Grounds for discontent at Everton as move hits trouble

Dub13 · Jan 22, 2009

The Guardian

Grounds for discontent at Everton as move hits trouble

Everton are desperate for Kirkby move even though it would earn only up to Â£6m extra each season

While the world of football has been transfixed by the gold and glitter of Sheikh Mansour's bid for Kaka, Everton, a club considered similar to Manchester City, are having a very different potential future determined, in teeth-grinding detail, in a 1970s civic hall in Kirkby.

There, buttressed by rows of ring-binders, a planning inspector, Wendy Burden, is hearing cases for and against Everton's new 50,000-seat stadium, proposed for the deprived town, originally overspill for Liverpool, as part of a massive retail park spearheaded by a 15,000 sq m Tesco.

The neighbouring local authorities – Sefton, West Lancashire, St Helens and Liverpool city council – are opposing the plans, not because of Everton's relocation but because they argue the retail development is too big and will suck 68% of its trade, much of it by car, from areas outside Kirkby.

Keith Nutter, a retail consultant, was standing up last week to some tetchy questioning from Knowsley council's barrister; Nutter described the scheme as "unacceptable and unsustainable", and the design as "poor" for a town centre. "This is big-box retailing in a sea of car parking," he said.

Knowsley, though, considers this a near-miraculous chance to regenerate Kirkby, where 30% of people are without work, and which has failed for more than 20 years to attract a major supermarket. The council granted planning permission last June, but two months later the government called in the scheme for a public inquiry on a formidable range of issues. The development is much larger than provided for in Kirkby's official local and regional plans; Burden must decide whether its scale is "appropriate", what its impact will be on "the vitality and viability of nearby centres" and whether it fulfils government policy on sustainable development and reducing shoppers' use of the car.

Thus Everton's future depends on the graphs, maps and expert evidence tracking consumer spending, transport flows and Merseyside councils' Unitary Development Plans. The stadium is something of a side issue; although a chair at the inquiry is reserved for the club, its representatives do not always see the need to attend. The lawyers for Tesco and Knowsley sit facing those for the opposing councils and, at the back, the Kirkby Residents Action Group, which is against the development, and Keep Everton In Our City, a fans' group which opposes the Kirkby move.

Tesco does not argue the stadium is necessary to the scheme in a planning sense – it thinks the retail should be allowed anyway. For Knowsley council, though, Everton's presence was crucial to granting planning permission. Sheena Ramsey, the council's chief executive, calls the arrival of a Premier League club "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" which lifts the scheme from being an enormous retail park to "Destination Kirkby", a development to transform the town's image and aspirations.

The club's involvement is, therefore, so significant to Tesco – which will expect to make Â£1m a week – that the development is to subsidise the cost of building the stadium, by Â£52m. Everton must find just Â£78m themselves, to build a stadium with a larger capacity – and dining and corporate facilities – they cannot deliver at grand, groaning Goodison. That financial reality persuaded the former chief executive Keith Wyness, and now his acting replacement, Robert Elstone, to become ardent proponents of the plan.

Everton's chairman, Bill Kenwright, an avowedly sentimental Blue, was never as enthusiastic, admitting that he did not want to be for ever known as the man who moved Everton out of Liverpool. Yet after years of fruitless talk about a new stadium, he advocates this plan on one simple basis: needs must.

In their recently published accounts, to May 2008, Everton showed a small profit of Â£26,000, following a Â£9.4m loss the previous year. Turnover, in the first season of the Premier League's Â£2.7bn TV deal, and with David Moyes' side having finished fifth, increased to Â£75.65m. Not bad, and all at Goodison, but Everton still feel strapped trying to keep up with the so-called big four; their borrowings and bank overdraft increased Â£10m to Â£40m, and total creditors were up from Â£66m to Â£84m.

Kenwright has constantly pushed the club's borrowings to provide Moyes with a fund for signings, but maintains it cannot continue. Everton appointed the merchant banker Keith Harris to find a rich backer, but Harris admitted Everton, with a stadium to build, were not football's most attractive prospect even before recession put the brakes on takeovers generally. To KEIOC and other Everton fans who protest that "a mid-level quality stadium" in Kirkby, as Tesco's own consultants, DTZ, describe it, is not good enough, Kenwright argues there is, financially, no choice. A ballot of supporters, held in August 2007, was promoted by the club with the glum prognosis: "There is no Plan B."

Just under 60% of Everton fans agreed with that, while 41% voted against Kirkby, and so Kenwright tied the club's future to Tesco. Evidence submitted to the public inquiry on behalf of Everton by the sports consultants Deloitte shows a surprisingly small financial benefit expected from all this struggle – just Â£6m a year extra, and that is based on the club almost filling a 50,000-seat stadium every time. This is no Emirates Stadium, which doubled Arsenal's turnover, and where the old Highbury could be redeveloped into luxury apartments. Everton still do not know how they will raise even the Â£78m required, and Goodison, itself in a deprived area with rows of boarded-up terrace houses, will not fetch a fortune.

Outsiders cannot understand why the two Liverpool clubs do not together build a landmark stadium to share, especially given Liverpool's failure to raise the Â£400m said to be required for their own new home planned for Stanley Park. In July the north American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, must refinance the club's Â£350m bank borrowing facilities, of which Â£270m is understood to have been spent – Â£185m of it on buying the club in the first place. They are expected to find that difficult in a global financial crisis, and borrowing Â£400m on top looks fanciful. Liverpool's new stadium designs, more than a decade in discussion, are, for the foreseeable future, computer-generated pipe dreams.

Yet the clubs are still set against sharing a stadium – and even if they make that imaginative leap, do not have access, even together, to the money required.

So Everton continue to hitch their future to the Kirkby move which, for Â£6m a year extra, has substantial hurdles still to overcome. The public inquiry, which opened on 18 November last year, is due to finish on 6 February, then the Planning Inspector is expected to take around three months to report. Even then, the government will take its time, and is not duty-bound to follow her recommendations. Everton, with no Sheikh Mansour on the horizon, do in reality have a Plan B, which they may yet need. It is to stay at Goodison Park, and continue to make the best of it.

david.conn@guardian.co.uk
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Grounds for discontent at Everton as move hits trouble

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Grounds for discontent at Everton as move hits trouble

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