Chris Beesley thinks Everton and their supporters deserve better than the current situation with Farhad Moshiri and 777 Partners, considering their special status in the football world.
Everton supporters may wish they could go back in time to the mid-1980s, when football players had haircuts akin to those of Michael Jordan, but in 2024, they are growing weary with “The Never Ending Story” of the team’s drawn-out takeover.
“In the absence of the Premier League making a timely decision, we insist that the Everton Board, and Farhad Moshiri in particular, stop this damaging process now and recognize that 777 Partners are not at this time fit-and-proper prospective owners of Everton Football Club,” the Everton FC Shareholders Association said in a forceful statement addressed to the majority shareholder of the Blues.
Last summer, Everton gave us the longest ‘48 hours’ in history after the statement they told the world would be made about interim appointments and the future of the chairman. Back on September 15, when Everton announced that 777 had signed an agreement with Moshiri to acquire his full 94.1% stake, the club stated that closing of the transaction was expected to occur in the fourth quarter of 2023.
We’re now just a week shy of it being eight months on and the deal is still awaiting regulatory approval. Even when that deal was struck, hot on the heels of investment talks with another US group, MSP Sports Capital, collapsed, 777 were fighting a public relations battle with fan protests at several clubs among their global portfolio of clubs – as this piece was being written it emerged that Standard Liege players are still unpaid for April and the Belgian outfit’s former owners have filed complaint calling for 777 assets to be seized after failed payment for their purchase of the club.
“You can’t get this wrong,” the ECHO front page warned at the time when we published a six-page special in the paper with additional content available online. In addition to not receiving approval from the Premier League board, the Miami-based private investment firm is now facing allegations of engaging in a sophisticated fraudulent scheme amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds, which raises further concerns about their capacity to successfully execute the takeover.
Even the charm offensive that 777 has been waging since the deal was announced has now been discontinued, as one of the PR agencies it has employed left last week. 777 has always declined to publicly comment on either their prospective plans for Everton or the process itself, citing the requirements of the OaDT (Owners and Directors Test) to remain silent. Worrisomely, it was about supposed payments problems.
Over the last few weeks we have seen the very best of Everton Football Club and Goodison Park as the team and its loyal but long-suffering supporters bounced back from being hit for six at Chelsea to rattle off a hat-trick of home league wins in a week for the first time in 120 years. Those results ensured that under Sean Dyche, despite being hit by two separate points deductions this season, Everton went into May with their Premier League status secure for the first time since crowds returned en masse following the global coronavirus pandemic.
As ECHO columnist, former player and lifelong Evertonian Michael Ball said: “The atmosphere has been absolutely fantastic and I am sure no other club in world football would be able to emulate what we do as a fanbase.” Every team and their supporters like to think that they’re special but Everton are a unique sporting institution in many ways.
The only founder members of both the Football League in 1888, before any of the so-called ‘Big Six’ were involved, and Premier League in 1992 to be ever-presents in the latter, with 2024/25 – the final campaign at Goodison Park – their 122nd season in the top flight (some 11 more than closest challengers Aston Villa) – they’re the closest thing the game has to a club who has competed at the elite level almost continually from the start. Their supporters have been the lifeblood of the club from the start and given that Everton enjoyed the highest gates over the first decade of the Football League, they can lay claim to being the game’s first major fanbase.
Even now, as the Blues endure their longest-ever silverware drought stretching back to 1995 – despite being raised on an attritional diet of relegation scraps the club say there are now over 30,000 people on the season ticket waiting list – only Manchester United and neighbours Liverpool can top their longevity of winning major trophies in nine separate decades. However, with Goodison Park generating the third-lowest revenues of any Premier League ground, the move to a magnificent 52,888 capacity stadium by the banks of the Mersey that will enable Everton to play in front of the biggest average crowds in their history, cannot come soon enough.
For all their recent trials and tribulations both on and off the pitch, Everton remain one of the most-prestigious names in football. Given that he played more matches for them than anyone else and won more honours than anyone else in doing so, being widely-regarded as being the best player in the world in his position at the peak of his powers, Neville Southall knows what the Blues are all about and shortly after the proposed 777 deal was announced, he admitted he was perplexed that others had not come forward.
