Martin Rogers

USA TODAY Sports

HALEWOOD, England – Landon Donovan still remembers his first visit to Everton, the English Premier League soccer team with more links to the USA than any other.

It was two days into 2010, and Everton was playing Carlisle United of England’s third-tier League One in the FA Cup, the venerable English tournament that started play in 1871. The opponent was about as unfashionable as you could imagine, and the conditions were freezing and gloomy. Yet Goodison Park, the club’s home since 1892, was packed.

“Every single person greeted me as I walked through the crowd and into my seat. I knew right then that I would love playing there,” Donovan told USA TODAY Sports. Donovan had two stints with the team, in 2010 and 2012, on loan from Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy. “(It was) an incredible place to play.”

MORE SOCCER COVERAGE:

Juventus beats Monaco to reach Champions League final

FIFA gives three months for other 2026 World Cup bids

FIFA is still a mess, latest election shows

Everton is called the People’s Club for a reason and comes with a heartwarming 139 years of history after being founded by a Methodist church minister who wanted to keep younger members of his working-class congregation occupied during winter.

“Rev. Ben Chambers set the club up in 1878 and wanted to bring his community together, giving this area some civic pride,” chief executive Robert Elstone said in his office at Everton’s USM Finch Farm training facility and headquarters. “We’re still bringing communities together, getting them engaged, listening and reacting to what they tell us and making them really proud to wear that blue jersey.”

Goodison was built for 19th-century life and is tight and cramped and frosty on occasion but exceedingly warm in spirit. In some ways, Everton throws back to a more innocent time, with its nickname “The Toffees” coming from a popular candy store that was located near the stadium.

For a U.S. soccer fan seeking an authentic team that won’t get him or her labeled a bandwagon jumper, Everton would be a solid option. With the current season winding down, USA TODAY Sports recently spent a day at Everton to see what makes an English Premier League operation tick, and found a desire to spread the team message far beyond its traditional borders.

“Growing up (in England) it is easy enough,” club captain Phil Jagielka said while reclining in a computer room used to educate trainees. “You support the team your dad did, or where you were brought up. (In America) if you don’t have a connection like that, some people — the glory hunters, if you like — might tend to go for the big teams, the big names. But we are a proud club … and a team on the rise.”

Not a ‘museum’ team

As a central defender who joined Everton in 2007, Jagielka enjoyed a long and productive partnership with U.S. national team goalkeeper Tim Howard, who was with the club from 2006 to 2016 before returning to MLS.

“Tim was one of the most important members of the team,” Jagielka said, adding that Howard was “terrible” at downtime pursuits such as pool and darts. “He fired up the squad and was always the person you could rely on.”

Apart from Donovan’s stints, Everton also has featured former national team forwards Joe-Max Moore and Brian McBride and, much further back, welcomed the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants for a 1920s baseball exhibition during a fledgling attempt to get America’s pastime to catch on in England.

Around that period, Babe Ruth met legendary Everton forward Dixie Dean, whose mark of 60 goals in a season still stands as a record and has mythical status similar to that of the Bambino’s 60 home runs in 1927.

Ruth was stunned when the soccer star told him he made 8 pounds per week, the same as every other player, because of a salary cap that paid no more than that of an average construction worker.

Now there is no salary cap in English soccer, with escalating salaries having allowed the wealthiest clubs such as Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Everton’s neighbors, Liverpool, to monopolize the top of the standings.

Everton wants to be the next team to break through and thinks it has the blueprint to do so under new owner Farhad Moshiri, a steel and energy billionaire who purchased a 49.9% stake in Feb­ruary.

“It is a big task, but it is one we relish,” Elstone said. “If you absolutely believe it’s all about money and that you get what you pay for, it probably looks even more daunting. But we feel that through the right manager, player trades, player development, you can buck that trend.”

With two games left in the season, Everton is in a comfortable kind of limbo, in seventh place, 13 points clear of its nearest rival, but needing a miracle to overtake Arsenal for sixth place.

Although the history is rich, with Everton being a founding member of the Football League in 1888, Moshiri says he does not want the club to be “a museum” and is committed to investing in fresh talent. A big splash can be expected during the summer transfer window.

“We’re the People’s Club, with a rich heritage going all the way back,” Elstone said. “We’re closing on the likes of Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, but to really push on and contend at the very top the thinking was that we needed the new investment, and we need a more modern stadium.”

Moshiri, who sold a substantial share in Arsenal to fund his Everton purchase, has taken steps toward building a state-of-the-art stadium, but how to build a squad full of world-class players who can win games in the EPL?

