Paul: Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you are, what time of the day you’re listening to this episode of Talking Your Blues. Now, quite often on this podcast, we talk about the fact that we haven’t planned what we’re going to say.
We don’t have an agenda. And we certainly don’t have topics that we’ve researched. Madly, I can genuinely tell everybody that’s listening to this on this occasion. And it’s normally true. Never was a truer word said.
So, this could be like a five minute Talking the Blues. George and Andy, how are you both?
Andy: Not bad.
George: You stop for someone to say. I’m sure when I got started, there’s various clickbait thingy bobs that Andy continually warns me of.
Ooh, have you read this? Last week’s was that the Friedkins are happy to unload Beto.
Have you heard this rumour? No. No. I would imagine you’re deliriously happy about it. I wasn’t deliriously happy because he’s a human being with feelings and what little I’ve heard of him speak and the way he conducts himself.
I think he’s a bit of a dude, but I was encouraged that if they’re going, this is not the standard that this club needs, then I kind of agree with that with respect to him, but as a person, but as a football player, no.
So, if there is any truth in it, I was kind of like, oh, that’s good news. And then just to counteract it, the same website tells you. me that Ranieri is now the new manager of Roma at 73 years of age.
Hope for all of us, I’ve written to Dan Freak in to go, I’m 77. I’m sure I could get my badges left.
Andy: It’s funny that you mentioned about quality because I watched Howard’s Way yesterday. It was on Sky Documentaries yesterday afternoon.
So I watched Howard’s Way and you know talking about from when he was first made manager and two or three years of disappointing results and everything and then everything kind of clicked into place in 83, 84 and we went on that route.
you know, that marvellous three or four years and and the place just oozed or the team just oozed quality in every position. And it just kind of right at the end, you know, when it was, it was Sharpie, Reedy, Andy Gray and Pat Van Den Hal laughing and joking and whatnot.
And you could tell that they all felt, you know, more than genuinely about the club and about that time and that period in their careers. And it did actually bring it almost a tear to the eye watching it because it was just brought back some great memories to sat there watching, you know, the clips of the games and everything and just and you just think to yourself, God, that’s that’s so, so long ago.
Please read games. Do your best. Don’t go at it bull at a gate. Do it. Do it smart. Do it, you know, be organised. Just get things back to where they were in the mid 80s if you possibly can. It’s been too long.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I always find that Howard’s way assume that you’ve seen it, George?
George: I haven’t actually. Is it on Netflix, Andy? How did you watch it?
Andy: It was on Sky Documentaries yesterday.
George: All right.
Andy: I think I might even have a DVD of it. I’ll send it to you.
George: Thanks very much. What are you going to say, Paul?
Paul: I always find it a fascinating study in so many different respects. It was, I suppose, from my perspective.
Clearly, it was the best, the best of times in terms of success. And, you know, it was just a fantastic time to be in Evertonian, particularly, having been brought up in Liverpool in the 1970s, when Liverpool won everything.
And it seemed that, you know, when you went to school, probably 75% of the school was Liverpudlians and only 25% were Evertonians, or at least it seemed that way at the time. And, you know, the endless European trophies at Liverpool won when we were, you know, we were neither challenging for the top nor were we in any danger of being relegated, I suppose.
Although, you know, I suppose looking back, you know, the Gordon Lee side. was a much better side than anybody ever really gave it credit for. And we did come close to me on a couple of occasions, you know, the 77 League Cup final against Aston Villa, finals against Aston Villa, for example.
And, you know, we were, we were so knocking on the door, but we were never quite there. And then all of a sudden, how it comes along at a really difficult time, has a difficult time to become with himself.
And then with a bit of a right type, a bunch of players missed some misfits on people getting towards the end of their careers. People like Peter Reid, who had been, you know, injured throughout different points throughout his career.
Other players, players like Bracewell, for example, who had not yet proven themselves. Even, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Even, you know, Neville Southall, I mean, he wasn’t Howard Kendall find, was he?
But he’d come from Bury and he wasn’t certainly when Howard first came to the club, he wasn’t, no way was he the world’s best goalkeeper. He became the world’s best goalkeeper, but he wasn’t at the point where Howard came.
