The Hill Dickinson is a world-class stadium. Everton must find a team to match

In the profoundest depths of the Mariana Trench, an environment too hostile for most sentient life, you will nevertheless find creatures that have adapted to such baleful conditions: deep-sea anglers, fangtooths and lanternfish. To us, they look like skeletal xenomorphs, ragged spectres of evolution so long devoid of God’s sunlight a mere glimpse might kill them.

A similar process of adaptation can be observed in the psyche of Evertonians. This season marks thirty years since their last trophy, an FA Cup win I’m lucky enough to have faint memories of. In the intervening period, our souls have, like the anglerfish, become salty, bitter and tough, able to withstand unkind banter and even crueller disappointment. Yet this is not a case of whatever doesn’t kill us making us stronger; each defeat seems to diminish us to a more spiritually emaciated condition.

In this analogy, Liverpool fans are preposterously well-fed minke whales, sunning themselves on the ocean’s surface. Since 1995, while their neighbours across Stanley Park have starved for silverware, Liverpool Football Club have won every trophy it is possible to win, including league titles, FA Cups, European trophies and even those Everton have never had sight of, like multiple league cups and even a rare Club World Cup.

You might, justifiably, think this is all a bit melodramatic. After all, there must be hundreds of teams that never get a sniff of silver. I live just a few miles from Tranmere Rovers, whose trophy cabinet disproves Aristotle’s thesis that nature abhors a vacuum. Meanwhile, Everton are easily in the top ten most successful clubs in the country, boasting nine league titles, five FA Cups and a European Cup Winners’ Cup.

Everton have also displayed a limpet-like tenacity for avoiding relegation, playing a record number of seasons in England’s top flight. This combination of past success and recent pluck has led Unherd contributing editor Jonny Ball to argue that Everton are the true Scousers: “perennial underdogs, down-on-their-luck, forever gritty, embittered, aggrieved, and ready to argue, with a chip on both shoulders.” Furthermore, they are currently enjoying a brand new and world-class stadium, and the football they’ve been playing under a returning David Moyes represents a definite uptick from recent seasons.

And yet. Just this year, previously cup-starved entities such as Newcastle United and Crystal Palace have added to Everton’s hunger. In Newcastle’s case, they broke an eighty-year trophy drought – with boyhood Everton fan Eddie Howe at the managerial helm, no less. Meanwhile Palace won their first ever trophy, beating Liverpool along the way — and what Everton wouldn’t give for that. In doing so, both clubs added themselves to a litany of less-successful clubs that have nevertheless tasted success since ’95, some for the first time in their respective histories. This list includes Portsmouth United, Wigan Athletic, Swansea, Leicester City and West Ham United.

West Ham even won the European Conference League under Moyes, who has only ever taken Everton to a losing FA Cup final in his combined decade-plus tenures at the Toffees. Other recent Everton managers to achieve winners’ medals in other jobs include Roberto Martinez, Ronald Koeman, Marco Silva, Rafa Benitez and, of course, Carlo Ancelotti. While nobody expected the great Italian to add to his record five European Cups at the old Goodison Park ground, the Everton faithful could’ve been forgiven for hoping for a domestic trophy out of the relentlessly successful Ancelotti, perhaps the greatest knock-out artist in all football management.

Ancelotti did, at least, break some other Everton ducks during his short tenure. By winning the Merseyside derby away from home, the Italian gave Everton their first win at Anfield this millennium. He also masterminded a win at the Emirates, Everton’s first away victory over Arsenal since 1996.

But those wins, while welcome, also serve to highlight another strange, perhaps uniquely poor fact about Everton in recent decades: their away record against big sides. Earlier this season, Sunderland — another club that, with all due respect, have not quite the size or historical stature of Everton — went to Stamford Bridge, put in a big performance, and defeated Chelsea by two goals to one. A good achievement, but in the context of Premier League football, in which teams get a chance to beat opponents in their own backyards at least once a year, nothing extraordinary.

And yet, in the case of Chelsea, this is something Everton have not managed since 1994. In that time, while Sunderland have sometimes languished in the lower divisions, even falling so far as the third tier, Premier League mainstays Everton have had 30 failed attempts to win at Chelsea’s away ground. And it’s the same at other intimidating grounds. But for a solitary last-minute winner in 2013, Everton would be looking at 33 years without a league win over Manchester United at Old Trafford.

Over this multi-decade period, all four of these clubs – Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea Manchester United have enjoyed periods of dominance, including the “Sky Four” era during which there was a large gap between them and the fifth-best club. They’ve also had dreadful patches, winless runs and confidence crises, and yet their home records against Everton have remained almost perfect.

