Phil Neville remembers his first day at Everton’s old Bellefield training ground in 2005.

“I walked in and Jimmy Martin, the kitman who has been there for years, looked at me and said: ‘Alright, Manc? How are you doing?’”

Neville, who had signed from Manchester United, told him that he could not wait to get started.

“Jimmy looked at me and said: ‘I’ll give you one piece of advice,” Neville recalls. “We don’t take fools, we don’t want flash people around here.’ What he meant was that ‘we all give our best here and as long as you do that you’ll be accepted’. It was blunt, but I remembered it.”

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Neville would go on to spend eight years at the club and become their captain.

“Before I joined them I thought Everton were a good club who used to be great,” he said. “Then I went into the club and my perception changed. It’s an amazing football club. There are parallels with Valencia. If successful they could be one of the greatest and biggest clubs of England and Spain.”

Moving to Everton from United was not, in Neville’s eyes, a big step down.

“I came away after eight years there and thought ‘I love that football club’. I fell in love with Everton. Once it has touched you, you never let it go. I’m still in contact with lots of people there. They are unbelievable working-class, down-to-earth people who work at Everton and support it.”

At the heart of Goodison

A map of the area around Goodison Park from 1900 is almost unchanged. Dozens of dense, terraced streets pack tightly around St Luke’s church and the football ground on Goodison Road. This is England’s Wrigley Field, a historic sports venue sitting on an irregular block close to the city centre.

It was England’s first major football ground described as ‘magnificently large, for it rivals the greater American baseball pitches’ in one 1892 report, but there are no ivy-covered walls at Goodison, where the main stand towers ominously over the nearby housing. The exterior of the 40,221 all-seater stadium is clad instead with pictures of heroes of yore against a backdrop of Mersey blue.

It is match day and as The National surveys the scene, a child steps into a puddle in front of images of Neville Southall, Everton’s 750 game record appearance holder, and Joe Royle, a club hero, outside the main stand.

Everton are due to play a Sunderland team managed by their former manager David Moyes in a Premier League game. The father shakes his head and escorts the child across the road to the Winslow Hotel which sits but 10 metres from the seven-storey main stand. The hotel is busy with fans, with quotes adoring the walls in blue and white.

One – “Don’t forget boys, one Evertonian is worth 20 Liverpudlians” from former Everton captain Brian Labone reinforces the rivalry with their neighbours across Stanley Park at Anfield. The feeling has long been mutual. “If Everton were playing at the bottom of the garden, I’d pull the curtains,” former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once memorably said.

All around, fans in blue come from small streets filling the arteries to the heart of Goodison, where the residents’ bedrooms are a mere 10 metres from the main stand.

Sunderland’s luxury team bus arrives under police escort and young footballers wearing suits with caps or headphones and clutching large designer wash bags step off their transport. “Haway the lads!” comes a lone cry from a travelling fan. Moyes, who spent 11 years at Everton, receives a muted, curious, welcome.

Over the road, a souvenir seller in Scouse hollers: “Everton hats! Everton scarves! Yer Everton badges!” and “Ross Barkley scarves! Lukaku scarves!” Lukaku, a £28 million (nearly Dh128m) club record signing in 2014, is already Everton’s highest goalscorer in the Premier League era – the era where Everton fell behind all their main rivals – with 67 goals. He is some way to go to catch 1930s striker Dixie Dean’s 395 goals.

Enough focusing on the past

The noise of the street sellers’ curses mingles in the damp air with the smell of fish and chips and the manure from police horses. In the ‘Everton one’ store (a second club shop cheekily called ‘Everton two’ is located in the ‘Liverpool one’ shopping centre), the tills are busy. The store is located away from the stadium, past the statue of Dixie Dean and sits under a large ‘Nil Satis Nisi Optimum’ motto (Latin for ‘Only the best is good enough’). Fans can buy a replica shirt from the 1985 Cup Winners’ Cup success in Rotterdam, while a wall is adorned with a picture of Howard Kendall’s great double title winning side from the same year.

Everton, England’s fourth most successful club with nine league titles, are rightly proud of their past, but it can engulf the present.

“There’s a lot of looking back to the glory years instead of looking forward,” Neville explains. “Because Everton had so much success in the 80s, people always refer to it. It’s probably the same the Nottingham Forest or Leeds United – past glories are thrown in your face. It can be a positive. I’d see the great former players around the club, the stars of Howard Kendall’s 1980s side and I’d want to emulate them, want to be a hero like they were. They motivated me, but the expectation of trying to emulate former heroes weighed others down.”

“That 80s team hunted in packs,” recalls Norman Whiteside, a man who played against them and scoring the winning goal in the 1985 FA Cup final to stop them doing the treble, before joining them. “They were a true team over stand-out individuals.”

