Silly me. I thought we’d done the Billy Kenny story plenty of times already on ToffeeWeb over the years. These last few days, I was studiously ignoring the latest filler from The Echo, thinking it was just another of their lame Everton-related stories to pad out this lame 3-week international break:
‘I’d love to run amok on there’ – Billy Kenny describes watching Everton at Hill Dickinson Stadium — The Echo, 6 October 2026
But this interview in The Guardian from last week gives a clearer picture of the latest episode in the endless retelling of this sad tale: Bill Kenny has now written a book of his travails, explaining how The Goodison Gazza was not given the help he needed by his club Everton.
‘Goodison Gazza’ Billy Kenny: ‘The only time I’ve had peace was when I was locked up’ — The Guardian, 29 September 2026
His addictive personality and compulsive behavioural traits took control and saw him crash and burn from putting in a Man of the Match display againt Liverpool in the Premier League’s first ever Merseyside derby at Goodison Park in December 1992 derby, to being ignominiously sacked for ‘gross misbehaviour’ by Everton in 1994 when a urine sample revealed cocaine, the young star who had bcome an instant favourite sipraling out of football in a haze of drugs and alcohol at the tender age of 21.
It’s a story we all know only too well. Just 17 league appearances for the club and 1 goal. A prodigious potential talent totally gone to waste. But as with any book promotion, the other newspapers give it their own treatment:
Destroyed by a football drinking culture: The sad story of Everton’s lost teenage genius Billy Kenny — The MailOnline, 6 October 2026
The ‘Goodison Gazza’, charts the demise of Paul Gascoigne and Norman Whiteside. All three deserved better, the Mail article concludes:
There would be a vestige of hope to take from this tragedy if Kenny might take on a role warning new generations of prodigious talents about not making the same mistakes he did. The point doesn’t seem to register with him, though. The look behind his eyes tells you that the lost career haunts him and the pain doesn’t seem done with him yet.
The Goodison Gazza, The Inside Story of Football’s No 1 Lost Talent, by Billy Kenny with Jamie Fahey. Reach Sport. £16.99