During the Sky Four era, at least for a couple of seasons, that fifth-best club was Everton. And they had the funding excuse: while Liverpool, Manchester United and especially Chelsea under billionaire oil magnate Roman Abramovich were able to spend freely, David Moyes had to assemble his squad on a shoestring, frequently relying on finding diamonds in the lower division roughs or recruiting from the youth team. But now Everton have seen their own billionaire owner come and go, with no improvement in their on-pitch ventures. Arguably, things got even worse, as the club were nearly relegated in 2022 and 2023.

Even at Goodison Park, Everton have not been able to celebrate many trademark, statement-making wins over their local rivals. In October 2020, Aston Villa stunned then-champions Liverpool 7-2 at Villa Park. This was, granted, an astonishing, outlier result. But is it so ridiculous to ask that something like this — not necessarily by five clear goals, and not even against Liverpool — might happen for Everton, every once in 30 years or so? Aston Villa are a club almost identical in terms of stadium size, historical honours and support. And the key performers for them on that day? Ross Barkley, a boyhood Evertonian, and Jack Grealish, Everton’s current talisman.

Villa also enjoyed a decent run in the Champions League recently, something Everton have never had. A key part of their revival? According to The Athletic’s Jacob Tanswell, former Everton fullback Lucas Digne. His colleague Ahmed Walid has since highlighted the importance of Digne and another recent Everton player to Villa’s left-sided attacks: Amadou Onana. Neither of these players drove Everton to anything like European qualification.

An obvious solution might be to look at what other clubs have done to turn a corner and copy it. But arguably, Everton have already tried that. Firstly, when they appointed Roberto Martinez, who was a big part of Swansea’s and Wigan’s successes. His tenure, initially very promising, ended in acrimony. Secondly, when they attempted to recapture the lightning-in-the-bottle moment of Leicester’s Premier League title win by signing their head-of-recruitment Steve Walsh as their own director of football, with disastrous results. Everton splurged £250 million on Walsh’s player recommendations to wind up in a worse position than when they started. Back in the 90s, long before Abramovic, Chelsea made the leap from relatively parochial team to Premier League big hitter by signing Ruud Gullit, changing the perception of the club forever. That’s exactly what Everton were attempting with former Real Madrid star James Rodriguez under COVID, only for the Colombian to leave without live fans ever getting a proper chance to welcome him.

My thesis is that this is not normal. Yes, other clubs suffer long bouts without silverware, disastrous runs of form, reputations for “choking” in crunch games and derby defeats, and failed attempts at cracking the glass ceiling. But I put it to you that no club, in this country at least, underperforms so dramatically in all these areas for this long relative to its size and historic success. Everton are uniquely bad.

If this isn’t to do with the players, managers, executives or corporate ownership structure, who does that leave?

The golden rule in football journalism is to never lay any blame at the door of the fans. In the modern game, the honest, hard-working match-goer is sacrosanct. (Considering entry fees, what proportion of season-ticket holders can legitimately call themselves working-class is a conversation for another time.) But I thought I might, at least, get away with asking for their take, heading to blue pubs or fishing around WhatsApp groups for people whose opinions I respect.

Sharif, a boyhood Evertonian who gets to the game often as he can, traces Everton’s systemic bad luck back to a decade before 1995.

“We got kicked out of Europe,” he says, a reference to the blanket European ban on English sides that followed the Heysel disaster. “[And] lost our best team,” one that had just emerged from another stint in the wilderness to win the FA Cup, a domestic league title, and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. The resulting financial trauma was one thing, but fans have always been left wondering what could have been achieved had the ban not been imposed: Everton never had their “turn” to build a proper legacy.

“Once we came out of that, a new status quo had emerged in the Premier League,” Sharif said, while Everton were left cash-strapped and having to “make late payments to the bank to keep the lights on.” By the time Farhad Moshiri, the aforementioned billionaire buyer, came in, other clubs around Everton were already rich, and when everyone’s rich, nobody is.

“That's the narrative I tell myself, anyway,” Sharif says.

Dominic, an NHS worker who has been a regular at both home and away games for the last thirty years, tells me mentality may play a part. In 2020, he saw a much-diminished Liverpool side beat a full-strength Everton in the third round of the FA Cup, 18-year-old academy graduate Curtis Jones scoring the winner. Even before the game, “there was still a general pessimism that we wouldn’t win,” Dominic says. “An attitude you would pretty much never get from Liverpool fans.”

