If we dont win a trophy next season a shameful anniversary will be upon us: 25 years without a trophy win. That'll eclipse the previous barren period between 1939-1963 by a year (and that was as lengthy as it was because there was no football for 6 years because of a war). Since 1995, Leicester have won three trophies; Villa, Blackburn, M'boro, Birmingham City, Swansea City, Portsmouth and Wigan have each won a trophy.
Our downfall hasn't happened by accident. It's happened because the club in the last quarter of a century has been run by amateurs who've squandered the greatest money spree there's ever been at the disposal of Everton in its history. It's gone nowhere. Spent on paying off loans (and the interest run up for those loans...and that's another murky area in and of itself). Those loans were taken out because a series of owners simply didn't have the wherewithal to make a successful takeover happen and they used the club's PL status as a credit card and a liberal sprinkling of player sales to keep themselves in position for a future sale. Oh yes, there's been poor recruitment of managers and players. The cash wasted there hasn't helped either.
But this has been an age defined by our former peers upgrading stadia / building new stadia in order to stay competitive and increase their chances of success, but Everton's owners were too dimwitted to ever get a stadium idea off the drawing board and built. Which should come as no surprise to anyone, because they are the same people who employed a variety of CEOs to cut deals which were appallingly small for a club of this size, people who exhibited no idea how to grow Everton into a commercially viable operation. They've all recognised the key problem, for sure, but that's only been in order to hide their failure behind the mantra of 'facility-led' recovery and then they fold their arms as if nothing else matters. And here we are now still waiting for it with promises of updates where a secured planning permission for a stadium and funding to build it should be.
So, as we head into our 25th year in the wilderness, take a bow Messrs Johnson, Finch, Kenwright, Gregg, Earl, Dunford, Wyness, Elstone, Moshiri...and you too Mrs Barrett-Baxendale.
We wake up to the continuing nightmare of our local rival lifting another piece of silverware and taking their place in the sun while we remain firmy in the shadows, but remember that those named above are our real enemies, not an embarrassing cult who just so happen to share the same city as us. No one at Liverpool bollocksed us up for this length of time. The perpetrators of our quarter of a century decline all sat and sit in our boardroom at L4.
