned: new home, new chief executive, new chief marketing officer, new chief stadium commercial officer, new shape of leadership structure. Ten players are out of contract and there will be new budgets for new players with – hopefully – a new recruitment policy that doesn’t lean heavily upon one agent.
And then, as if to reinforce history meeting future, is David Moyes, that old custodian who welcomed the legendary players and thanked supporters for signing his name on the final day. The permanent must guide them through the months of transience.
That was the overwhelming feeling of Sunday as an outsider: a vague hinterland in which nobody really knew how to feel or what to say to those around them. Few have ever attended the last game at a home stadium and will hope to only ever do so once. It is a bizarre experience.
Goodison is going for good but also staying open. They woke up early to extend a day they never really wanted to come. They sang in jubilant pride outside and inside their beloved club, but the flag on top of the Bullens Stand hung solemnly at half mast.
The one point on which everyone can agree: this must mark a new age of Everton. Goodison was forced to play witness to too much anger, too much desperation. If it looks a little tired, that’s only because life here has been exhausting. Pray for better. St Luke’s is open every Sunday at 11am.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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