This reminds me how, a few years before, I sat rather surreptitiously in the home end for another FA Cup derby at Anfield. Wearing the sartorial equivalent of a purple bin, I was able to observe the Kopite in his own environment. Once accustomed to the non-local accents, I became aware that Liverpool fans were angry — not at their club, and certainly not at their players, but at the very possibility of losing to Everton.

“We have to beat these,” the man sat beside me growled, as if any other result would be too far beyond contempt to contemplate. I’d never heard such optimism from Evertonians, never mind confidence — often, we are resigned to losing before the first whistle, while somehow simultaneously paralysed with anxiety at the prospect.

There’s a reason why Liverpool fans booing Trent Alexander-Arnold last season was a big story, and Everton fans turning on their own players… well, isn’t. But it cannot be that Everton’s problems are only the result of some self-perpetuating feedback loop of stress between the live crowd and the players on the pitch. Can it?

“I’ve been thinking about it,” says Dr Gillian Cook, sports and performance psychologist at Liverpool John Moores, after I outline my thesis via email, “and [I] haven’t been able to identify any compelling evidence of a systemic mental block affecting players that they pick up at the club.”

Regarding changing managers, owners, and players over this period not making a difference, Dr Cook says “these changes affect the technical, tactical and sport science approaches and can impact performance in ways that are different to a mental block.”

I never want to subject anyone to the tyranny of “positive thinking”, nor tell fans some pseudoscientific law-of-attraction bullshit that they just need to believe more — as if the collective will of the Goodison faithful wasn’t already a huge part in Everton surviving recent relegation battles. On the other hand, there may be something in the management of the club perpetually trying to square the circle of the fans’ expectations.

Dominic thinks that, just how self-hatred can be another kind of narcissism, there’s a paradoxical element to the Evertonian mentality which he calls “win now.” Basically, Everton fans are fed up with not winning, which has bred impatience with the necessarily slow-burning process of player trading and development. He cites a “dead rubber” season under manager Sam Allardyce, when there was realistically no prospect of Everton either pushing for Europe or being relegated. That was the perfect opportunity to blood younger prospects like Ademola Lookman and Dominic Calvert-Lewin with an eye on future seasons; instead, Everton recruited Cenk Tosun and Theo Walcott because they were perceived as the finished article already.

“There have been too many deals like them, [Morgan] Schneiderlin, [Gylfi] Sigurdsson, [Yannick] Bolasie, etcetera, where [we’ve] bought experienced players on big wages and consequently can’t shift them when they inevitably don’t perform,” Dominic says.

Ball’s Unherd essay also addresses this magpie tendency at the club. “Rather than building patiently upwards,” Ball writes, “boardroom cowboys attempted to short-circuit the game via botched investments in overpriced and ageing players.”

Dominic says the fans’ post-traumatic impatience was once again in evidence last week: “‘Let’s sign Ivan Toney and make a push for Europe this season,’” he quotes, “when firstly, it’s very unlikely that we finish high enough for that even with him, and secondly it hinders player development of [recent Everton signing] Thierno Barry.” This season, I’ve heard fans lament that Everton are always buying “projects” like Barry rather than peak-performing athletes, effectively turning on a 23-year-old player before he’s even had a fair crack.

To supporters who have gone thirty years without a trophy, forbearance is perhaps the most bitter prescription of all. Why should we give a club who have failed us again and again the benefit of the doubt? It transgresses against the very motto of the club itself: nil satis nisi optimum, usually translated as “nothing but the best is good enough.”

But a logo is just a saying: you cannot summon the best ex nihilo. They have to be tempted, nurtured, allowed to make mistakes and given time.

In recent years, the live crowd have reinterpreted “optimum” in terms of effort, so that players are applauded so long as they clearly do their best. That’s laudable — not to mention more realistic than expecting Dwight McNeil to metamorphose into Lionel Messi. But it’s also why the useless Denis Stracqualursi, always happy to put a shift in for the Toffees, is better remembered than Premier League-era record scorer Romelu Lukaku, who was frequently denounced as lazy and uncaring. Running yourself ragged is not the only attribute of a top footballer. Now that Everton are sitting pretty at the Hill Dickinson, with stars the calibre of Grealish and Iliman Ndiaye seemingly ensuring us against further flirtations with the drop, it might be time to give less-assured players the time and space to develop other virtues, such as technical ability, vision, timing, finesse and patience.

Patience? Paradoxically, after so long without the light of silverware, that last one might be the one thing we haven’t tried.