Goodison curtain call celebrates Everton’s past and future | OneFootball

Everton’s Last Dance at Goodison: Smoke, Sentiment and the End of an Era

Goodison’s farewell staged in the full theatre of its defiance

It wasn’t so much an ending as a resurrection—one last riot of blue fervour before the inevitable curtain call. Goodison Park, ageing and aching with memories, bowed out in the only way it knew how: defiant, deafening, utterly incapable of going quietly into history.

Everton’s 2-0 victory over a compliant Southampton was just the detail, a footballing punctuation mark in a story that was never really about football. This was the final match, yes. But also the final walk, the final queues for chips, the final chants echoing off Leitch ironwork. The final thud of boot on turf three miles from Liverpool’s glittering centre. And for those Evertonians who queued outside since 8 am, ticketed or not, this wasn’t mourning—it was testimony.

Photo IMAGO

The streets surrounding Goodison—Winslow Street, Eton Street, Neston Street, Andrew Street were transformed into a pilgrimage route. Thousands swarmed towards the old church on the corner, towards the statues that anchored Everton’s past in concrete and bronze: Dixie Dean looming over dreams, ‘The Holy Trinity’ frozen in celebration. Each monument bore flowers, scarves, phones held high. Devotion etched into everyday ritual.

The team coach couldn’t make it to Goodison Road. Detoured instead to Bullens Road, cloaked by blue smoke, fans chanting as if it was a final. Because it was.

Songs, statues and stubborn sentiment

This was no Premier League farewell wrapped in corporate gloss. This was scruffy, romantic, raw. The Blue House bursting, the Winslow heaving, the Blue Dragon fish bar doing the best trade of its century. You could smell vinegar and fresh paint and yesterday’s regret. Inside, the old ground pulsed with anticipation hours before kick-off.

Z Cars blared, the air-raid siren groaned, and the Bullens Road Stand—Archibald Leitch’s architectural graffiti—shook as if trying to outlive itself. The Main Stand, futuristic in 1970, somehow still carrying the weight of hope in 2024. And when Iliman Ndiaye scored twice, it barely mattered. The football was the subplot.

Photo IMAGO

As the game trundled to its inevitable conclusion, something more powerful began to rise. A hush, a murmur, a tension building for what everyone knew was coming but couldn’t quite face. Then the board went up. Four minutes. Four final minutes of Goodison’s Premier League story. Four minutes of thunder.

Rituals and reunions beneath the stands

When Michael Oliver blew the final whistle, the stands didn’t empty. They stood. They sang. They cried. Because Goodison was never just steel and grass. It was a place of inheritance and argument, of memory and mischief. And in this final act, it found its best self again.

Video tributes played on the screens—Thomas Tuchel, Mikel Arteta, Carlo Ancelotti—all pausing to honour the noise, the awkwardness, the intimacy of Everton’s home. “The atmosphere at Goodison is unique,” said Arteta, a nod to the place where he found his rhythm before crafting Arsenal’s.

More than 70 former players made the pilgrimage. Tim Cahill, Gary Stevens, Paul Rideout, Bob Latchford, Graeme Sharp—men who had sweat into the soil of this place, now applauded like returning soldiers. Wayne Rooney was met not with judgement, but jubilation. No longer the lad who left for Old Trafford, but the boy who scored that goal, returned for remembrance.

Even David Moyes, who Evertonians once sang for and sometimes railed against, stood there again—older, greyer, humbled by the arc of time. “This was an extraordinary atmosphere,” he said, looking almost as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. “Everyone had come together as one club.”

Rebuilding identity beyond the bricks

For Moyes, now 62 and leading Everton into their new Hill Dickinson Stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, this was more than a swansong. It was a blueprint. “We all see it as another chance,” he said. “We need to start rebuilding Everton again.”

Photo IMAGO

There’s a danger in nostalgia—of becoming trapped in sepia, mistaking survival for glory. But for Everton, the past has always been armour. Moyes’s words struck with the weight of that: “Goodison Park will be remembered for one thing. The people.”

This is what new owners The Friedkin Group must understand. Not the structure, but the soul. The rattle of old signage, the smell of boot polish and Bovril, the roar that starts in the Gwladys and consumes the Bullens. “This should be bottled up, wrapped up and taken to the Mersey,” Moyes implored. “We have to make that happen again.”

Reproducing the irreproducible

But how do you replicate something so specific, so weird, so utterly irreplaceable?

Goodison was not perfect. The toilets were dreadful, the sightlines were worse, the atmosphere wasn’t always electric. But it was authentic. And in an era of homogenised arenas and piped-in playlist passion, that mattered. Andy Gray said it plainly: “We will leave Goodison Park. Goodison Park will never leave us.”

In its final moment, the old ground was given a send-off befitting its contradictions. A lone trumpeter played Z Cars once more, fans stayed rooted to their seats long after the players had gone. Not ready to leave, because deep down, they never really will.