With Everton’s season belatedly getting under way this weekend the focus has, rather predictably, once again shifted back to the dire financial predicament the club currently finds itself in.
The release of the transcript of a meeting between Everton’s chairman and owner Bill Kenwright with members of the ‘Blue Union’, an amalgamation of supporters groups, has only served to heighten the doom and gloom the majority of Everton fans are feeling at the moment. What the ‘Blue Union’ were hoping to achieve by the release of the aforementioned transcript is open to debate. If they were trying to force Kenwright’s hand then that is all well and good, but investors and/or buyers aren’t exactly forming a lengthy queue around the district of Walton at this moment in time to throw their hard earned at the club. All it has really served to do is acutely embarrass the club and put it on the back pages of the national press for all the wrong reasons.
The majority of revelations exposed, for want of a better word, are not particularly new, or news, for that matter, to Everton fans. It was always quite apparent that the money from the transfer of Steven Pienaar to Tottenham and the sale of the former training ground had gone to appease the bank. In a time of global recession Barclays obviously view Everton’s debt as ‘toxic’, in fairness you can see their point. The clubs outgoings are greater than their incomings, you don’t need to be a brilliant mathematician to calculate that the fiscal problems the club is enduring are only going to exacerbate as time passes.
The main argument seems to be that although Kenwright is a true Evertonian he is not cut out to run a football club. It is difficult not to argue with that statement though. There are thousands of Everton fans out there who love the club as much as Bill purports to, however, that doesn’t give them the ability, business acumen or know-how to run a football club either. Is Bill just refusing to let go of his train set, is that perfect investor that he is searching for really out there?
You have to be careful of what you wish for though, lets take Portsmouth for example, or evenBirminghamCity, the new dawn both clubs faced has certainly turned sour to say the least. Things aren’t exactly rosy at Aston Villa either, where Randy Lerner was set up to be the shining example for other clubs to follow. Over the past couple of years Aston Villa have sold Gareth Barry, James Milner and Ashley Young in order to balance the books. It appears that not everybody is a Russian oligarch or a Sheikh Mansour.