I don’t quite know how to put this into words but, although I had never been to Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium before, and had driven and walked the nearby streets both before and during its construction, I was immediately hit by a pervading sense that it has always been here.
I suspect the simple explanation is: good design. Everton’s new stadium doesn’t try to be something it is not and doesn’t try to be everything all at once either. It is not entirely made of glass and is not covered by a vast canopy that looks like a circus tent. It is not a rebadged NFL stadium. It is a home of football and feels like a home of football.
You can walk around it and yet it fits snugly into its space. It is sleek without being gaudy, large without being monstrous. It is a plug-in-and-play good experience. If you are going to build a football stadium on a former UNESCO world heritage site then it had better be good; it was worth it.
Inside, the Hill Dickinson Stadium has all the usual trappings: 17 restaurants and lounges, lots of bare concrete and white that gives it a slight Severance vibe, brilliant steep-sided stands and that incredible ability to make you lose all sense of which way the pitch is as soon as you enter the bowels. The pitch view sits somewhere between Schalke and Tottenham, which is a compliment.
But its greatest strength is how it marries together modernity and tradition: orange brick and silver metalwork, the retention of the old dock wall, the thousands of grey bricks in the floor outside (each with a dedicated supporter message), the photo wall at the back of the West Stand, Z Cars blaring out over an extraordinarily powerful sound system that stings your ears without quite making them bleed.
For a while before kick-off, around the mid-level advertising boards, the Archibald Leitch latticework of Goodison Park was displayed. An electronic replication of graft and grit; there could be no more perfect touch and it is a great shame that they are replaced by Stake.com adverts when things get going.
And then the nods to community that will go unnoticed to many but ensure roots extend down further and more quickly. At the southern end of one plaza, Fans Supporting Foodbanks’ purple vehicle collects donations just as it always did at Goodison. In the Bluenose building across the road, the Everton Heritage Society has its own new home. Nowhere will ever match the Church of St Luke the Evangelist on Goodison Road for history, but they will give it a good go.
On Monday, three hours before kick-off, Everton supporters are already gathering. Their explanation to me is simple: the longer they spend here before a game, the more natural it will feel. For all Goodison’s tradition, you couldn’t really spend time close to the ground on matchday in the same way. This is an inclusive Everton experience because there is room to house thousands, not hundreds, outside.
For now, there is a distinct weirdness as if the Hill Dickinson Stadium is a neutral ground or national stadium. That is entirely natural: we all know the same strangeness from moving homes, residing for a while in a building that is simultaneously ours and ours alone and yet entirely unfamiliar.
We have known our beloved football grounds for far longer than any home, but also their environs: the pubs, the food, the walk, the parking spots, the familiar faces walking their familiar paces to their familiar places. The Hill Dickinson Stadium cannot earn that through anything other than time.
History is a weird concept for football clubs. Fail to respect it and you lose your identity, use it as your identity it will hold you back and tie you to the floor. It is an entirely intangible concept and yet it clings to you like a winter coat.
Goodison felt the same, in its later years. At its best it was an enthralling, motivating whirlwind, but the grand old lady became grouchy thanks to off-pitch incompetence and on-field funk. Those touches of yesteryear – wooden seats, restricted views – became anachronistic as other clubs upgraded. The repeated failed attempts to retire Goodison didn’t help: 1963, 1997, 2006, 2010. It ached for something new.
The first Premier League game “under the lights”, as the Hill Dickinson Stadium announcer was keen to stress, offers a glimpse of a new home at its best, like spending your first family Christmas in a new abode. There was the obligatory pre-match light show (which was awful because all pre-match light shows are entirely awful), but the roar when Michael Keane scored lifted you out of yourself.
Those acoustics also resonated at full-time, when there were audible boos for a home draw that took Everton to ninth in the Premier League. A useful reminder that the crowd is still the same and they always demand better. As one Everton wag said when attending a match for the first time: “The anger and angst is really going to pop here”.
For all the failed projects, Everton’s stadium move has probably come at the perfect time. Were they settling here with the old regime still in place, Farhad Moshiri and Kevin Thelwell overspending and underdelivering to hamstring whichever manager was tasked with lifting Everton out of their pronounced decline, opportunity would surely have been squandered.
Instead, hope can spring eternal. When captain Seamus Coleman delivered a long read feature before Goodison’s final bow, he delivered the missive everybody needed:
“I want us to improve as a football club from every aspect because we have to move on from these past three or four years. We’ve seen recently with other teams how quickly things can change for the better and that must be our goal now to go and be better and be excited for the future.”
Hardly groundbreaking, but Coleman is spot on. For all that the Premier League’s financial elite are insured against repeated failure, the dominance of the division over Europe’s rest (and subsequent increase in European places) has opened a window for the others. With a new stadium and with financial mismanagement now largely off the balance sheet, Everton can be beneficiaries.
And they can do it with style. David Moyes’ remit is no longer to remove the crippling fear of a first relegation in 75 years, but to incorporate attacking flair into a team that in April started a Merseyside derby with a front four of Carlos Alcaraz, Abdoulaye Doucoure, Jack Harrison and Beto. Functionality out, fun in – and woe betide Moyes eventually if he misses the brief.
Tyler Dibling is yet to start a league game for Everton, but there remains the distinct possibility of him, Jack Grealish and Iliman Ndiaye all behind a striker: a whirligig, unpredictable crop of elite table magicians. Ndiaye attempted the fourth most dribbles in the league last season. Dibling was in the top 20 in a rotten Southampton team. Grealish looks keen to make up for three years of slowing down the ball, turning back and playing a safe pass at Manchester City.
This will take time and patience and Everton supporters will run out of one quicker than the other. The squad is small – no manager has used fewer players this season than Moyes. One result of gross transfer waste is that only 12 first-team players were under contract at the end of last season. As such, new contracts for Idrissa Gueye (36), Coleman (36) and Keane (32) made sense. Repeated failure in squad-building can never be overcome in a single year.
But the wider picture is one of great potential. That is the silver lining to failure: a low bar to climb over. It has been eight seasons since Everton last reached 60 points. It is six since they even finished in the Premier League’s top nine. If Leicester, Wolves, Sheffield United, Leeds, West Ham, Brighton, Brentford, Aston Villa, Forest and Bournemouth can all do so (and have in the interim), Everton have little excuse not to reach for the same.
Most importantly, they have their platform and their line in the sand. The Hill Dickinson Stadium is magnificent, the new centrepiece of a regeneration project that will transform an area of Liverpool. You hardly have to read between the lines to use the same metaphor for a club that has been without much at all for much too long. Everton’s future is now.
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