So that, that whole movie goes through that whole, whole period. And yet at the same time, there’s some, like really some things which today possibly would not be considered to be acceptable. There was that the whole relationship with alcohol, which I still find difficult to, to understand, both in terms of what they did at the time, also how they could still continue to talk about it to this day, or however many years ago that Howard’s way was produced six, seven years ago, whenever it was. Big drinking culture. Yeah, yeah. Because it just doesn’t obviously doesn’t fit in with modern professional sports.
And it possibly doesn’t even fit in. Societally these days, neither. But yeah, there we are. You know, the best team, not the best club, but the best team in Europe for a short number of years. And then obviously, we never really got to know how, how good they could become and how dominant in Europe they could have become, for fact, is completely beyond our control.
And then, you know, this, I think the start of the decline of the management and the running of the club was that in the sense that we couldn’t keep the team together, we couldn’t maintain our competitive advantage in the European ban era after we’d won the European Cup Winners Cup.
We started to decline competitively even though all of the other major English clubs had the same competitive problems in terms of not being able to play in the world. We had more to lose than most. We had much more to lose and I think without having done any great analysis of it, I think we lost our key players more readily and more quickly than other teams did.
I know people argue about the time that Lineker was at the club that obviously we came very close but we didn’t win anything in the one year that was at the club but he left and then and Trevor Stevens died and went to Rangers and other players left as well and the team broke up very very quickly didn’t they and the people that we brought in towards the back end of the 80s were all good players but they weren’t the same players and they didn’t have the same individual and team identity that that particular team had for that very short period of time and it’s obviously from an Evertonian’s perspective it’s almost quite tragic that the period of time that we were successful was so short because it wasn’t warranted by both the manager nor warranted by the players that we had at the time yet I don’t think how its way necessarily and maybe it doesn’t need to.
But I don’t think it addressed those issues at all and one of the issues I have with many of the people many of the players that were in that team at that time with the honourable exception of Neville Southall, is that none of them really have ever addressed or asked the questions that needed asking of Everton in the period ever since then?
And I do wonder, and I still wonder, and I would love one of them, or more than one of them, to come out and explain why they haven’t been more demanding of the club, particularly in recent years, and more outspoken about the way the club has been run in recent years, so that we could get back to somewhere near where they left us. Because I often believe that they would never have accepted the standards that this club has operated at for decades now. whilst when they were players and if their love and dedication to Everton is as complete as they claim it to be and as for example that film suggests it is, why did they never ask those questions?
George: Interesting. I’ve heard Andy Gray be critical of the way the club is run but he’s the only one, him and Southall, and he’s certainly not as outspoken as Southall. Just tell me something that I’ve completely forgotten because obviously you’re making me think about this.
English clubs were banned for five years from European competition after Heysel, weren’t they?
Andy: Yeah.
George:Were Italian clubs banned for five years as well?
Andy:No.
George: Oh.
Paul: It was a direct result of Margaret Thatcher actually making the representation to UEFA that English clubs shouldn’t play in European competition.
George: I beg your pardon?
Andy:That’s right, I could. It was a direct result of Margaret Thatcher’s policy. Well, not policy, the fact that she went to UEFA and said English clubs should not play in… The only way of solving what she called the English problem was to take us out of European football.
Paul: It was driven by the British government. And of course once that happens, UEFA were only too pleased to oblige.
George: You may have to speak to us for about 10 minutes here. Hang on, let me rev up the bleep machine.
Well, oh my God, I never realised that. I just had a little sneaky thing as you started to talk about it. The back of my mind that the Italian club didn’t get back. Fantastic. And change the subject, please.
Paul: I mean, you can ask the question why, and the Scots would argue that they didn’t have the same problem that the English clubs had, but what were the cultural football differences between Scottish football and English football at the time, in terms of spectator behaviour?
I don’t think they were that different. But then you could argue what was the difference between the behavior of English football supporters overseas with that of the Italians. Or any country, for that matter.
Andy: Everybody’s got a percentage of goons that travel away. Yeah, but I suppose, and this is, yeah. Where it grates you know, where it grates you know, is that barely, you know, a week, 10 days earlier, whatever hour, however long it was, you know, we’ve been round, we, Everton Football Club supporters have been roundly commended for their behavior in Rotterdam.
