“My friend Ronald Koeman destroyed me the first time I came here,” said Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola after last month's win at Goodison Park against Everton.
“It was 4-0 with Lukaku scoring and I remember it perfectly. It’s almost one decade [ago] but I love to come here... Clubs grow and the new stadium will be magnificent for the revenues, for the fans to be more comfortable, but it will be missed and it has been an honour to come here. I was like a little boy today watching the screens and the old goals from players like Gary Lineker. I see these and say ‘Wow, this is English football’."
On Sunday, against Southampton, the 39,414-capacity venue which has staged more top-flight football matches than anywhere else in England, hosts its final Everton men’s fixture. David Moyes’ team will move to a new 53,000 seater stadium in August on the banks of the Mersey at Bramley-Moore Dock.
Guardiola was speaking in the press room under Goodison Park’s main stand. It’s a little cramped, a bit like the press box above with its blue wooden seats and obstructing poles. It’s a little tired too - though the hospitality of staff made it friendly.
When the three-tier main stand was built in 1970 it was the biggest in Britain. So tall that the floodlight pylons were taken down and the lights mounted along the roof. With escalators carrying fans to the upper tiers, it was groundbreaking, the centre point of one of the finest football grounds and it replaced a significant stand from famed Scottish architect and engineer, Archibald Leitch.
Two of his stands are still present at Goodison, with their famous criss-cross steelwork balconies.
Goodison is England’s Wrigley Field, a historic sports venue sitting on an irregular block two miles from the city centre, but it’s no architectural marvel.
Its beauty comes from being there for so long; a 1900 map of the area is almost unchanged from now. Dozens of dense, terraced streets pack tightly around St Luke’s church and the football ground on Goodison Road.
It was regarded as the finest football ground in England when it opened in 1892 and became the first and only club venue to stage an FA Cup final in 1894, a game attended by 69,000. By 1905, Goodison’s 50,000 capacity was double the size of nearby Anfield.
Goodison was England’s first major football ground, described as "magnificently large, for it rivals the greater American baseball pitches" said one 1892 report. But there are no ivy-covered walls at Goodison. The hemmed in exterior is clad instead with pictures of heroes of yore against a backdrop of Mersey blue.
Goodison was among the best until relatively recently. In the 1980s, only it and Old Trafford offered both standing and seating facilities on all four sides of the stadium while Goodison was the only ground to have double decker stands on all four sides.
But what was once the biggest and one of the best has faded as rival stadiums were expanded or rebuilt. In 2000, the capacity of Goodison was 40,100 (down from a peak 78,299 in 1948) and Anfield 42,000. In 2025, Goodison went below 40,000, Anfield is 62,000.
While Liverpool bought up the houses which surrounded Anfield, Everton looked to move to a new stadium rather than do the same – though in 1937 they did buy up houses on Gwaldys Street to build a new expanded stand.
This century, Everton looked at building a new home at King’s Dock by the Mersey in the city and in Kirkby on the outskirts of it, plus a potential groundshare with Liverpool in Stanley Park. But they all came to little until Bramley-Moore, which has cost around £750 million.
Everton’s motto nil satis, nisi optimum – ‘only the best is good enough’ – no longer applies to Goodison as it once might. The football ground – for it is a ground, rather than a stadium – missed out to neighbouring Anfield across Stanley Park when it came to hosting games at Euro ’96.
Before that, Goodison was chosen as the city’s venue during the 1966 World Cup finals. Long before, Everton FC played their first eight years as tenants at Anfield before an argument over rent led to them going it alone and finding a new home on land described as a "howling desert".
That was in 1892 and a new team comprised entirely of Scots was formed to play at Anfield: Liverpool FC.
But time moves on. Two hundred years ago, Everton was a pleasant hilltop village favoured by the local gentry for its toffee shops before it was absorbed into Liverpool’s boundaries in 1835. To this day, the club’s nickname is The Toffees.
When a football club moves home, it’s not just the fixtures and fittings that are left behind. So do the discreet plaques by the side of the pitch bearing the names of the fans whose ashes have been scattered on the pitch or by the side of it.
Or the 2001 statue of Bill ‘Dixie’ Dean, one of the most prolific goalscorers in football history and the man who scored 60 league goals in one season. Dean once lived in a terraced house nearby and died at Goodison during a Merseyside derby in 1980.
Though some things can be preserved and moved – the team, the fans, the Z Cars theme tune played before every game – the soul of a football club can’t just be transferred overnight. Like the matchday habits of visiting favoured public houses or fish and chip shops, seeing familiar faces or the memorabilia stalls inside St Luke’s church that are part of the culture.
Fans have invested decades of emotion and routine into their ‘Everton’ and it’s hard to break that moving to a home that is still unfamiliar. Everton’s women team will stay at Goodison, but how do fans feel about the final days of a place they love so much?
“So much of the season was occupied by what looked like the genuine possibility of relegation and most of the football under Sean Dyche was grindingly miserable,” explains Mark O’Brien, who has written several books on Everton.
“So, for a long time the whole prospect of this being the final season at Goodison was pushed to the back of everyone’s mind. It's only been since the upturn under (new manager) David Moyes, and easing away from the bottom of the table, that there’s been the headspace for people to start to really take it on board.
“There was also the dreaded final derby game (against Liverpool) to navigate. And what a night that ended up as. In many ways, it would have been most fitting if we could have just done a mic drop and exited the building the moment James Tarkowski smashed home that injury-time equaliser”.
The new stadium has been greeted with enthusiasm by most Evertonians.
“It’s been the one ray of light for a lot of people for quite some time,” explains O’Brien. “Everything about it seems to have been handled spot on and in what is, to be honest, a quite un-Everton fashion. I think some of our supporters wish they could get season tickets to follow (the builders) Laing O’Rourke instead. It does look tremendous though and the location on the banks of the river is just ridiculously iconic”.
It does indeed look tremendous. It has smooth lines next to the water, steep stands and is far from the identikit new stadia that were thrown up in a too similar fashion over the past decades.
It’s big too, with 13,000 more seats than Goodison (and scope for 10,000 more) and far more revenue-rich executive facilities.
It won’t have the sheer wall of Goodison’s main stand, where multi-million pound footballers are dropped off outside terraced houses dwarfed by the what was once the biggest stand in Britain, where Guardiola spoke barely 20 metres from where working Liverpudlians live, the football club at the heart of the working class community which helped make it what it was.
