Part of the Kirkby propaganda was to put Coventry’s crap new stadium on a pedestal, and then argue that Everton ought to be emulating Coventry’s move into a crap new stadium.
Our marketing under Kenwright was incredibly weird. The club was talked down all the time, with us being portrayed as a desperate quaint entity living in a crumbling shed of a death trap stadium that is ecstatic with 10th place finishes. It was a marketing ploy by Kenwright to keep expectations low imo, and it worked very well, for him.