You know, by the Dutch police, everybody, everybody said that we’d been fantastic. And we were, it was a tremendous couple of days.
Paul: The Dutch police took their jackets off. Yeah, played football in the square.
And used their jackets as goalposts and played football against us.
George: Keep talking boys, I’m still seething about Thatcher. You keep seething bro. Howard’s way, he’s not going to be that kind of film, is it?
Does it suggest, you know, I always assumed that eventually Howie had a big drinking problem, didn’t he? But I always assumed that that kick in the teeth for all the ambition and everything that he’d put together being destroyed by the ban on English fans was the trigger for his, you know, what I presume was the downhill path.
Andy: Well, it was, it was, I mean, part of the fact that we came back the year, you know, two years after and won the league again, but again, we weren’t able to go into Europe. We weren’t able to go into the European Cup as champions.
We weren’t able to defend the Cup Winners’ Cup, which, well, we wouldn’t have done because we were champions that year, so we’d have gone straight in the European Cup. But then we were champions again two years later, and we weren’t allowed to go in again.
And Howard wanted to test himself in Europe. So, that was why he ended up going to Athletic Bilbao.
Paul: Well, if he wanted, yeah, I mean, if you go to Bilbao or you go to San Sebastian, the whole region, the Basque region, and George, I mean, you live very close to the Basque region.
And they absolutely adore Howard. for for what he did when he was there very very adorable man wonderful football player yeah actually which probably leads us on to um get away from that yeah um who’s who’s 80th birthday was it this week
The king calling calling the man and Andy painted the White Pele banner, and for those that don’t know that banner was actually painted and held by one Andrew Costigan.
Where was it Andy?
Andy: Uh it was over the electric scoreboard on the day we played Wolves in a one of the drabbest nil nil drawers you’ve ever seen in your life and we’ve got a collection of them the drab nil no drawers have we ever featuring the White Pele. Yeah no calling calling never appeared in a drab game well i’m sure he did but we’re never going to have an excellent run
But no i was i was distraught, Bally had gone, Howard had gone and then Colin was sold it was like what on earth’s going on here?
George: I’m still asking the same question Andy
Andy: Pardon you’re still asking the same question. I know yeah what on earth’s going on yeah but Colin was always my favorite and I just felt I had to do something.
So me and me and a mate, Garth the General we uh, oh well I made the banner and me and hitch hiked down the East Lancs displaying the banner all the way down the East Lancs and then got in the got in the Park End and hung it over the electric scoreboard
And when Martin Dobson came in and walked across the pitch, we shouted to him and said, you’ve got to live up to this, pal. And Dobson looked up and read it and must have thought, oh my God. Yeah, King Colin hates it. Happy birthday, King Colin, if you’re listening.
George:How many caps did he win?
Andy: I mean, that’s just ridiculous that he only won one cap. Was it Malta? I thought he got one in a Joe Mercer friendly, didn’t he? No, I think he has one. I think his one international cap was against Malta.
George: And how many did Howard get? How many caps did Howard
Andy: I don’t know. none, I don’t think. I don’t think he got any, did he? I don’t know how he was not capped. I mean, when you think of that trio, you know, I mean, Blly, Harvey and Kendall, I mean, I think Bally had 30 caps in his time with Everton.
So, less than 40 caps between the three of them. For the greatest midfield trio, the game in this country, for sure, has ever seen. And they’ll never be better, in my money, for my money, the best midfield trio ever.
They could play, they could tackle, they could fight. And most of all, they wanted to win, and they wanted to win with style, and they did. And that’s what we’re lacking. That’s the kind of, that’s what the club needs now at once.
Players of that kind of determination. I mean, you speak to Colin Harvey, he’s such a mild-mannered guy, but from, you listen to the players, but I mean, even in Howard’s Way, they talk of him. When he was training them, you know, he would rip the back out of him, they were all terrified of him.
They knew, you know, big guys like Sharpie and Ratcliffe and Mount Phil, and even Big Nev, they knew, if Colin had beef with him, they knew they were going to get it. That’s what Seamus did the other day, wasn’t it?
