IAN HERBERT: Everton are withering in front of our eyes, but they don’t need these sharks picking over their carcass.
Over the weekend, there seemed to be a sense of despondency at Goodison Park.
The new owners, 777, do not appear to have the best interests of the squad in mind.
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There are 1,000 reasons why Everton is so important in our football landscape, many of which are founded in history and sentiment.
The Bullens Road Stand balconies are distinguished by their crisscross steel construction. The huge murals of legends on the Goodison façade, as seen from the terraced side streets leading up to Goodison Road. The way fans can go from glum to deafeningly defiant after one bad ref judgment.
Last Saturday, Everton couldn’t have been further from that legacy. There was something clearly different in the Gwladys Street Stand, where I would sometimes watch the team in the early 1990s, breathing in Everton spirituality and soul on good and bad Saturday afternoons.
A sense of resignation. A sense that all has been lost. Gary Neville called it ‘dreary,’ but ‘weary’ probably describes it better. A sensation that things can’t possibly get much better than this. ‘There aren’t many instances when I’ve left feeling so unhappy,’ a good friend of mine observed, trudging away from Liverpool’s southern suburbs after those bleak few hours on Gwladys Street.
That’s how it feels when an outfit named ‘777,’ the worst expression of the gamblers presently alighting on British football, picks over what they view as a carcass.
Josh Wander, one of the two Miami-based entrepreneurs heading that firm, is frequently seen in baseball caps and occasionally discusses himself in the third person, which is never a good indication.
‘Is there anyone in the world who has been more serious about buying football clubs in history than Josh Wander?’ said Wander in all seriousness a few weeks ago, alluding to the fact that he has picked up six of them in the last few years, all of which are so desperate for cash, post-pandemic, that they’ve thrown in their lot with him.
Wander envisions ‘his’ clubs as the football version of Tesco, selling fans every financial product possible since it bears the team’s name. ‘One day, we won’t be selling hot dogs and drinks to our consumers; we’ll be selling insurance, financial services, or whatever,’ he recently told the Financial Times. He noticed that fans are so obsessed that “they want to be monetised.”
Could there be a more dramatic depiction of Everton’s decline under the so-called guidance of Farhad Moshiri, whose fantasy that he can sell the club for £500 million has driven away all potential buyers?
Everton are left with Wander and his 777 business partner Steven Pasko, whose main commercial triumphs have been in insurance and payment processing.
Nobody knows where 777 will get the money for a job of this magnitude. There was a little uproar on Tuesday when they announced that they had supplied Everton with a £20 million loan. As noted Everton podcaster and writer ‘The Esk’ pointed out, that is enough to fund a month’s cashflow for a club that is basically bankrupt.
Wander claims that a piece on the acclaimed investigative news outlet Josimar concerning cases involving leased planes and his own arrest in 2003 on a charge of cocaine trafficking, for which he was sentenced to probation, was the result of ‘haters attempting to destroy you with trivial things.’
But Everton are dying in plain sight, spending more money than they earn and running up against their credit card limit after letting players leave during the summer. That’s before you even consider the £15 million monthly expenditures of building a new stadium.
