Euston station in London is a bleak place at the best of times. Claustrophobic, harshly lit and always overcrowded, nobody wants to be there for longer than is absolutely necessary.
It was thus a fitting venue for a group of Everton fans to harangue their team’s players as they boarded a train back to Merseyside after their 4-0 defeat to Tottenham at the weekend. “F***ing rat” was one of the choicer epithets that could be heard on a clip that went viral at the weekend.
The footage raised conflicting thoughts. On the one hand, it was tough not to agree with the club’s striker Neal Maupay — one of the primary targets for the abuse — when he posted on X: “Imagine another job where it’s normalised to get abuse like this. Hanging around at a train station to scream at men who are trying their best.”
It is only two games into the new season and they are not deliberately trying to lose.
Neal Maupay was the subject of abuse on Saturday (Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
Yes, the players are paid huge amounts of money, but the numbers on their wage slips are reflections of their athletic and mental abilities relative to the finances of the industry they are in, not a measure of how many swear words you can hurl at them while they are boarding a train. By Monday morning, Everton fan groups were queuing up to condemn the scenes.
On the other hand, there will be plenty of people out there who, maybe in a very small way, identify with those Everton fans. Sometimes you have a lot of rage and frustration and you don’t know what to do with it. Those Everton supporters should not have reacted the way they did, but when you are at the end of a long, expensive and disappointing day, and the sources of that disappointment wander past, it’s easy to see how rage can drown out the better angels of your nature.
The reaction isn’t just about one game either. You could make a strong argument that Everton are the bleakest club in the Premier League — and have been for some time, given all of the problems swirling around them.
We’ll take on-the-pitch stuff to start. They have lost their first two games of the season by an aggregate score of 7-0. It is the first time in their history that they have lost both of their opening games by three or more goals. Only Everton and Southampton are yet to score in this season’s Premier League. Everton have had only two shots on target, which is the lowest in the division, and a much-trumpeted final season at Goodison Park began with a defeat to Brighton that saw the stadium half-empty by the time the final whistle blew.
Goodison Park was largely empty by the time the Brighton game ended (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Dominic Calvert-Lewin, despite his run of goals towards the end of last season, continues to be nothing like his best. Beyond him, they have only Maupay and Beto as centre-forward options, albeit Iliman Ndiaye will potentially be threatening from a slightly deeper role. Their full-back options are shallow, they look light in central midfield and they will be praying Jordan Pickford’s error at the weekend is a blip rather than a sign that his capabilities are waning. Saturday’s game against Bournemouth is, absurdly for the third fixture of the season, already looking massive.
But that’s nothing compared to the off-pitch stuff. The sale of Amadou Onana to Aston Villa should set aside any immediate concerns over a third points deduction related to profitability and sustainability rules, but you never know what gremlins lurk in their books.
More of a worry is Everton’s ownership situation. Fans have been protesting the regime of owner Farhard Moshiri for years. It is a relief that they didn’t end up in the hands of 777 — the Miami-based investment firm that The Athletic pointed out in June had been “described as a ‘house of cards’ in one lawsuit and a ‘Ponzi scheme’ in another” (claims 777 denies) — but the mess left by that protracted takeover saga spooked the Friedkin Group, a slightly more reputable potential custodian.
As Matt Slater reported in July, the Friedkins got cold feet because of legal uncertainties surrounding the £200million ($260m at current rates) that former Everton suitor 777 Partners has lent to the club over the past year.
Moreover, even though Dan Friedkin didn’t acquire the club, he still lent them a further £200million to pay a bill from the constructors of their new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock. So the next suitor that comes along not only has to unpick the ball of wool that is their finances, but also has to contend with two sizeable loans to previous prospective owners — loans that will need to be paid back at some point.
They’ve managed to find themselves in a Groucho Club situation: it’s such a mess that anyone you would want to own your club is probably too sensible to go anywhere near them.
Everton fans have been protesting at the running of their club for years (Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
Their best hope appears to be John Textor, but even if he manages to divest his stake in Crystal Palace — which, for financial and regulatory reasons, he needs to do to buy Everton — he’s not exactly a knight in shining armour. The most generous description of his record with his other clubs is ‘patchy’: a less generous interpretation is that his clubs tend to end up in varying degrees of chaos.
Belgian side Molenbeek were relegated last season, Lyon’s men’s team were in danger of the same in 2023-24 until a superb second half of the campaign and Palace’s progress has been stop-start since his arrival as a shareholder in 2021.
Even the success stories come with an asterisk: Botafogo are second in the Brazilian Serie A, just one point off the top after 24 games, but collapsed spectacularly when well placed in the title race last season. Textor subsequently made a series of match-fixing and corruption allegations that were rejected by the Superior Tribunal de Justica Desportiva, the autonomous legal arm of Brazilian football, funded by the country’s football federation.
Ultimately, if Everton fans were to choose their ideal owner, it wouldn’t be Textor. He just looks preferable to some of those who have kicked the tyres over the past year or so.
Sean Dyche summed it up more succinctly after the defeat to Tottenham: “There’s so much noise and stories every day around Everton and it is tough. It’s not very often about the football.”
There are some reasons to be cheerful. They also lost their first two matches of the previous two seasons and were ultimately fine. They have an excellent manager who specialises in defying expectations, whose entire career has essentially been one long middle finger to people who have written him off. They have, at the time of writing, managed to keep Jarrad Branthwaite, a genuinely excellent and homegrown (mostly — he signed from Carlisle United when he was 17) defender that plenty of big teams have already been sniffing around and more will do so in the future. All being well they will be in a new, modern, picturesque stadium this time next year.
But those rays of hope are having to work hard to pierce the fog of despair at the moment. If you search ‘Everton dejected’ in the Getty Images database, it comes up with 4,563 results. And not all of them are Pickford.
At the start of the season, The Athletic ran a survey to gauge the hopefulness levels of each Premier League club’s fans. According to that, 76 per cent were more optimistic about the season ahead than pessimistic.
You wonder how different that will be now.
(Top photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
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