Are Everton on Track to Become Proper Rivals For Liverpool Again? | OneFootball

There are some older Liverpool supporters who would be happy to see Everton finish second every season as long as the Reds won the league, believing that it would be a good thing for the city in general. There are more modern ones who would also be happy to see Everton finish second every season, provided it was in League Two.

Regardless, Everton haven’t been considered serious rivals to Liverpool for some time, but might that all be able to change with the position that the Blues find themselves in right now?

A New Ground Means a New Beginning

There is no doubting the fact that Goodison Park, whilst being one of the most romantic of stadiums in the United Kingdom, was falling apart. Repairing it to any real extent would’ve cost Everton an amount of money that the club simply doesn’t have available, so the only sensible thing to do was to move. Bramley-Moore Dock has its problems, which is a fact that has been evident every time the club has held a test event and traffic has ground to a standstill along the Strand and public transport has been straining under the weight of fans.

Having said that, the Everton Stadium, as it is known for the time being, certainly promises to be a great addition to the Premier League and will give players, management, and supporters a lift heading into the new season. It is also the kind of thing that might well attract new players to the club, keen to play in the newest stadium on offer in the English top flight, even if it does mean having to play for the Blues. The only question that needs to be answered is whether it will prove to be a financial albatross around the club’s neck.

New Owners Could Elevate the Club

When it comes to the people responsible for making the decisions at Everton, the club has struggled for a long time. Bill Kenwright, who died in 2023, was Blue through and through, putting Everton above all else in his thoughts to the point that he wouldn’t even allow red to appear on the Christmas trees in his offices. Sadly, his hatred for Liverpool seemed to be more important than his love of Everton, which then permeated down to the supporters and other members of staff at the club. His sale to Farhad Moshiri was supposed to represent a new dawn.

Moshiri, though, was largely being backed by Alisher Usmanov, meaning that the money dried up when Russia invaded Ukraine and the British government blocked Russian billionaires from being able to spend their money in the UK. As a result, Moshiri failed to invest in the club in the way that was hoped, leading to widespread celebrations amongst Evertonians when he sold it. Given the fact that the club was being run so badly at that point and there was a large amount of debt attached, some Blues may have stopped to wonder why The Friedkin Group wanted to buy it.

The answer came in the form of that new stadium, which offers a huge amount of promised revenue down the line. The question that needs to be asked is what The Friedkin Group has been like for other clubs that it owns. The American business, headed by Dan Friedkin, also owns the Serie A side Roma, with many of their supporters unhappy at the way The Friedkin Group goes about its business, with some referring to them as ‘The Fraudkins’. William Friedkin was the director of The Exorcist, so Blues will be hoping this won’t be another Friedkin horror story.

There’s a Long Way to Go Before They’ll Challenge Us

If you have any soft spot whatsoever for Everton, then there is no question that new owners and a new ground are both huge positives for supporters to look forward to. Even so, there is still a long way to go before the Blues will be considered anything close to genuine rivals to Liverpool. The Reds are going to win their second title in the space of five years in May, having won every trophy there was to win in the decades since Everton last won a trophy of any description. Barring the geographical, there is little in common between the two sides.

That doesn’t mean that the Blues can’t become rivals in the future, however. Liverpool supporters know only too well how quickly things can turn, having spent most of the club’s Premier League existence desperately reaching for a title that didn’t come or else flailing around hoping to even qualify for the Champions League. If Fenway Sports Group gets things wrong at the same time as The Friedkin Group gets things right, who knows where we’ll be. For now, though, they might want to just focus on winning that first piece of silverware since 1995….