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Standing on a seat to his left is a young fan, smiling gleefully and holding his scarf upside down.

Big Dave catches sight of him for an instant and laughs. He’s about to lift the FA Cup after beating Manchester United.

There are few better feelings, for Everton player or supporter.

Neither dreamed that day it would be the last time (to date) the club would lift a trophy.

Watson, of course, is no longer playing. But the fan is still a fan. It was me.

Watching your team go 20 years without silverware hurts. It’s why Everton fans clubbed together to fly a plane over St Mary’s last weekend calling for the board to resign.

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Plenty of pundits took that as a kneejerk reaction to a frustrating transfer window. It wasn’t.

There is a growing contingent of Everton fans simply fed up at years of perceived stagnation by English football’s fourth most successful club.

It’s why there will be more planes flying banners this season, possibly even this Sunday when Manchester City visit Goodison Park.

So what is wrong at Everton? The simple answer is – money. It tends to talk in football these days. Look at last season’s top four.

Disgruntled Evertonians point to the fact the club has been in the Premier League since it started, and received mind-boggling sums in TV rights.

They ask where that money has gone. But the answer to that is simple – into the pockets of the players.

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Look at Everton’s last set of accounts. The club earned £88m in TV money. But it paid out £69m in wages. Doesn’t leave much for transfers, does it?

It’s the same story if you look at the bigger picture. Everton’s turnover was £120m. How much did it cost to run the club? £115m.

Where’s the TV money? It’s gone back into the club, lads.

Everton made a small profit before tax in that period of £28m – which was basically spent smashing the club transfer record to buy Romelu Lukaku.

Does that make Everton “poorly run”? It depends on your point of view. When you have the ninth-highest wage bill in the league, you have no right to finish higher than ninth.

Yet Everton have consistently finished higher than that – higher in fact than far richer clubs, including Liverpool and Manchester United in recent seasons.

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For some fans, finishing fifth or sixth or seventh isn’t good enough. They want trophies.

But here’s the problem with modern football. Trophies don’t mean what they used to. There isn’t a single club whose main goal at the start of the season is to win the FA Cup.

The top clubs want to finish in the top four. The rest just want to stay up.

If you can’t win the league or the Champions League, anything else is a consolation prize.

What did winning the FA Cup do for Wigan, or Portsmouth, the only two other clubs outside of the top four or five richest in the land to do it in the Premier League era?

Football has changed, and it has changed because of the riches on offer from staying in the Premier League.

It’s why qualifying for the Champions League is simply a bigger prize than lifting a cup at Wembley.

Some fans will never understand this. But it is a fact.

It is also one reason why Bill Kenwright can claim he has been a successful chairman of Everton.

There have been no real relegation battles during his time in charge. Plenty of dicey moments. But no last-day escapes of Mike Walker proportions.

And has there been a bigger achievement in Premier League history than what David Moyes did in 2005?

Having just sold Wayne Rooney, he somehow took a squad scraped together on a shoestring budget all the way into the Champions League. Marcus Bent was the lone striker in that team.

Not so long ago Everton were celebrating their highest points tally in the Premier League. They were English football’s last representative in Europe last season.

These things are not trophies. They are not what the fans were used to in the 1980s. But they are successes. Ask Aston Villa, Leeds or Newcastle fans.

If there is one big criticism of Kenwright, it is his abject failure to bring serious investment into the club. And his claim that there is no better salesman for the club does look laughable.

But to the fans currently saying: “They don’t want to sell. They’re just in it for the profit”, ask yourself this – Do you honestly think Bill Kenwright is turning down buyers every day?

All a serious bidder would have to do is go public with an offer and the public outcry for change would make it virtually impossible for Kenwright to cling on.

So why hasn’t the club been sold when other clubs have? Well, what exactly is so attractive about Everton except it’s history?

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Manchester City were bought because they had a brand new stadium to move into on the cheap as a result of the Commonwealth Games.

Chelsea were bought because they were a London club with wealthy fans, land to build property on and plenty of scope to fill VIP boxes.

Everton sits in a very different market. It’s fanbase is dwarfed by the noisy neighbours, in a city where disposable incomes are low, and any buyer would need around £300m for a new stadium.

“But it’s Bill’s fault Everton don’t have a new stadium!” some would argue.

Is it? No-one doubts the failure of the King’s Dock scheme in 2003 was a huge missed opportunity. Was it Kenwright’s fault? In part, certainly.

But if you can’t fund something because costs are spiralling out of your control, what are you supposed to do?

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As for Kirkby, I can remember plenty of opposition from Evertonians to that move – and it was essentially dead in the water as soon as it was called in by the Government.

“But he’s sold all our assets, he’s the worst chairman in our history.” Is he? Worse than his predescessor, who couldn’t even be sure he could pay his players on time?

When Kenwright took over from Peter Johnson Everton had the fourth highest wages to turnover ratio in the league, at a time when it was making an annual loss of £3m and close to its overdraft limit.

Johnson was “investing” in has-beens and journeymen with no future, paid for with borrowed money which almost brought the club to financial collapse.

Yes Everton won a trophy under that regime. Big deal. They almost went under as well. Hell, Johnson even had to sell Duncan Ferguson behind his manager’s back.

As for asset-stripping, ask yourself this. Would you rather own bricks and mortar or Romelu Lukaku, Ross Barkley, James McCarthy and John Stones?

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Anti-Kenwright fans say: “What’s the plan? Show us the ambition!”

Didn’t they do that by appointing a manager who immediately aimed for the Champions League, and still wants to get there? By repeatedly breaking the club’s transfer record?

Isn’t the plan to slowly build a financially stable club, invest the TV money in the playing staff, grow the business, pay down the debt (as of May 2014 it stood at a manageable £28.1m, down from £45.3m the year before), look for new investment and explore every possible option for a new stadium?

Everton fans have never seemed more divided. Every one of them is entitled to his or her own opinion.

But it is beginning to descend into an ever more spiteful argument between bitter rival voices.

That can’t be good for the club. Calling for someone to go is all well and good. But that’s calling for a vacuum.

You can sack a manager and there are hundreds out there who would line up to take over. I’m not sure the world is quite so full of rich investors desperate to take over from Bill Kenwright.