Paul: He had standards, and he wanted them to adopt his standards and improve upon his own standards. He was a complete perfectionist, wasn’t he? And there was no tolerance of anything below. whatever was the best that people went when people didn’t produce their best.
And I think that was the big thing about him that he just demanded everything from everybody. And he wouldn’t tolerate anybody not producing everything that they could give. I didn’t mean that you had to be the best player in the world by any stretch.
It just meant that whatever you had to offer, you had to give it. And if you gave it, then everything was okay. And if you didn’t give it, then everybody knew about it. And you’re absolutely right for such a mild mannered, gentle man, and very shy man.
But he was the perfect number two, wasn’t he? He was the perfect foil for Howard. Because Howard, I think Howard was demanding, obviously, and demanded the best. But he was the expression about the iron fist and the kid glove.
And where his comms were different. And he was like, and I suppose that’s why they were so well together. I mean, in the same way that Taylor and Clough worked together. Yeah. But Taylor was the mild, you know, or it seemed like the quieter guy, but actually, he was the one who had even greater demands than the more demonstrative Clough.
George: Yeah, Clough was the last one. Yeah. As was Howard.
Paul: Yeah. And yet the irony is that in footballing terms, as footballers, even though we call them the Holy Trinity, there really was only one God and that one God was Alan Ball.
And I suppose the argument would be with, I think, from an episode in this perspective, Alan Ball was and is the greatest of them all. But how much of that is attributed to the fact that he played alongside Kendall and Harvey?
Andy: Yeah. I still don’t know why we sold him. Bally
George: Yeah. Was it Thatcher’s fault?
Andy: Probably. Oh, George Osborne.
Paul: George Osborne, yeah. I think it was probably Sir Keith Joseph. We’re really pigs. There’s that picture, isn’t there, of Bally, when he’s leaving Goodison, with his white boots, when he’d been told he’d been sold to Arsenal.
He’s walking towards the corner of the old Park End Stand. You can see it in his face. I don’t think he ever wanted to leave Everton.
George: You wouldn’t imagine anybody in that side who ever wanted to leave Everton.
Paul: Well, I can’t imagine anybody ever wanting to leave Everton at all. I was reading some stuff today because I was putting together a lot of stuff on Moshiri’s time, which may or may not end up as a book.
I was thinking today about the time when Lukaku was asked whether he was staying at Everton. Remember when he was overseas and he was playing for Belgium somewhere and he was asked by, well, are you staying at Everton?
And he just laughed and he just said no chance, rather there’s no, I think he said there’s no chance of that. Incredible, really.
George: How did we get to this? We’re depressed.
Paul: Well, yes and no. Things are terrible on the pitch and the football that we’re playing currently is as bad as any football that we’ve ever played.
Even the football that we’ve played under Mike Walker. Worse than the football that we’ve played under Allardyce. Worse than the football that we’ve played under Benitez, for sure. But are we totally depressed?
No, there’s hope. And I’m clinging to it. You know, in three Talking the Blues time, Moshiri will be toast and we’ve got new owners and perhaps a new manager. And I’m looking forward to the new year.
Andy: You have to, don’t you? I’m very positive about that. about where we’re going. The issue is the length of time it’s gonna take us to get to where we wanna be. Yeah, but like you said, don’t go bull at a gate.
Although I’d be perfectly happy if they did go. No, you know, cause Koeman went bull at a gate. We don’t want a shed full of number 10s again, do we?
George: We do not. You know, if we need a number 10, just get warm and make sure he’s a good’un.
We don’t have to buy them all. And then try and figure out who’s the best of them. It was kids in a sweet shop, wasn’t it?
Andy: Yeah, absolutely. That was what I meant by the bull at a gate. Don’t go kids in the sweet shot.
Paul: Just, you know, I don’t think these guys are gonna be anything remotely as ludicrous with splashing the cash as much here he was. When you think back, and again, You know, I’ve been doing a load of stuff which is not complete by any sort of imagination.