There is no draft aimed at creating parity, just a prize money structure that rewards the wealthiest, who also routinely earn the right to participate in lucrative European tournaments such as the Champions League. That money gets reinvested in even better players, and on it goes.

For a club such as Everton, now being able to afford players who can make a game-changing difference is just part of the battle. You still have to persuade them to join. Convincing a big-name foreign striker that Everton is a better proposition than say, Manchester United, requires a powerful sales pitch.

That’s where Steve Walsh, hired as director of football last summer, comes in.

Produce players for ‘our team’

Walsh is a modern talent-hunting guru, having built the Leicester City squad that won the EPL as a 5,000-1 shot last season. One member of that squad, Riyad Mahrez, was the 2016 EPL player of the year. Another, N’Golo Kante, now with Chelsea, just won this year’s edition. Both were plucked from obscurity by Walsh, a jovial character whose methodology must be a bit more complicated than it sounds.

“You use the stats and use your eyes to see the type of player they are,” Walsh said. “Watching gives you a flavor of what the players are like, and then you find out as much as you can about the player’s character.

“You can find out a lot from their social media habits. You speak to people, former coaches. Are they dedicated or distracted by other things? Young boys with a lot of money can easily go the other way if they are not careful.”

With few exceptions, the biggest teams have relied on buying players in the transfer market. Youngsters in English soccer are signed to contracts and developed. It is supposed to end with the best of them graduating to the first team. In practice, however, most of the starters at top EPL teams were bought, not grown.

“There are different stages of development young players need, and the most important thing they need at the end of that is an opportunity to play in the first team,” said David Unsworth, who appeared in 188 games for Everton and coaches its under-23 team. “You can have all (the infrastructure), but if you don’t get an opportunity to play in the first team, what are we doing it for?”

Everton has invested more heavily in its youth structure than other clubs of a similar size, and it is starting to see the payoff. Unsworth’s charges just clinched the EPL under-23 title and, perhaps more important, the survival rate of the developmental players is high.

England captain Wayne Rooney is the signature name to have come through the program, having joined Everton at 9 before being sold to Manchester United for a world-record fee for a teenager of more than $30 million in 2004.

Now Ross Barkley is the example for trainees. On the day USA TODAY Sports visited the training field, England national team head coach Gareth Southgate was looking on from an upstairs balcony, casting his eye over 23-year-old Barkley, who could be the national team’s long-term midfield solution.

There are others emerging too, such as Tom Davies, a Beatles-listening and thoughtful 18-year-old who gets dropped off at training by his mom but has settled effortlessly into the rigors of EPL life.

“The No. 1 point (here) is to produce players to our first team,” Unsworth said. “Not anybody else’s, but our first team.”

A major part of the youth program involves activities designed to keep young players humble, no easy task when some EPL 16-year-olds have contracts large enough for them to afford a Ferrari. Unsworth spearheads a community project in which his players are contributing their time and money to renovate a property near Goodison that will be used to house homeless youth.

An EPL stalwart

Everton’s consistency — it has been relegated from the top tier of the English game only twice, most recently in 1951 — must have something to do with its familial nature. Reputations count for little in soccer; former EPL champion Blackburn Rovers was relegated from the second-tier Championship to League One last week, and former European Cup winner Nottingham Forest narrowly avoided the same fate.

The inner workings of an EPL team over the course of a day is something that the British news media, and by extension the U.K. public, rarely get to see. EPL teams are notoriously secretive and highly wary of the media, perhaps with good reason.

Barkley, who is of mixed race, was recently likened to a “gorilla” by the Sun newspaper after an incident in which the player was the victim of an unprovoked nightclub assault.

Other than banning the publication from its premises for an indefinite period, Everton has simply moved forward, with serious business ahead.

Head coach Ronald Koeman has been linked with Barcelona, which could be taken as a cause for concern but also is proof the team is doing something right. The Dutchman, one of the best players in the world during his playing career, scurries around training as if he was 24 and not 54, taking part in five-a-side games while approaching the conundrum of Everton’s continued progress with scientific precision.

English soccer’s flaw in recent times is that it has been a closed shop, but Everton, from top to bottom, senses a crack that can be exploited. To do so, everything has to keep working, seamlessly and persistently.

Koeman is a blunt talker, but the reason he came here, and what he wants to achieve, is never far from view. Having won the European Championship with Netherlands as a player, he has little interest in looking over his shoulder.

“If this club was not ambitious,” he said, “I would not be the manager of Everton.”