Farhad Moshiri sold 15% of Arsenal on Friday,
confirmed a deal for 49.9% of Everton on Saturday, has yet to receive Premier League approval for his latest acquisition and has not got down to the nitty‑gritty of how much Roberto Martínez will have to spend during face‑to‑face talks with the club’s manager. The outline facts may indicate Bill Kenwright’s decade-long search for new investment ended overnight but the truth of the British-Iranian billionaire’s arrival at Goodison Park is quite different. The “new era” that Martínez has proclaimed will not be launched from a standing start.
Everton’s manager does not have a figure for this summer’s transfer budget but he does know that, once the 60-year-old is installed as major shareholder, the days of being outmuscled financially by the likes of West Ham United for
Dimitri Payet, as he was last summer, will be over.
The club’s wage cap will be demolished this summer and the first impact will be to convince Ross Barkley, John Stones and Romelu Lukaku to remain the team’s core on long-term contracts. Some will be easier to convince than others. Martínez may prefer to buy young players with rich potential rather than the finished article but it would be out of choice, not necessity, and he can have the pick of both markets. He also accepts that an owner with resources to match Everton’s ambition means greater pressure on his own position. “We want that expectancy and with it the pressure of having to deliver,” he said. “But, remember, there is always pressure.”
A resolution to Everton’s stadium saga is also on Moshiri’s agenda for the summer. The Monaco-based businessman, who retains shares in the Russian mining and steel manufacturing company Metalloinvest, in which long‑time business partner Alisher Usmanov holds the controlling stake, plans to reach a decision on the stadium move in the close season. The options have been explored during the investment process. A redevelopment of Goodison has not been discounted but, after two failed stadium projects on Kenwright’s watch,
Everton retain hope of relocating to Walton Hall Park but want backing from Liverpool City Council to do so. The city’s mayor, Joe Anderson, was informed of the imminent investment by Kenwright in London last week.
Robert Elstone, Everton’s chief executive, told the club’s annual general meeting in November that several parties had approached Kenwright. They were Moshiri, the American investors John Jay Moores and Charles Noell plus a consortium from the Middle East. Everton’s chairman, who has always liked to draw comparisons between the club of his childhood and Arsenal, is understood to have favoured a single investor with a long-term vision. The initial deal was a complicated process with Moshiri’s 49.9% representing a purchase of Robert Earl’s 23% stake plus shares diluted from Kenwright’s 26% holding and Jon Woods’s 19%. After an interim period of working alongside the Everton chairman, Moshiri has an agreement to become majority shareholder. The financial landscape at Goodison, however, will change as soon as the billionaire receives Premier League approval. “Of course it will help us keep our best players,” Martínez said before the game at Aston Villa on Tuesday night. “In our structure you’re always going to have some sort of limitations from a financial point of view. That’s where we are as a football club. Now, with a new investor this is a new beginning, it’s a new start for
Everton. If we’re here, now we can go here [points up] internally in terms of budgets, in terms of facilities, in terms of wage bill. The new TV deal helps you up to a point. What we’re talking about here is a completely different approach.”
Martínez does not expect Everton to be transformed into Champions League contenders overnight. He admits the likes of Stones and Lukaku will have to buy into Moshiri’s plan to resist overtures from other Premier League and European admirers this summer.
“We need to create a football club that the player wants to be part of,” he explained. “It is no good us saying: ‘Yes, we will keep such and such.’ If they don’t want to stay it will be the wrong investment. But if ‘such and such’ want to stay, can we make them stay? The answer now is yes. It is as simple as that. Every case is an individual case. Ross Barkley, for example, is an Evertonian. He can get at Everton anything he could get at another club. And it is his club. So that’s that answer. Everyone else, we don’t know what their aims are and what they want to do but we will never lose a player now because we are unable to give him what he deserves, put it that way.”
Martínez has held talks with Moshiri – he also met Moores and Noell during their due diligence on Everton’s books – but insists the budget at his disposal, and it is not unrealistic to claim it will be the biggest in the club’s history this summer, is for another day. The Everton manager said: “We haven’t had that sort of detailed discussion yet. Everything still needs to be confirmed by the Premier League and then we’ll sit down and I’ll have to make him aware of where we are in football terms and what we need. I think it’s more about the type of person we are getting at the club.
Farhad is a very impressive man who is a businessman and a successful one but he also understands football because he’s been involved at Arsenal for a long time and that’s very rare. He knows how to support a manager and how to be involved in a football team. I’ve been impressed by his drive, he wants to have a winning team. He’s been following our results, performances and the reaction of the fans and I think he’s become an Evertonian. He’s fallen in love with the club and what it means.”
