Everton FC: An assessment of a prospective sale by The Friedkin Group

As at 6 September 2026, no sale of Everton Football Club has been announced, agreed or confirmed. The Financial Times and The Athletic reported on 3 September 2026 that The Friedkin Group is working with advisers to test appetite for a significant minority stake while retaining control.

Both the club and The Friedkin Group declined to comment. No mandated bank has been publicly named. The reporting is credible and consistent across two outlets, but it is single-origin in substance and describes an early-stage process that may not conclude.

The evidence does not support a distress narrative. The Friedkin Group repaid the Rights and Media Funding facility in full, settled the 777 Partners position, arranged a 30-year £350M private placement at institutional pricing, and cleared the club’s legacy regulatory exposure. Dan Friedkin’s personal wealth is reported at approximately $13.4B. This is not the behaviour of a forced seller.

The more probable reading, consistent with a source quoted by the Financial Times describing the Premier League as “an arms race with more firepower entering the league”, is that the group has concluded the equity cheque required to make Everton competitive is larger than it wishes to write alone. That is a capital-structure judgement, not a retreat. It is also, on the analysis within this report, correct.

A buyer entering today acquires a club whose legacy liabilities have been dealt with by someone else. The £450.75M of Moshiri-era shareholder loans were converted to equity. Rights and Media Funding, with its restrictive negative-pledge covenants, was repaid. The 777 Partners and A-Cap exposure of approximately £200M was settled at around 33p in the pound. The Premier League discontinued the outstanding profitability and sustainability charge in January 2025, ending all legacy proceedings.

This clean-up has real economic value. It is the principal reason the club is investable at all.

This is the most important and least understood point in the entire analysis, and it cuts against the prevailing narrative on both sides of the transaction.

The Hill Dickinson Stadium should lift matchday income from £20.3M to somewhere in the region of £46M to £55M at maturity, with a further £10M to £15M of associated commercial uplift.

Against that, once the asset is brought into use two charges that were previously suppressed appear in full: depreciation of approximately £22M to £24M a year on an £813.1M asset, and interest of approximately £30M to £32M a year that was previously capitalised into the construction cost at a rate of £32.3m in 2024-25 alone.

The stadium is transformative for enterprise value and for competitive positioning. It is close to neutral, and possibly negative, for the reported profit and loss account in its early years. Any business plan that treats the widely-cited “£60M of additional income” as £60M of additional profit is in my opinion wrong.

On 2024-25 audited figures Everton’s squad cost ratio,  wages plus player amortisation plus agent fees, divided by revenue plus net player-trading profit,  was approximately 93%. The Premier League limit from 2026-27 is 85% for clubs outside Uefa competition and 70% for those in it.

Everton therefore cannot spend its way up the table even if a buyer is willing to fund it. Wage growth must be earned through revenue growth and player-trading profit before it can be deployed. This inverts the conventional takeover playbook and pushes the competitive uplift into Years 3 to 5. It is the reason the 5-year forecast  shows disciplined rather than aggressive wage expansion.

Liverpool City Region gross value added per resident is approximately £27,500, around 74% of the United Kingdom level, and the gap has widened since 2010. Close to a third of City Region neighbourhoods sit in England’s most deprived decile, concentrated in precisely the north Liverpool wards surrounding the stadium. Few large corporates are headquartered in the region.

Everton also competes for local sponsorship and corporate hospitality with a Champions League club in the same city whose reported valuation exceeds £5B. Everton is structurally the second commercial proposition in its own market. This does not prevent commercial growth, the existing book is demonstrably below market, but it caps the realistic terminal commercial revenue well below the level a comparable stadium in London or the West Midlands would command.

The stadium is excellent. What surrounds it is not. There is no dedicated rail station; Sandhills requires a walk of approximately 15 minutes and dedicated access funding of around £4.2M is not allocated until 2027.

The Liverpool Waters regeneration that was to provide the surrounding urban fabric has moved slowly. There is no integrated retail, leisure or commercial estate of the kind that generates non-matchday income at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and Liverpool’s premium hotel stock is thin relative to the corporate demand a 52,888-seat venue is capable of generating.

Separately, Finch Farm is owned by Liverpool City Council and leased back to the club. It is dated relative to peers. Replacement at 2026 prices is estimated in this report at £80M to £100M and is not optional if the club intends to compete for players with Newcastle, Aston Villa or Brighton.

My forecast shows cumulative pre-tax losses of approximately £351M over the five years to 2029-30 on a Squad Cost Ratio-compliant plan. The cash requirement, which is the number that matters to an investor, is a gross outflow of approximately £523M, net player capital expenditure, cash interest, infrastructure investment including the training ground, and scheduled debt amortisation, offset by modest EBITDA, or approximately £444M net of the £79.1M of cash on the balance sheet.

This is the central finding of the report. Everton is not a club that requires a purchase price and then runs itself. It requires a purchase price and then approximately the same amount again over five years.

On an enterprise value of approximately £700M to £880M, 3.0 to 3.8 times estimated 2025-26 revenue, a premium to the historic two-times multiple for non-top-six clubs that is justified by the owned new-build stadium, less net debt of approximately £389.4M, equity value falls in a range of approximately £310M to £490M, with a central estimate of approximately £400M.

Roundhouse Capital’s reported equity acquisition cost was approximately £231M, with additional capital inputs bringing the total to £400M. On the central estimate, the group is breakeven on paper and materially ahead only if the stadium’s first full year performs at the upper end.

That is consistent with seeking minority capital at a fair price rather than exiting at a premium, and a buyer should not price this transaction on the assumption that the seller is desperate.