Everton FC braces for finale at 133-year-old Goodison Park before moving to a new home

How does an iconic team that has had just one home for the past 133 years pack up all that history, culture and tradition when it comes time to move across town?

Very carefully.

That's how Kevin Barker starts this fine piece in the LA Times, which includes a lot of the history we all know so well, plus these comments from Dan Meis which might not be so widely known:

“From the very start, [the new stadium] had to be a proper English football ground,” Meis said. “From our perspective, it was don’t focus on the architecture. It’s about the experience.

”So I dove very deeply into the history of English football and that was a driver of the design from the start.”

He wasn’t working alone; Evertonians would never allow that. So when the club conducted a public consultation during the planning phase for the new stadium, 65,000 people took part, making it the largest commercial public consultation ever in Liverpool. And what Meis and the club heard was that the fans wanted something that reflected Everton’s gritty blue-collar pedigree.

“There was a lot of, ‘We’re not fancy, you know, this is about history, and it’s about generations of support throughout,’” Meis said. “It was a sense of history that we had to respect.

“As an American, I was a little bit shy of this, but I talked about their similarities to Fenway or Wrigley, baseball stadiums [that] tended to grow up over time. That’s how those buildings became these kind of quirky, different things like Goodison. You plop down 65,000 seats one time and you lose a lot of that sort of quirkiness. We’re very conscious about that.”

» Read the full article at Los Angeles Times

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