The Moores’ family’s association with Everton Football Club spanned more than three decades from 1960 to the mid-1990s. The family’s principal figure, Sir John Moores CBE, founder of the Littlewoods retail and football pools empire, transformed Everton from a club of modest post-war ambition into what contemporaries called the Bank of England Club and the Mersey Millionaires: the first modern English football club to deploy systematic, wealthy-patron-driven investment in playing talent.

Under John Moores’ stewardship as chairman and majority shareholder, Everton won two First Division titles (1962/63 and 1969/70) and the FA Cup (1966), built the celebrated Holy Trinity midfield of Ball, Harvey and Kendall, and set British transfer records on multiple occasions. 

The club’s infrastructure was modernised, gates were sustained above 40,000, and the manager appointed by Moores, Harry Catterick, earned a place alongside Bill Nicholson and Matt Busby as one of the defining managerial figures of the decade.

The report also documents the critical distinction between branches of the Moores family across Merseyside’s two clubs: while Sir John was Everton’s architect, his nephew David Moores, son of Cecil Moores, Sir John’s brother, was a lifelong Liverpool supporter who served as Liverpool FC chairman from 1991 to 2007, overseeing the club’s Premier League era and its 2005 Champions League triumph before a controversial sale to Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

A residual Moores family shareholding in Everton persisted well beyond Sir John’s death in 1993, with Lord Grantchester (grandson of Sir John) retaining approximately 7.9% of shares until 2019, when those were sold to incoming major shareholder Farhad Moshiri, formally closing the family’s direct financial stake in the club.

The Moores Family: Origin & business empire

Sir John Moores CBE (1896–1993)  Biographical Profile

Born into a working-class Lancashire family, his father was a bricklayer, John Moores left school at 12, trained as a telegraphist, and in 1923 co-founded a football pools operation with two colleagues, Bill Hughes and Colin Askham, with initial capital of £200 apiece. The venture nearly collapsed within months: the first coupon distribution at Hull netted a single returned entry. Moores bought out his partners’ £200 stakes and persisted alone, eventually building Littlewoods into one of Britain’s largest private companies, encompassing the pools business, a national chain of retail stores, and a catalogue mail-order operation employing, at its peak, over 25,000 people on Merseyside.

By the late 1950s, Moores was one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and his attention turned to football. Though long associated with both Merseyside clubs, he held a small shareholding in Liverpool FC for much of his life, it was Everton that received his primary commitment when he joined the board in 1960 and rapidly assumed the chairmanship.

Moores across Merseyside football

The Moores era at Everton FC (1960–1994)

Everton FC, by the late 1950s, was a club mired in mid-table mediocrity, respectable but far from the ambitious force its history demanded. The board, recognising the need for fresh capital and energy, invited local business titan John Moores onto the board as a director in 1960. In stepping away from the chairmanship of Littlewoods Pools (handing control to his brother Cecil), Moores freed himself for a deeper engagement with the club. He was elected Chairman in June 1960, and his impact was immediate and dramatic.

The defining first act came in April 1961. Manager Johnny Carey had led Everton to their highest post-war League finish of fifth, yet Moores, demanding victory, not creditable performances, famously dismissed Carey during a shared London taxi ride. The bluntness of the act was entirely characteristic of a man whose business success rested on an uncompromising demand for results.

Financial structure: Shareholding, loans & investment

Sir John Moores’ financial engagement with Everton was both direct and indirect. Prior to assuming the chairmanship, he had provided an interest-free loan of £56,000 to the club during the 1959/60 season to support operational costs and player acquisition, at a point when Everton were struggling with modest revenues from gate receipts. This was the first evidence of his willingness to deploy personal capital to support the club.

As chairman, Moores’ primary mechanism for funding player investment was a series of personal loan guarantees, leveraging his own standing and wealth to underwrite transfer expenditure without requiring the club to generate capital independently. Rather than direct cash grants, Moores structured his support through underwriting: Everton amassed over £500,000 in cumulative transfer fees during the mid-1960s alone, at a time when most clubs spent a fraction of that figure. The club became colloquially known as the Bank of England Club, a reference to the seemingly limitless financial resource available to Catterick.

Moores retained effective control of the club through a substantial personal shareholding maintained until his death in September 1993. The exact proportion fluctuated across the decades as share issuances occurred, but his bloc was consistently the dominant holding, giving him effective veto power at board level. Upon his death, the shares passed initially to family members, principally John Moores Jr., who subsequently sold his tranche of approximately 875 shares to Peter Johnson c.1994, enabling Johnson to achieve an unassailable 85% controlling interest for a combined consideration of approximately £10m for the Moores family stake in the aggregate sale to Johnson.

Key transfer activity & financial benchmarks

The following table records significant player acquisitions during the Moores era, illustrating the scale of ambition relative to prevailing market norms:

Alan Ball’s £110,000 arrival in August 1966 set a new British transfer record and remains one of (if not the) the most celebrated signings in the club’s history. Catterick later estimated Ball’s worth at £1m, a figure that, even as hyperbole, underscored the calibre of player Moores’ financial backing was attracting to Goodison.