When you look back at it and think about Ronald Koeman’s time, he was the manager that Moshiri wanted because Moshiri wanted in his own words, a Hollywood manager. And then when he was brought in, I mean, Ronald Koeman was not a David Moyes, he wasn’t the guy that was going to be there 24-7, seeing 10 games a week, knowing the details of every single player that played in the second division or played in the Spanish league or whatever,
Andy: As did Moyes, for example. He just wasn’t that type of manager. He was a 9-5 manager, wasn’t he? Yeah, and you could argue about whether he’s a good manager or not. Most people would say that he wasn’t, but he was definitely Moshiri’s choice.
Paul: You know, after they decided to get rid of Martinez, you could argue about whether or not they should have got rid of Martinez, although Martinez probably had won his time. Certainly felt like it. Martinez, and again, you know, I’m not going to go into it all now, but Martinez only managed to have 11 games in the period that Moshiri was owner.
Andy: He was toast, wasn’t he, before, you know, in the run-ups of Moshiri arriving? No? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the crowd had run out of patience with him. We’d run out of dour performances and his overuse of the word phenomenal.
No, his time was up. It was really only a matter of time before the decision was made. I mean, Mr Kenwright tried to extend it with his what a manager quote in Moshiri’s ear when we knocked Chelsea out of the cup.
No, he was always going, but I think Moshiri’s appointment of Koeman surprised many of us really. That was through to this. Don’t get me wrong, you know, if he’d managed the way he played the game…
George: Quite. 100% Andrew, that’s one of them. When many of us remember Ronald Koeman and the player and hope that that was going to be the kind of, you know, if we got Ronald Koeman and the player in a manager, then brilliant.
We’d be laughing, you know, because he was a class act as a player.
Paul: Well, I wonder if he was when he cheated against England. Yeah. But then look at Slaven Bilic, you know, yeah, we can’t go into great players that cheated, can we?
Paul: We would be here. I’ll tell you what we can go into. Oh, right. I’ll tell you what we can go into both with, actually, three, I’m going to name three, three managers, Martinez, and this all happened under Moshiri’s ownership, and for different reasons, Martinez, Ronald Koeman, and Silva, they were all managers with a certain skill set, and you can argue what that skill set was, but they all had skills which might have meant that they could reach the top of the game.
And in the case of, you know, Silva. Moshiri, Silva. he still might do that. My point would be, and the difference between Moshiri’s approach with those managers and, say, you know, the period when we’re, as we were talking about earlier in the podcast, Howard’s way was that Howard was given all the support that he needed when things went bad for him by the club and by the players, and, you know, they, like that thing I was talking about a couple of weeks ago with Michael Caine, used the difficulty, they got through the difficulties of the time with Howard and turned it into something that was remarkable.
We’ve never done that, or we never did. that. It’s too late now and we never did that with Moshiri and we didn’t do it with Moshiri with regards to Martinez and what Martinez needed actually was probably a director of football and he needed a good defensive coach to sit alongside him to sort of tone down you know some of his natural exuberance.
You could argue with Ronald Koeman that we had a manager like him. We probably had the ability to attract some of the best players across Europe and again had he had more guidance, had he had people who were prepared to and I want to talk about change in a few minutes.
Had he had people who were prepared to tell him the truths about the way that he was managing about you know as you say Andy you know he was a man to five manager and he had people who might have said to him, look, you might, you might have been the world’s, one of the world’s greatest footballers, but you’re not yet one of the world’s greatest managers.
And we’ve brought you in because we think you can be and this is what you need to do in order to become that. Had he had, had he had somebody like that at the football club, particularly the owner, then the, you know, the Koeman situation might have been very different from how it ended up.
I would argue particularly with the silver situation and had he again had Silva. had somebody who could put their arm around him and, you know, give him some guidance, give him some support, bring other people in that could have helped him in the areas where he needed help.
And there wouldn’t have been a reason to fire him when we fired him, but we didn’t do that. Or rather fired Moshiri didn’t do that.
Andy: Can I just interject here, Paul, just to ask, when did brands arrive?
Paul: That’s the top of my head. 2018.
George: But wasn’t Silva his kind of like, wasn’t he there in place to?
Paul: Yes, Brands was there when Silva was managing it.
George: So if you are writing a book, I’ll be interested to see and hear your opinions of, of Brands and, you know, his first director of football we’d ever had, wasn’t it?
Paul: Really, he was the second because of Steve Walsh beforehand. Steve Walsh was basically a chief scout. And he was never provided a job description when he joined as director of football. So he never had a template.
