An open letter to Chris Beesley, Liverpool Echo.
Dear Chris,
I write this in response to your article titled Everton claims Sean Dyche has lost the dressing room are missing the point and your follow-up tweet/X post to signpost people to this drivel which was worded as follows:
“We all know “Nil Satis Nisi Optimum” this is not but anyone calling for the manager’s head needs to give their own head a wobble. If that’s your answer to this mess then unfortunately you’re part of the problem.”
As someone who is the Google and display advertising guy for a farming newspaper, I am very aware that views of a page keep the lights on. With 9 ad slots on your website, I estimate that Reach PLC make around £0.15 and above per page view. I am also aware that Reach PLC made the decision in 2022 to switch to a minimum page view target for its reporters. So for your career, you do what you have to do to become the best in your profession, and ultimately keep yourself in a job. But in this instance, you have got it massively wrong.
Whilst you could look at a wider issue of the last 4-5 years of being an Everton fan. The last 12 months have been new levels of mayhem. As fans, we are at breaking point. Off-the-field stuff aside, we have won 1 game since mid-December and the football is as bad as anything we have seen.
You go the games for free, in fact, you get paid to go the game and talk about Everton. For some fans, you probably have their dream job. Where do you think you get off telling paying fans that they are not now allowed to question the manager?
Further to this, how – after all the fans have done for the last 3 years – are the fans “part of the problem”? The only thing the club has left now is the fans.
We have had hit piece after hit piece since October from The Times, the Premier League, Martyn Ziegler and Sam Wallace in The Telegraph, The Guardian, and, of course, how could we forget the Daily Mail‘s Matt Hughes?
There’s not many people in the media who have come out to fight for us… Henry Winter, Martin Samuel to name a few. But why don’t you and the Echo go back to journalistic basics and use your platform to ask some pertinent questions and be on our side?
You are meant to represent the club in a world where we pretty much have no support. You have royally pissed off a lot of fans with this. If we get to the point where, as fans, we don’t want to read your Everton content, then who are you aiming for? Liverpool fans?
Do better. It’s the least we as fans deserve from our local newspaper.