Why Everton’s Fans Are Asking The Right Question About The New Stadium

Everton supporters were angry even before the team lost 1-0 at home to Aston Villa on Saturday.

Prior to kick-off fans organized a plane to fly over the stadium with a banner calling for chairman Bill Kenwright’s resignation. 

The film and theatre magnate has been the object of Everton’s followers' frustration for some time now and tensions have been escalating with every poor result.

After the game, a video emerged of supporters jeering Kenwright as he attempted to leave the ground. As the chairman tried to reason with them, the anger grew.

“What’s the point of the new stadium?” one of them shouted. “We’ll be playing in the Championship next season,” another chimed in.  

The sentiment was a stark contrast from the giddy enthusiasm that had been present just a few months back. 

In October, fans were so excited about the new project they were monitoring the progress of the vessel tasked with dredging the area of the River Mersey just by the stadium.

Although the forum may have been somewhat unconventional, the question raised by fans was a valid one: How does a sparkling 52,000-seater stadium help a club staring a relegation battle in the face?

Build it and they will come?

When the club’s hierarchy was making the case for the stadium, the reasoning was straightforward: They needed a new home to compete with the very best. 

“We love our spiritual home of Goodison Park, but we have been there for more than 125 years now, and it is clearly the one factor that we need to do something about if we are to bridge the gap to the top six,” Sasha Ryazantsev, Everton’s then-chief finance and commercial officer, said in an interview with SportsPro.

“The new stadium will give us more general admission seats and more hospitality, and it will also attract better partnership deals and enhance commercial revenues. But most importantly, the new stadium will give our supporters a better experience and make them feel proud and excited in an iconic setting on the Liverpool waterfront.”

It’s hard to argue with Ryazantsev’s general logic, but there is one fundamental issue: Having a larger capacity and better hospitality is only as good as the entertainment you provide.

No matter how loyal the support, a club battling relegation will always have a harder time selling out the stadium compared to one challenging for honors.

The benefits of having a big stadium are also reduced if you have fewer games to play in it.

Teams who are not competing in Europe make far less than ones that are and even then, the prestige of the competition can be a factor.

As I’ve pointed out before, in a stadium 40% larger than Chelsea’s with more hospitality, Arsenal managed to make only around the same amount of match-day revenue.

They trailed behind their rivals overall, and the reason was simple—they weren’t as successful.

If such challenges exist for a club that is already established in a new home, imagine what it is like for a team that’s upscaling.

In Everton’s case, there is the additional obstacle of geography. 

The wider Merseyside area has a population of 1.4 million, which is half that of Greater Manchester (2.8 million) and six times less than Greater London (8.9 million).

Realistically, Everton will need to draw supporters from further afield if it is to successfully fill out its new home regularly, particularly the pricier hospitality facilities.

But that’s easier said than done.

It can take years to establish a fanbase large enough to balance out a smaller population.

Bitter rivals Liverpool only do so by packing the ground with supporters from other parts of the UK and abroad.

Those fans were made decades ago thanks to the club being the dominant force in European soccer as the game was being televised more widely around the world.

But even if you are based in London, which has the biggest population in the country, and you can fill a bigger stadium, it doesn’t necessarily bridge the gap to the so-called 'Big Six’ clubs.

West Ham United’s stadium lessons

In 2016, West Ham United got a considerable upgrade when it moved from the 35,000-seater Boleyn Ground to the 60,000 capacity Olympic stadium.

However, as University of Liverpool soccer finance expert Kieran Maguire detailed on his blog, despite the massive increase in capacity, four years on from the move West Ham was only $10 million better off than at the club’s previous home. 

"The very big financial gap between West Ham and the Big Six is as big as ever,” he wrote. 

“What was so great and identifiable historically about West Ham has been lost in the shape of being representative of East End working-class culture has been replaced with a very bland, very corporate and very anonymous ‘matchday experience’ that is for many a price too high. 

Since that was written the atmosphere around West Ham United has changed, the club is doing well in Europe and is challenging for the Champions League places.

But no one would argue the stadium has been the catalyst for success that optimists hoped it might.

Indeed, many commentators suggested that the club’s improvement, which started while Coronavirus was keeping stadiums empty, was because fans were absent.

The simple truth is that the key ingredient to a successful stadium move is nothing to do with the facility itself, it’s whether the club is winning.

The reason the transition Spurs made from White Hart Lane to its new Tottenham Hotspur stadium was smooth had much to do with the timing, amidst a dramatic run to the Champions League Final.

In the groundswell of emotion at the club’s ever closest brush with Europe’s biggest prize, few noticed the project had been delivered far later than promised.

Building a top-level stadium is not easy. 

But, it turns out, it’s a lot simpler to do than assembling a successful Premier League team.