I mean, first of all, nobody in the club knew what a director of football was. And I have firsthand evidence of that quote, relating to that. But then nobody even sat down and Steve Walsh and said, okay, even if we don’t know what the director of football does, do you know what a director of football does?
Because what would have happened was that we would have found out that neither the club nor Steve Walsh had any idea what a director of football did. But we would have found out an awful lot earlier than we did.
I think Brands did. But again, you know, there wasn’t the structure around the club that wasn’t the governance within the club. that allowed him to do the things that he wanted to do. And in particular, and you know, this is not just a Kenwright bashing exercise in any sense, but in particular, the greatest conflict within the club over that period of time was not Brands and Moshiri, because Moshiri to a degree, although he did intervene and he did interrupt and he did interject with, particularly with his relationship with Kia Joorabachian Moshiri didn’t really have a huge issue with brands. The person who had a huge issue with brands was actually Bill Kenwright.
And you know, Bill saw Brands as a direct challenge to his role within the club. Yeah. You could argue that, you know, Bill was chairman. So how on earth could the director of football challenge what the chairman did?
The fact is that Bill as chairman was doing what directors of football did elsewhere. He was part of the recruitment, he was part of the overall strategy in terms of what the squad should look like. Even if he didn’t know that, that was what he was doing.
He was the person responsible for negotiating contracts, for agreeing contracts, agreeing contract extensions, agreeing transfer fees for players coming in and leaving the club. All the things that you, in today’s world, you’d expect a director of football to do, and probably all the things that Marcel Brown’s expected to do.
UAnd Marcel Brown’s biggest problem was Bill, not Farhad Moshiri, but not helped at all by Moshiri, because Moshiri either willingly ignored or didn’t have the ability to recognise. the conflict that existed between both parties.
George: I think that’s 100% spot on. That’s exactly how I read it. And I also read it as the biggest wasted opportunity of Moshiri’s whole tenure, was the waste of Marcel Brands. When he arrived, and the way he handled himself, and particularly when he brought that boy in from Italy, with his mother, he thought, oh, a class act.
And within two years, he’s going, just get me out of here. That was, in some ways, I think the club’s not recovered from that.
Paul: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very good point, George. When you think of some of the players that were recruited around that time, Moise-Keen is one, and Lookman is another.
Andy: Loughman was slightly before that one because he was there when Koeman was there.
Paul: Yeah, he was, but the point I’m making is that both of those players have gone on to do things which they should have done at Everton.
Andy: Well, certainly Lookman has. Never did. I’m not quite sure where oise Keen’s at in his career at the moment, but Lookman has certainly blossomed in Italy with Atalanta.
George: Yeah, very much. So, I guess, what are we saying, if you don’t?
Well, what we’re saying is what we were saying before when we were talking about the whole eternity, we want some standard and we want the club. I mean, people say that you shouldn’t hang on to the club motto because it’s just a motto.
Andy: You know, but no such as NSNO and nothing but the best, that was what those players, you know, back in the late 60s and what those players in the mid 80s lived and died by. Nothing but the best.
Well, Ball, Collin and Howard lived and died by. Yeah.
For sure, and it’s certainly what John Moores lived and died by. Yeah, and that’s all we want. Again, we want that belief in the motto again. You know, live up to it.
George: I don’t think football works like that, Andy, anymore. No, it probably doesn’t, but just because the rewards are so big that what, you know, what the team has to get behind is an ethos of how they play and they must express their pride in that.
Now, it stands to reason that the players that we’re going to watch next Saturday will not have a great deal of pride in the way they’re playing football because they know what good football looks like because you can.
It is sometimes elsewhere. And until Everton provides them with an ethos and a style and a passion to coalesce as a team and be proud of the way they play, then we are going to get short change. That’s more than anything.
George: I mean, I hope that, you know, that they must sort out the business side of Everton, which is just tragic. You know, I’ve been haunted by that thing you said, Paul, about the fact that this is our last season at Goodison.
And who knows? That stuck with me. And that’s just bad, bad management. Doesn’t matter, you know, that we’re not storming up and down the league. It’s still, you know, a terribly important part of what that club was.
