It’s 40 years since the greatest season in Everton’s history, when they won the league and the Cup Winners’ Cup and reached the FA Cup final. But it was a strange glory, coming as it did at a time when it was hard to see how English football, devastated by tragedy and disaster, could go on. Everton were – along with Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham – one of the “big five” clubs who led the Premier League breakaway in 1992, an event now widely regarded as having been a necessary step in the rebirth of the game.
But the move also led to football’s embrace of neoliberal economics: Everton’s only trophy since the breakaway is the 1995 FA Cup and, after three straight league defeats at the start of this campaign, they look like spending a fourth successive season battling relegation.
Change was necessary. Five days after Everton had wrapped up the 1984-85 title, 56 people were killed in a fire at Bradford. That same day, a 15-year-old Leeds fan died when a wall collapsed on him during fighting in a game at Birmingham. Four days later, Everton beat Rapid Vienna in the Cup Winners’ Cup final. Two weeks after that, 39 people were killed following a charge by Liverpool fans in the European Cup final at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels.
The week after the Bradford fire, the Sunday Times published its notorious editorial that observed that football had become “a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people” and demanded the implementation of minimum safety and security standards.
But how to pay for them? The editorial rejected the notion of subsidy arguing that if some clubs went to the wall, a more streamlined game might be “leaner, healthier, safer, more prosperous and more fun … football, like any other professional entertainment, is nothing if it does not draw crowds on its own merits”.
What the Sunday Times – along with the vast majority of people in the game – seemed not to grasp was that improving the supporter experience would rapidly come to pay for itself at all levels. In the 40 years since, league attendances have doubled. Was the breakaway and the economic model it introduced necessary for that? Those connected to the biggest clubs would perhaps say yes, that they needed to get richer to raise standards and that clubs all the way down the pyramid have benefited.
It might even be partially true, however discredited trickle-down economics now are: it may be that the exposure leading clubs brought to the game as they signed glamorous foreign stars – superannuated as they often were at first – was the best marketing tool possible for English football as a whole. Given that was the way European football was going with the advent of the Champions League, maybe the Premier League was necessary for English clubs to compete.
But others are sceptical. Sir Bob Murray, for instance, who was chairman of Sunderland at the time, believes better facilities plus revenues from satellite television would have elevated football anyway; the Premier League, in other words, takes credit for a phenomenon that was already happening: an economic revolution enacted under cover of projected necessity.
Maybe even the terms of reference are wrong. It’s become so common to speak of football in terms of finance that to suggest the priority should not be profit but sport feels quaintly utopian. With a less overtly commercial model, with more equitable distribution (although, to be fair to the Premier League, it has at least retained a relatively even disbursement of domestic television rights), more teams would be competitive and the gulf from Premier League to Championship would not appear so vast.
Was this the future the original big five envisaged? Did they imagine their lightly regulated capitalism would attract world oligarchs and sheikhs, states and private equity, bluffers and chancers? Only three of the original big five have won the Premier League (United, Arsenal and Liverpool), and one of those only once (Liverpool). Only one league title in the past 11 years has gone to a big five club (Liverpool). There is a sense that they have been outpaced by the economic structures they implemented. Everton face a scrap not to be the first of the five to be relegated.
In the decade to 1992, Everton won two league titles and an FA Cup and appeared in a further four Wembley finals. They were the third-most successful side in English history. But for the ban on English clubs following the Heysel disaster, they may have become the fifth English side to win the European Cup and built on the title successes of 1985 and 1987. The big five had been the clubs with the five highest average attendances for most of the late 80s.
Were Everton always overreaching? Was the issue that they never quite had the economic potential of some others? There were the David Moyes years of economic prudence and top-10 finishes but the financial gulf was always obvious. Could different leadership ever have changed that, or was it inevitable that they could never quite take a seat at the very top table?
The sense has grown of a club uncertain of their place, unwilling to adapt to declining status. Talent has been bought on the way down not the way up; under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership there seemed for a long time an almost pathological attachment to signing the aged and the lost, as though signing the young and unproven to sell at a profit were somehow beneath them.
The result is the present chaos: four successive seasons of bringing in more from transfers than they’ve spent, yet still scrabbling to comply with profitability and sustainability rules, while a selection of questionable prospective owners squabble over the wreckage that remains from the fiasco of the Moshiri years.
At least there is the prospect of a new stadium. It may be a short-term drain on resources but in the long term it should drive revenues, which is what modern football is about.
But they have to get to that future. The first 87 minutes against Bournemouth last weekend suggested they have the ability to do that; what followed cast doubt on whether, amid all the turmoil and negativity, they have the mentality. But those are details. The underlying driver is the economic change that reformed the game in 1992 and a revolution that is beginning to devour its children.
• This article was corrected on 8 September 2024 to reflect the fact that Everton won one FA Cup, not two, in the decade up to 1992
