Football Ground Map
Football Ground Map
It has been a tumultuous season at Goodison Park to say the least, with Toffees fans beginning to fear if this will be the first time Everton will be playing in the second tier of English Football since the 1953/54 season. The hiring of Liverpool legend Rafa Benitez was met with huge pushback from fans and his tenure was doomed before it even started. Benitez was sacked after just six and a half months in January, and swiftly replaced with Frank Lampard taking the reins. Lampard was seen as a risky appointment for the Toffees, given his lack of experience, particularly at clubs in danger of relegation. Everton are currently 2/1 to be relegated according to these betting sites based in the UK. It is hard to see any positives for Everton fans at the moment, but looking beyond this terrible season, the new stadium that is currently being built looks like it is going to be one of the most beautiful in the country, and with a a capacity of 52,888, will be one of the biggest too.
Plain and simply, Everton are in real, real trouble. Their 5-0 loss at the hands of Tottenham Hotspur was one of the most abject performances from a team in the Premier League all season and highlighted quite how much work there is to do for Lampard and his players. With players of the likes of Richarlison, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Abdoulaye Doucoure and Donny Van de Beek, they are not short on quality, particularly in attacking positions. However, their defence has been awful all season, and the form of Michael Keane and Mason Holgate is extremely worrying. With games against Newcastle, Burnley, Watford and Brentford still to come, survival is in their hands, but it is fair to say they are the worst team in the league on form, and need to turn it around fast, starting with Newcastle.
On a recent Monday Night Football broadcast, Jamie Carragher brandished the team as "an absolute disgrace" and that he feared for the club he supported as a boy. He said: "They have had (Carlo) Ancelotti, they have had Benitez, Ronald Koeman, Marco Silva, they have tried every manager you could possibly think of. It is probably similar to a Manchester United situation where no matter what manager you are picking it is not working. That structure of the club, I mean the players. The players are an absolute disgrace at Everton, they really are."
Later on during his conversation with Gary Neville, he said: "I don't think Evertonians believe they're going to stay up. Their fixtures are horrific. The players have been an absolute disgrace." To which Neville responded, "They look so flaky. The pressure is enormous given that they're a big club. I know a few Everton fans and they're thinking 'We're done.' Who's in that dressing room that's going to lift them?"
Realistically, there is very little for Everton fans to be happy about, if anything. They could be playing in the second tier of English football for the first time in nearly 70 years, and they are in financial ruin. Part of that ruin is down to a state of the art brand new stadium being built on Bramley-Moore Dock to replace Goodison Park, which has been their home since 1892. Bramley-Moore is a former commercial dock, based within the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City, which was a UNESCO World Heritage Site until that status was revoked, largely due to the stadium being built there. Everton have been planning on moving out of Goodison Park since at least the 1990's, but after a move to Kirkby was mooted, which drew widespread opposition from fans and politicians, they went back to the drawing board, finally ending in March 2017, when it became known that Everton had chosen Bramley-Moore Dock as a suitable venue for its new stadium, which was planned to cost around £300m. American architect Dan Meis saw the dock for the first time since construction began earlier this month, and was extremely excited by its progress. He said: "It's so incredibly exciting and very emotional. It's like being a kid in a toy store and it never gets old. It seems a little absurd that it all starts with a little sketch and then hundreds and ultimately thousands of people come together. It's a giant team of engineers and architects and contractors and a lot of people have put their heart and soul into this stadium, and that's really touching and just phenomenal.
"There was a time when we weren't really sure that the pitch would fit in the dock itself, but when you see it now, with the dock filled in and the machinery spread out, it's a massive site, so you really do start to get a sense, particularly with some of the pieces going up, of just how vast the site is and how big the stadium is going to be."
While the new ground is undoubtedly an exciting project, it could have the unfortunate statistic of being one of the world's biggest football stadiums to not host a top-tier team. The proposed capacity of 52,822 would make it the third biggest stadium of a non-top division club in the world, behind Hamburger SV in Germany and S.S.C Bari in Italy. Hamburg's Volksparkstadion holds 57,000 people, and plays host to 2. Bundesliga games, thanks to a disastrous 2017-18 season, in which they got relegated for the first time in the Bundesliga's 55 year history, causing the fans to riot. Despite having such heritage and an enormous stadium, HSV have failed to get promoted from the second tier since, and currently find themselves in seventh place.
Bari's Stadio San Nicola is the fourth biggest stadium in Italy, with a capacity of 58,270. The beautiful ground was built for the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Sadly for Bari, the club has had an awful time of it in recent history, with bankruptcies and bad ownership leaving the club in all sorts of trouble. On 16 July 2018, Bari were banned from participating in 2018-19 Serie B due to financial reasons and subsequently, the shareholders, who tried to appeal the decision, failed to do so, leading a phoenix club to be born, starting in Serie D in the 2018-19 season. They got promoted at the end of that year to Serie C, where they remain to this day.
Taking my son to his first football match was one of the best experiences I've had as a father so far. I've written this article for Alex to read when he gets older.
All good things have to come to an end, and the same unfortunately has to be said for football stadiums too. This article looks at the grounds which are soon to host their last match, the stadiums whose days are numbered and where fans will be watching their football from next.
My daughter's first ever football match - Orlando City v Atlanta United, August 2019. Written for Izzy to read when she gets old enough. Vamos Orlando
An in-depth look at the biggest football attendances ever recorded, from the 1950 World Cup to pre-season friendlies in the States and the Scottish ground with dozens of 100,000+ attendances