But in terms of the team, I believe you’ve got to find a coach who can mold very well-paid young men who don’t know what NSNO means and it doesn’t mean anything anyway because every club’s got a motto and a you know idiot with a teddy bear’s head on or something.
Bring back the toffee lady I say. That’s what I’m hoping for. In terms of expressing what you just said about Colin Harvey, that happens now through a team going no we’ll give you a game of football.
Andy: We’ll beat you, whoever you are. We don’t care. We’re good and you know we all go that’s because they’re wearing the blue shit but it’s not really but you know it’s fine if it happens and it’s about time it did happen because we’ve been waiting decades for something like that to happen.
Paul: So when we talked a little bit before about the optimism that we might have for the future, the optimism that we have for the future is that there’s going to be change. The optimism is not driven by what we currently are.
It’s driven by what we should be in the future and the recognition that we’re not going to change under the current ownership and the current leadership that we have to have change in order to affect that change which justifies the optimism and again you know just I’m probably talking a bit too much here about some of the stuff I’m doing elsewhere but I was thinking about change and I came up with that three things that you might want to ask yourself when you’re considering change and it’s something actually I learned from a private equity guy.
How bad would it be if he didn’t change? So that’s the first question that you have to ask yourself when you’re considering change. And some people might think, like many people have never thought for many years, actually, it’s not going to be that bad if we don’t change because we can just carry on doing things the way that we’ve done in the past.
I don’t think that’s true. But that’s what some people might think.
The second question, then you have to ask yourself is, what is the prize that you’re after, if you do change? And nobody ever has asked that question, let alone answered that question for years and years and years, apart from perhaps the prize is to stay in the Premier League.
And that’s not really a prize. But that’s probably the closest to an answer that you’d get. And then the final thing that determines whether you’re going to change or not is actually how difficult is it to change?
Because you can build a case for change, you can create an ambition that you want to achieve by virtue of change, but then you have to ask yourself, well, in the knowledge of all of that, how difficult is it to do so?
And for Everton, for too long, change has been more difficult. The cost of change has been greater than what they perceive as the benefits today. And that’s the hope that the Friedkins, I think the Freidkins bring into this.
And people have talked about, you know, well, it’s like absolute chaos at Roma. Well, yeah, it is chaos at Roma. But that chaos is driven by the need to change. It’s not driven by the requirement to maintain the status quo.
It’s not driven by the thought process that says, everything’s okay here, and just carry on doing things the way that we’ve done them previously. It’s driven by, we’re looking for something here, we want something different from what we’ve got.
And they may, although they probably won’t articulate it, they may know what they want. But what they do know is that they can’t get what they want by virtue of doing what they’re doing, therefore, they need change.
And they will keep making changes until they find the people that can execute the change that provides them with what they want. And that’s what that’s what we’ve got to hope for.
George: Do you think that’s why they bought the club?
Because it’s ripe for that?
Paul: Yeah. Because for the right people, for the people who actually understand change, and for the people who’ve got ambition, and for the people who know how to execute change, and everything is an incredible opportunity.
Yep, certainly a sleeping giant. But it needs all of those aspects of change to be become a non-sleeping giant, in order to get to where we want to get to, well, where the three of us, and I think almost everybody that listens to our podcast, in order for us to get to where we want to be, we have to execute change.
And I think, ignore all of the nonsense of the people that claim that they wanted to come in and buy the club previously, none of them really demonstrated change or presented change as part of their reasons for buying the club.
They just saw the idea of 777, John Textor, and people before that, just saw the idea of buying Everton Football Club as a means of achieving their own objectives, and those objectives were waived beyond that of evidence, everything just a part of a bigger or greater objective elsewhere. I think that the Friedkins are different. And it’s funny enough, I wasn’t saying I was going to talk about it today.
I’ll leave it for another time. But all of that, and particularly what’s happening at the moment, which brings into question, and again, it’s not for today, but we’ll talk about it, I think, this whole idea of multi club models.
What are the benefits of it? And what are the dangers of it? Now, people will say Friedkins coming in, they already own Roma, and they own Cannes in France. But they don’t really operate it as a multi club operation, just happens that they own, in this case, two clubs currently, and probably, hopefully three clubs in the very near future.
