Chaos club Everton reap the whirlwind of Premier League’s financial revolution

Like us, Tottenham are the other breakaway side to have not won the Premier League. Their sole honour was a League cup in 2007-08.

The reality is in recent years the Premier League has been dominated by foreign wealth, state or state-linked (bar Leicester's "aberration").

Looking at Everton, and being of a vintage that remembers the transition to the Premier League — indeed working at the club immediately before — I'd posit that Everton's failure was at board level.

Whilst other clubs restructured to meet the new challenge and opportunity, Everton simply carried on, and ran it like a £5m enterprise through the years, rather than exploit the revenue opportunities a global behemoth (the Premier League) offered.

It talks about our greatest season, 40 years coming up, and then explains that English football had to change, with some very good examples and the now very obvious downplaying of Heysel, which diminishes with each passing year.

The saddest question was when the journalist asked were Everton always over-reaching?

The plucky pair, neither of whom would have been good enough for Everton Football Club during any other year, definitely changed the narrative, much to my dismay.

The Impressario whose name I cannot bring myself to utter.

There was definitely a complacency at board level from 1987 onwards. The title win that year almost came too easily with Howard Kendall working wonders with make-do-and-mend signings well below international level.

In the summer of 1987, the club rested on its laurels, extended the roof over the Gwladys Street terrace, one of several piecemeal improvements to the stadium hen a longer term strategy was required, lost the best manager we have ever had, and failed to improve the squad while our neighbours were recruiting Barnes and Beardsley. So commenced a directionless drift towards mediocrity on all fronts.

Philip Carter rightly earned praise for sticking with Howard Kendall when many were calling for a change in 1983. Unfortunately, part of his legacy was a club built on conservative ideas with limited horizons. He was honest enough to admit in one of his final radio interviews that ‘none of us' envisaged the scale of the growth in TV revenues.

Given that growing TV revenues was a major driver for the creation of the Premier League, that was a remarkable admission, but spoke of the club's abject failure to keep pace with the changes under way.

Aside from the Moyes years, we have never looked like turning things around. The new stadium is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to arrest the decline and start to bridge the gap between ourselves and some of the clubs we looked down upon three decades ago.

Your final paragraph explains everything about where we are right now and why we've achieved nothing in the past 35 years.

In some respects, Howard Kendall's surprise team reinforced this notion but it was short-lived, leaving us vulnerable to any headwind and Heysel was just that.

Obviously the same for all clubs but the dullness of our leadership left us wandering like sloths amid determined clubs like Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool and Spurs.

Now we are so far down the ladder with colossal debt from the new build… only the input of monumental money can rescue us.

I look at Leeds and see us as the modern variant.