Everton’s unbeaten start to the Premier League season, and their progress in the Carabao Cup, have prompted a minor outbreak of something rarely felt around the club in recent times: optimism. It is guarded optimism, understandably, but the mood has shifted since the fury that followed a badly botched transfer window, typified by a shambolic final day that left manager David Moyes with only 18 senior outfield players.
A move for AS Monaco striker Falorin Balogun fell through when he walked away from the deal after problems with the medical, while Iliman Ndiaye, arguably Everton’s best player, was sold to Manchester City for £65m. It is against that backdrop that Moyes is seeking to end Everton’s 31-year search for success, a wait that has saddled the club with an unwanted record.
Since the turn of the century, Everton are the only club in English football’s current top four tiers who have not won a trophy or been promoted. Their last trophy was the 1995 FA Cup, won against Manchester United at the old Wembley. The alternative route to a celebration would require the pain of relegation first, and that has come uncomfortably close this millennium: Everton, last relegated in 1951, stayed up by beating Bournemouth on the final day of the 2022-23 season, having only guaranteed safety the previous campaign by coming from two goals down to beat Crystal Palace in their penultimate game on a night of thunderous sporting theatre at Goodison Park.
So is supporting Everton a life of unrelenting sporting misery, or is there still joy to be had at one of the grand old English football institutions? Leon Osman, who made 433 appearances for the club between 2003 and 2016 and scored 58 goals, is clear where he stands.
“We’ve had some disappointments in those times, certainly in terms of not winning anything, but we’ve had some good days along the way, good moments,” he said. “We’ve reached semi-finals, an FA Cup final, some great celebrations. We had some great trips in Europe – I think about us winning in Nuremberg in the Uefa Cup with thousands of our fans there to enjoy it. I certainly don’t feel it’s been 26 years of misery. I would argue very strongly against that. When we qualified for the Champions League in 2005, that was an incredible achievement, given the clubs we were up against. We did something very special in that season.”
Osman added that he is more upset than any Evertonian that the club has not won anything in the last 20 to 30 years, particularly during the period he was playing and could affect it. But, he said, there has never been a single moment when he would swap being an Evertonian for anyone else. “It’s better to be an Evertonian than to support any other club, and you mark my words, if and when we do get silverware, just you watch those celebrations. They will be something else.”
The supporter’s verdict comes from Dr David France, whose devotion can be measured in the two million miles he calculates he has travelled to watch Everton – the equivalent of going to the moon and back four times – from his home in the United States. “I can explain what I celebrate, even if we haven’t had tangible success for so long. I celebrate being an Evertonian,” he said.
Others who celebrate supporting Everton include Andy Burnham and Canada’s Mark Carney, who both recently attended the 1-0 EFL Cup win against Wolverhampton Wanderers at Hill Dickinson Stadium that set up a last-16 home tie with Newcastle United.
The statistics that pile pain on Everton and their fans reflect those occasional highs and more regular lows. Everton remain one of only six Premier League originals, along with Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, who have never dropped out of the top tier. Elsewhere the tale of the tape is less flattering.
Since 2000 they have lost two FA Cup semi-finals, winning a third against Manchester United on penalties in 2009 only to lose to Chelsea in the final, and they have been knocked out at the first time of asking in the third round eight times. In the EFL Cup they have reached the semi-finals twice, in 2008 and 2016, losing both. In the league in that period they have failed to win at Chelsea in 27 attempts, won only twice at Manchester United, once at Arsenal, once at Liverpool and five times at Manchester City – although they did win an FA Cup fourth-round replay at Stamford Bridge in 2011. Of the 53 Merseyside derbies played in the Premier League in that time, Everton have won only five and lost 28.
Their ledger is balanced by a dramatic FA Cup fourth-round replay win against Liverpool in 2009, secured by Dan Gosling’s last-minute goal in extra time, and a crucial 1-0 derby victory that formed part of their finest season in this fallow period. In 2004-05, Moyes – after selling Wayne Rooney to Manchester United – guided Everton to fourth place and into the Champions League, an achievement then Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger described as “a miracle”. That campaign also contained another celebratory moment, when Duncan Ferguson tormented Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United by scoring the winner with a trademark header from a Mikel Arteta free-kick on a memorable Goodison night.
Everton’s Champions League journey ended in heartbreak and controversy in the qualifying round. After losing the first leg 2-1 at home to eventual semi-finalists Villarreal, referee Pierluigi Collina mysteriously ruled out a late Ferguson header that would have sent the tie into extra time, and Everton went out 4-2 on aggregate following a decision that still rankles today.
Dr France is no ordinary Everton fan. The 78-year-old, whose base has been Arizona since 1977, attended his first game on 4 September 1957, when Everton drew 3-3 with Manchester United’s Busby Babes. He established the Everton Former Players’ Foundation in 1999 and is the club’s premier archivist, with more than 20,000 items of memorabilia that he transferred into public ownership via The Everton Collection Charitable Trust and which are now maintained at the Liverpool Record Office.
Asked what his devotion has cost him, he replies: “A robust seven-figure Littlewoods Pools jackpot” – a nod to the company formed by Everton’s patriarch of the 1960s and 1970s, Sir John Moores, whose vast fortune earned the club the nickname ‘The Mersey Millionaires’. He acknowledges that Everton “missed the boat after the Premier League ship sailed” and are “no longer the best of the rest”, noting that for about a decade under Moyes they averaged around sixth or seventh with the odd hard-luck story, and that more recently a three-year period could almost have seen them described as a laughing stock. “We aren’t with the Aston Villas and the Newcastles, who are challenging for the best of the rest, but we live in hope,” he said.
His pick of a recent celebration is Everton’s 2-0 win over Liverpool at Goodison in April 2024, their first win in 30 derbies, excluding the 2-0 win behind closed doors at Anfield during the Covid-19 pandemic. He watched it from the second row of the directors’ box, three rows in front of Burnham. “I’m very lucky to be part of something very special supporting Everton. It is a special community. You don’t become an Evertonian to be a glory hunter do you?” he said. “We have loyalty inbred into us. We don’t just support the club, Evertonians support one another. We are a family. When I go to watch Everton, I feel like I’m among friends.”
He hopes he and those fellow supporters will have something to celebrate soon.