In 1994 I was like any other footy-mad kid of the day.

Every time I got some pocket money, I’d run up to the shop to buy a packet of football stickers to add to my collection as I tried to complete that season’s Merlin’s Premier League sticker book. Those stickers were like crack cocaine for kids. The high you got when you opened a packet to reveal the shiney club badge you had been after for months wasn’t matched until later in life when you lost your virginity.

Anyway, Everton weren’t very good at the time. Manchester United had Ryan Giggs and we had Stuart Barlow. Still, I could console myself when looking through the honours lists for each club. I could see that only a couple of clubs had won more stuff than Everton had. I could see that in the year I was born, Everton were crowned the best team in the land, and again two years later, which was the last time they won the league. So I thought the good times would come around again. Then, just a year later, Dave Watson lifted the FA Cup and I actually witnessed Everton success for myself.

With our exit to Leicester City in the FA Cup this season, it will now be a guaranteed 22 years since the Toffees lifted some silverware. As a kid in 1994, Everton’s greatness still felt tangible. Today it has quite literally never been further away.

The last time the club suffered through a barren period as long as this it had started after winning the 1938-39 championship, when the Second World War broke out to disrupt any progress. That’s Everton all over, that.

It wasn’t until 1960, 21 years later, that the blues would be roused again and it was all down to one man. Sir John Moores - a mega-rich millionaire who had earned his fortune founding the Littlewoods Pools - took over the club and began bankrolling record-breaking British transfers in an aggressive bid to build a squad with some of the best players available. The ‘Mersey Millionaires’ were born.

Thanks to some memorabilia that has been handed down to me, we can see exactly how the mood had changed around Everton shortly after Moores’ takeover. The following quote is lifted from the Everton FC Football Handbook 1960-61, a tatty, yellowing booklet I have been lucky enough to find:

The Everton manager whose own playing career marked him as one of the greats of all time is a quiet, serious-minded man whose aim is to please the great number of fans who demand the best of their club. Attendances of 50,000 and more at all home fixtures towards the end of last season indicates what support the club can expect if they are even reasonably successful. The Everton supporter has been brought up to recognise class football and anything less than that does not satisfy him, It is my belief that Everton are about to begin a new era, one in which the many changes made at the club during the past few seasons will have their real chance to show results for their considerable labours. The new pitch, too, should help the re-constituted team to perform better than they did on a most difficult surface last mid-winter. Everton’s plan to make themselves a force not only in retain but on the Continent and elsewhere is no dream. All the moves they have made recently have been aimed to that purpose and if progress has been slow it has certainly been sure. In my view they are very much a club of the future, a club whose post-war record will soon be forgotten when they begin, as I think will, to make their mark in League and Cup within the next few months.

By Sports Editor, Liverpool Echo, 1960.



56 years later and Liverpool Echo journalists are making the same noises around Everton’s immediate future. The current Echo sports editor, Dave Prentice, has even published an article on the similarities between now and then proclaiming the rebirth of the Mersey Millionaires.

“Everton is a very good club with a very good crowd, but they expect success and if they don’t get success something should be done about it and something will be done about it.” - John Moores, 1960.

“It is not just enough to say we are special. We don’t want to be a museum, we want to be competitive and we want to win.” - Farhad Moshiri, 2017.

With Moshiri matching Moores for financial clout and ambition – he also seems to be going down a similar route for building a squad. The then Everton manager in 1960, Johnny Carey, shared the club’s vision and strategy for assembling a winning team in a piece titled “The Season’s Prospects” as part of the 1960 Football Handbook.

There are three ways in which to build a team. The first is to buy all the best available players, but this requires a great amount of money, and probably much more than any one club could afford. The second is to embark on a youth policy, and depend entirely on producing the players needed for the first team. This method may take more time than a club can afford if it is to maintain its present League status meanwhile. The third way is to have a combination of both. This is the method I favour. A sound Youth Policy is a must in present-day football for a senior club. From among the club’s young players should come the nucleus of the first team of to-morrow. Where the inevitable gaps occur, recourse to the transfer market must be made to complete the team.

It’s fair to say that then, as is now, the Everton squad faced a cull. Today we’re also doing it the third way with the likes of Barkley, Holgate, and Davies complemented by the recruitment of Steve Walsh and the cash of Moshiri.



Unfortunately for Carey, his prospects weren’t so good. Despite steering Everton to their most successful season since the war, John Moores decided to sack him - in the back of a taxi. And so when Moshiri called a taxi for Roberto Martinez last season you can trace that saying directly back to that incident.

Moores’ decision was justified as after just two years the new manager, Harry Catterick, had won the league. Ronald Koeman speaks of a two year timeframe needed to build the side he wants at Everton. All Evertonians should afford him that before passing serious judgements. After all, the financial landscape today with competing clubs is the major difference between now and then, even if it seems everything else is in place.

When Everton avoided relegation on the final day – twice – in the 90s, we truly escaped the jaws of disaster and may have ensured that league success would one day return to the club. In an alternative universe, we went down on one of those nerve-racking days and suffered the fate of Leeds or Nottingham Forest. With the poor management of the club at the very top it is actually a miracle that we didn’t go down. The board during that period would have fully deserved it. But we didn’t and now, like in 1960, Everton is emerging from the doldrums of a dark era, deprived of success and diminished in status because of it.

If I was a kid today there is no chance I would have had the same optimism I had back in ‘94 scanning through the club honours lists. Blackburn Rovers, Middlesbourough, Portsmouth, Birmingham City, Wigan Athletic, Swansea City, Tottenham Hotspur (twice), and Leicester City (three times!) have all won major trophies since Waggy lifted the Cup in Wembley on that day in ’95.

The only hope now is that Matthew McConaughey’s alcoholic cop from True Detective, Rust Cohle, is right. That “time is a flat circle” and history is repeating itself. The present gives us hope that in Moshiri we are resurrecting an era of our past and that a bright future lies ahead.

When Chelsea and Manchester City were bankrolled all the way to the Premier League summit, their billionaire benefactors succeeded in making them great. But if Moshiri’s millions return Everton to the top there will be one major difference…

We won’t just be great - we’ll be great again.