Whereas, if you look at what Textor has done, and you will look at what 777 did, all be under different circumstances, a very, very different model. And that’s, I think that’s worthy of a whole podcast on itself.
So not at the back end of, you know, tonight’s talking the blues or today’s driving the blues. Basically, what he said is that if so he has an operation that owns several football clubs, multi club operations.
And he said, basically, if one club has excess cash, or has the ability to raise cash by selling players, or by borrowing more money, or by selling assets like stadium, or like the women’s football club, like they’ve done in Lyon, it’s perfectly acceptable for me as the owner of all of these clubs to take money from one club and give it give that money to another club within the group that needs that money more. So if you imagine the scenario where you sell your best striker for 40 million euros or 50 million euros or we sell Branthwaite for 80 million pound and because we’re having to be part of a group whereby somebody else in the group has a need for that money that money doesn’t stay in Everton to develop Everton’s squad it goes to another club somewhere else to cover the debts that they’ve got to cover the losses that they’ve got to cover whatever it is that that particular club needs to do.
John Textor and he may well be listening to this because I know he listens to some of our podcasts and believes it’s perfectly acceptable for him as the owner of all of those clubs to do that.
I don’t know a single football fan who would think it acceptable that resources from one football club can be passed to another football club, even when there’s common ownership. Yeah, because we’re fans of a club, not a group.
Yeah. You know, I don’t think any Olympique Lyonnais fan, for example, gives a sh*t what’s happening to Botafago in Brazil or what’s happening in Crystal Palace. And I don’t think any Crystal Palace fan gives a monkey what’s happening in France.
They’re only concerned about themselves just as we would be at Everson. So that in itself is an enormous area to discuss and to explore. And I don’t think it’s a problem with the Friedkin group, even if they own several clubs as they do.
Andy: We’ll get to that on the next international break, then.
Paul: Yeah. All right. Well, I don’t know how long we’ve spoken for, but given that we didn’t have an agenda to begin with. It’s an hour, Paul. It’s an hour.
Paul: Good. And we didn’t plan anything. We’ve got through it, and I think we’ve raised some interesting topics, points.
George: Yeah. Now, where’s my dartboard and my picture of Margaret Thatcher?
Andy: She’s hiding behind George Osborne.
George: Oh, no. I must have known that at the time and blanked it. Probably. Wouldn’t surprise you, would it? No, it doesn’t surprise me because I do remember the Luton fans. There was a Cup tiel at Luton one night and it was on the telly and they all rioted and they broke up the seats. They ran on the pitch and the police were completely overwhelmed. And it was the first time she’d ever seen it. And she was totally shocked.
Andy: You could see it, you know, it was just a Millwall gang. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. And, and she called everybody in, and said explain this to me, and so, you know, from her point of view, but how many Liverpool fans died at Hysel?
None
George: Oh, really?
Andy:39 Italians
George: Sorry. It’s pointless discussing it. She’s dead and buried and we moved to France because of her. So I got that bit, right?
All right gents, should we leave it there?
George: What time’s the kickoff against Brentford?
Andy: I should have planned you asking what time’s kick-off is,
George: Andy. It’s only because I’ve got rehearsals of the Am-Drams in the village. I’m going to miss it. Oh, dear. I know. Seriously. It’s got it coming up now, just a minute.
Say the five o’clock, Andy. You’d prefer five o’clock. The late kick-off, please. What is it? Or even the early one?
Andy: It says four days, 17 hours and 56 minutes. Three o’clock.
George: Right. I’ll miss it. I’ll look forward to the podcast then, boys.
I should be silent and wait for your wisdom.
Andy: That could be a long way. Tune in in a few weeks.
Paul: All right, guys. Thank you so much.
Andy: No worries, guys. Again, thank you to everybody. We’ll try them on an agenda for one week.
Paul: Why break the habit of over 300 podcasts? Actually, we have had agendas in the past. We’ve never stuck to them anyway. It’s a complete waste of time, writing them out, typing them out, sending them out.
Andy: I gave up doing it.
Paul: Oh, dear, mate. Never mind. Yeah, lovely to enjoy. Take care. Thanks to everybody for listening. Thank you.