As deals go, Everton’s agreement with Laing O’Rourke to lock-in the construction costs of their new stadium could prove to be one of the most astute in the club’s long history. At a time when all of us are feeling the financial pinch in our pockets over the ever-increasing cost of living while our wages fail to keep up with dramatic inflation, the Blues have ensured the bill for moving to their new home by the banks of the Mersey do not spiral out of control.
Everton have, understandably, been under significant scrutiny of late over the prudence of their outlays. Former director of football Marcel Brands departed in December with a cryptic parting shot of “is it only the players?” when asked by an angry fan after the 4-1 home defeat to Liverpool if he’d recruited those on the pitch while the team continue to fight for their Premier League lives under Frank Lampard, lying 17 th in the table despite having what is widely reported as being the seventh-biggest wage bill in the division.
But while the Blues continue to strive to get ‘more bang for their buck’ on the pitch, agreeing prices when it comes to their build at Bramley-Moore Dock seems a very shrewd move. In a world where the cost of most things seems to be going up, the raw materials needed to construct a building of this size could be impacted in a major way but Everton have now ensured a significant degree of protection for themselves on this score.
Just think how much your weekly supermarket shop has gone up over the past year, or filling up your car with petrol? Magnified to a stadium project understood to be somewhere in the region of £500million and the financial hazards could have been potentially enormous had the Blues not taken such prudent actions.
Even before the uncertainty of these current times, skyrocketing costs when building a new stadium proved to be a treacherous pitfall. An eight year saga to rebuild Wembley saw the Football Association’s original £458million price end up nearer to £827million by the time it was finally finished in 2007 while Tottenham Hotspur’s bill jumped by around two-and-a-half times their early estimate of £400million to an eye-watering £1billion mark.
US architect Dan Meis insisted Everton’s new stadium would be functional rather than luxurious and that he was building: “a Ferrari not a Bentley” but even Spurs owner and renowned master negotiator Daniel Levy must have wished he’d been able to strike a deal as savvy as the one that chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale – once described by chairman Bill Kenwright as the Blues’ “Little Miss Dynamite” has acquired.
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Everton’s new stadium has already had to overcome the major obstacles of the global coronavirus pandemic – that forced after 132 years professional football in England to be played without fans for the first time – and the disgusting proposals of a breakaway European Super League that threatened to fly in the face of over a century of sporting integrity created by football’s organic pyramid system based on merit and instead manufacture a synthetic closed shop private members’ club while leaving all the other teams in the game to wither and die.
Those unsavoury machinations were thankfully kicked into touch by a scathing public backlash in which the likes of Professor Barrett-Baxendale spoke out eloquently but strongly against the selfish and narcissistic actions of the would-be rebel owners and once more, she’s got Everton’s back here. Cynics like to claim that the Blues only trot out stadium updates after a bad result. Unfortunately with 18 Premier League defeats this season, there’s been a significant chance of this happening for much of what has been a deeply-troubled campaign.
Not here though. After what was hopefully a nadir and perhaps the jolt needed to turn things around at Burnley, Lampard’s side bounced back with a potentially-crucial 1-0 victory over Manchester United on Saturday.
As this correspondent pointed out in February, some conspiracy theorists seem to have developed a particular penchant for Everton new stadium stories though to the point of it becoming an unhealthy obsession with some keyboard warriors’ mentality totally at odds with something so obviously beneficial for the community. As the construction presses ahead, such progress seemingly irks a small but vocal gang of peculiar types who have nothing better to do than troll articles about the subject.
The people of the Liverpool City Region, be they of a Blue, Red, other or no footballing persuasion, gave this amazing development a truly ringing endorsement throughout the public consultation stages and the reality is that I could see what some still pathetically refer to as “an imaginary stadium” rising before my very eyes through the window of the Merseyrail carriage I travelled on to go to Goodison Park on Saturday while the naysayers were possibly too busy staring at screens in their bedrooms, preparing to spew out more pettiness and paltriness. This deal should go a long way to ensuring that Everton’s new home – which Barrett-Baxendale says Farhad Moshiri is committed to delivering – is completed on schedule in 2024.