Harry Catterick (1961–1973)

The appointment of Harry Catterick from Sheffield Wednesday in April 1961, just days after the dismissal of Carey, was Sir John Moores’ most consequential decision as Everton chairman. Catterick, authoritarian, disciplined and tactically astute, proved the ideal vehicle for Moores’ ambitions. The partnership between a results-demanding chairman and an equally demanding manager produced Everton’s most sustained period of post-war success.

Catterick’s tactical innovation was to reject the prevailing English orthodoxy of physical centre-forwards in favour of technical partnerships: Roy Vernon and Alex Young in the 1963 title-winning season were a movement-based strike pairing that bewildered opponents. The later construction of the ‘Holy Trinity’ midfield, Alan Ball, Colin Harvey and Howard Kendall, produced one of the most admired units in English football and delivered the 1969/70 championship. Catterick suffered a heart attack in 1972 and his authority gradually diminished; he stood down in 1973 and died in 1985. His tenure at Goodison, underwritten entirely by Moores’ resource, places him among the greatest managers in the club’s history.

Achievements under Moores’ stewardship

Honours Record

The 1962/63 title, Everton’s sixth League Championship, was won with 61 points and a goal tally of 84, with Roy Vernon and Alex Young as the attacking axis and Catterick deploying a technically sophisticated system. Everton were virtually unchallenged in the second half of the season.

The 1966 FA Cup Final against Sheffield Wednesday (managed by Alan Brown) produced one of Wembley’s most dramatic reversals. Two goals down at half-time, Catterick’s team, inspired by Mike Trebilcock, who scored twice, overturned the deficit to win 3-2. The win came weeks before Alan Ball, who had appeared in England’s World Cup triumph at the same stadium, was signed for a record fee.

The 1969/70 title,Everton’s seventh, was won with 66 points from 42 games, finishing nine points clear of Leeds United. The Holy Trinity midfield was at its zenith, and the squad, which included Gordon West, Brian Labone, Keith Newton, Colin Harvey, Alan Ball, Howard Kendall and Joe Royle, is considered one of the finest assembled in the club’s history.

Everton as a model for modern club ownership

John Moores’ approach at Everton has been retrospectively identified by football historians as a pioneering template for the ‘benevolent owner’ model of club ownership that would later define the Roman Abramovich era at Chelsea and the post-2008 transformation of Manchester City. Everton under Moores were, in the early 1960s, an outlier in willingness to deploy private capital, at scale and urgency, in service of sporting ambition. The comparison is instructive: just as Abramovich’s Chelsea drew ‘unfair advantage’ criticism, Moores’ Everton attracted rival clubs’ suspicion and the nickname ‘Bank of England Club’ as a somewhat loaded epithet.

The club’s average home league attendance during the early Moores years exceeded 43,000, one of the highest in England, providing a revenue base that, combined with Moores’ financial guarantees, enabled consistent elite-level recruitment. Goodison Park’s capacity and its standing as one of the country’s premium football venues was a product of that era.

Chronology of John Moores’ Chairmanship

The end of Moores’ control – Transition to Peter Johnson (1994)

Sir John Moores died on 25 September 1993 at the age of 97. His death closed the direct Moores line at Goodison, though family members retained shares in the immediate aftermath. The principal vehicle for exiting the shareholding was John Moores Jr., Sir John’s eldest son and a longstanding Littlewoods executive, who held a significant tranche of shares inherited or purchased through the estate. In 1994, with the club in financial difficulty and requiring fresh capital following a near-relegation escape on the final day of the 1993/94 Premier League season, the board engaged with Peter Johnson, a Tranmere Rovers owner and confirmed Liverpool FC supporter.

Johnson purchased approximately 50% of the Moores family shares for around £10m, securing initial control of the club. He then acquired a further 875 shares directly from John Moores Jr., achieving an unassailable 85% controlling interest. This two-stage acquisition effectively ended Moores’ family operational control of Everton, which had endured in one form or another since 1960, a span of 34 years.

Not all family members exited simultaneously. Lord Grantchester, grandson of Sir John Moores and a family member who had served as an Everton director, retained a holding of approximately 2,773 shares, representing roughly 7.9% of the total issued capital under Everton’s pre-expansion share structure. This residual position persisted through the Peter Johnson era, through Bill Kenwright’s ownership, and into the Farhad Moshiri period.

In June 2019, Lord Grantchester and his family sold this shareholding to Farhad Moshiri, formally ending any direct Moores family financial stake in Everton Football Club, some 59 years after Sir John first joined the board, and 26 years after his death. The transaction received no significant public comment, a quiet conclusion to one of English football’s most significant ownership dynasties.

David Moores & Liverpool FC

The single most important structural fact governing the Moores family’s dual presence in Merseyside football is this: Sir John Moores CBE was a committed Evertonian; his brother Cecil Moores was a committed Red. Cecil’s son David, Sir John’s nephew, was, in his own words, a lifelong Liverpool supporter who grew up in a household shaped by Anfield rather than Goodison. The split allegiance within a single family produced two distinct ownership narratives running in parallel on opposite banks of Stanley Park.

Sir John held only a minor shareholding in Liverpool FC, his connection to Anfield was broadly civic and commercial rather than personal. The family’s long-term majority stake in Liverpool resided with the Cecil Moores branch, crystallising finally in David Moores’ 1991 acquisition of a controlling interest.

David Moores: 

David Moores assumed the Liverpool chairmanship in September 1991 following the departure of Noel White, at a moment when the club, five-time European champions and dominant domestic force of the 1970s and 1980s, was entering an uncertain transitional period. He oversaw Liverpool’s entry into the newly-formed Premier League in 1992 alongside chief executive Rick Parry, and made the managerial appointments of Roy Evans (1994), the joint Evans-Houllier experiment (1998), Gérard Houllier as sole manager (1998), and finally Rafael Benítez (2004), whose appointment immediately preceded Liverpool’s astonishing Champions League triumph in Istanbul in May 2005.

Moores’ tenure is complex to assess. The 10 major trophies won during his chairmanship include one of the most celebrated nights in the club’s history, yet the Premier League title never arrived, a critical gap for a club of Liverpool’s pedigree. His decision in 2007 to sell to American investors Tom Hicks and George Gillett, in preference to a Dubai International Capital (DIC) bid associated with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, proved catastrophic for the club. Moores stated publicly that he was handing the club to ‘safe hands’, a judgement he subsequently acknowledged to have been spectacularly wrong. The Hicks-Gillett era descended rapidly into boardroom dysfunction, legal action, and near-insolvency before NESV (now Fenway Sports Group) completed a rescue takeover in 2010.

The Moores’ legacy across both clubs

Legacy Assessment – Sir John Moores’ legacy at Everton

Sir John Moores’ transformation of Everton in the 1960s was genuinely structural rather than merely financial. He not only provided the capital to recruit world-class talent, at transfer fees that were, in relative terms, as startling in their era as any Premier League acquisition today, but he also instilled an institutional culture of ambition and expectation that persisted long after his active involvement ceased.

The three trophy successes of the Moores era (1963, 1966, 1970) remain the bedrock of Everton’s post-war competitive identity. The Holy Trinity midfield, Ball, Harvey, Kendall, is arguably the finest unit the club has ever deployed. The 1969/70 title in particular, won with a nine-point margin, was a performance of dominant quality. Moores built the conditions for the Howard Kendall renaissance of the 1980s, both by bringing Kendall to the club as a player under Catterick and by placing Philip Carter on the board in 1975, a board member who would later empower Kendall’s managerial appointment.

Where the legacy is more contested is in the post-1970 trajectory. Having created the infrastructure and culture for sustained success, the club, with Moores increasingly in the background, failed to maintain momentum. Liverpool’s ascendancy through the 1970s, under Shankly and Paisley, exposed a Goodison boardroom that, as one analysis noted, ‘seemingly lacked the vision, sense of investment or will to prepare for the future’. The missed opportunities of the Catterick late years, Bobby Robson and Don Revie were both close to signing as manager,  and the gradual dispersal of the Holy Trinity without adequate replacement, dented a legacy that the raw trophy record alone would otherwise place in the highest tier.

On balance, Sir John Moores is rightly credited as the first architect of the modern wealthy-patron ownership model in English football, a man whose commitment to Everton produced that club’s last period of genuine sustained elite dominance. His death in 1993, at 97, retaining his shareholding to the end, marked the close of an era that has not been replicated at Goodison in the three decades since.

He was in my opinion the last to stand true to the club’s famous motto.

Institutional acknowledgements & civic legacy

Sir John Moores was awarded a CBE in recognition of his commercial, philanthropic and civic contributions. His business empire provided employment for tens of thousands across Merseyside at its peak, and his family’s philanthropic activity, through the Peter Moores Foundation and related vehicles — directed substantial funding into the arts, education and civic life. Liverpool John Moores University, one of the largest universities in the United Kingdom with over 22,000 students, bears his name in permanent recognition.

At Everton, there is no comparable formal memorial infrastructure, no stand bears his name, no prominent statue. His legacy is carried principally through the historical record, the trophies in the cabinet, and the cultural identity of a club that, during his time, led English football in ambition and resource. That cultural memory, of Everton as the Mersey Millionaires, the Bank of England Club, the club that set the British transfer record, remains part of the club’s institutional self-image.

Key facts 

Appendix: Everton Honours: Full record (Pre-Moores & Moores Era Comparison)

★ Denotes trophies won under direct Moores chairmanship and financial stewardship.

All financial figures are sourced from published historical records, club documents and verified biographies