The history is all there in St Luke’s church, where a collection of stalls fills the wooden floor of the hall, selling old match programmes, artwork, badges and arty T-shirts for the more middle-class fan. The mood in this Toffeopolis is friendly and familiar. With their side settled in seventh, a wealthy new owner and plans for a new stadium, plus an Under 23s team clear at the top of the Premier League 2, Everton fans have much to feel optimistic about.

“It’s a club that has been through difficult times since our last great period in the 80s,” says Graham Ennis, the long-time editor of the When Skies Are Grey fanzine, who now mans a T-shirt stall, “but things are definitely on the up with the investment we’ve had in the last year. We can see steady improvements with the quality players that are being brought in like [Morgan] Schneiderlin and Ademola Lookman. We’ve got Yannick Bolasie, we’ve kept Lukaku and you can see a real team developing. We always like young players here who’ve come through the ranks like Tom Davies, too.”

Davies, an 18-year-old local boy, signed a five-year deal with the club this Monday. No club has as many teenage goalscorers in Premier League history as Everton’s 17, the youngest being James Vaughan.

Farhad Moshiri, a 61-year-old British Iranian who made his US$2.6 billion (Dh9.5bn) in steel and energy, has been the club’s major shareholder since 2016.

“It’s not enough to say you are a special club and a great club, we don’t want to be a museum,” Moshiri told fans recently. “We need to be competitive and to win. We have a position but we do not have all the time in the world. We need to establish ourselves and we have a window to do it.”

Graham Ennis agrees.

“Everton’s troubles started towards the end of the John Moores’ family reign and the legacy they left,” he says. “The club stymied in that period. His successor Peter Johnson did invest some money until things started going wrong. Bill Kenwright then came in not as a successor, but a safe pair of hands. That reign probably last far too long.”

“Bill Kenwright was a great chairman who knew the club’s values,” Neville says. “But he had to sell part of his shares to compete with the billionaires in the Premier League.”

Opposition to Everton leaving their home of 125 years for a new place on the banks of the River Mersey, is hard to find.

“If we build a proper stadium then everyone will welcome it,” Ennis explains. “We’re already talking about it being the fourth grace and when you have the cruise liner coming in sailing past the new Goodison Park it will be fantastic.”

Could they not develop Goodison as Liverpool did with Anfield?

“I wouldn’t like to do what Liverpool have done in expanding Anfield,” Ennis says. “They bought the houses behind Anfield, they let the neighbourhood degenerate and go to rack and ruin. I hope that Everton have more of a social conscience than that. On the current footprint we have you can’t do it. If you turn the ground around and rebuild then you’re losing Goodison anyway. Regrettably, I think we have to go and grasp the opportunity while we have it.”

Last week, Everton and Peel, who own Manchester’s Trafford Centre and much of the land by the Manchester Ship Canal, agreed terms to acquire a site at Bramley Moore Dock – which forms part of a £5bn Liverpool Waters scheme – after negotiations brokered by Joe Anderson, the mayor of Liverpool. The 50,000-60,000-seater stadium will cost in excess of £300m and be fully funded by the club.

Everton are moving into a bigger financial league and following the commercial lead set by bigger clubs in England north west. They are expecting to increase their shirt sponsorship by 300 per cent as they play catch up with the league’s biggest fish.

Building a culture

The Goodison Park public address system is a throwback to the 1980s. Songs by A-Ha, KC and Sunshine Band, Womack & Womack and Elton John ‘and I guess why it’s why they call it the blues’ add to the air of nostalgia. They are played alongside the 1985 FA Cup final song – sample lyric: ‘We’re the team, we’re supreme number one, and we love you, E-V-E-R-T-O-N.”

The whole experience of watching the team is like a throwback – from the 1960s TV show Z-Cars theme tune which greets the players, to the wooden seats on wooden floorboards around the old ground. It has more character than many a new Premier League bowl, but character can be a hindrance. There are too many stanchions obstructing the view, too few executive facilities to bring in the revenues similar to rivals. And it’s too small.

“Now, in Moshiri, we’ve got a man who is determined to build the new ground,” Ennis says, approvingly. “We’ve had 20 or 30 years of ground development ideas, but this one feels very real.”

The demand is there. A full 30 years since they last won the league, Goodison Park has been 95 per cent full on average for 15 years.

“Everton have been very good at making going to the match affordable,” Ennis adds. “A season ticket for a child under the age of 11 is £95, which is incredible. Young adults have concessions. Compare that with our neighbours Liverpool who are missing out on a generation of local children who cannot afford to go to games. A season ticket for me and my teenage year old son costs less than £500.”

Ennis stood outside Goodison selling fanzines for years before going inside to watch the match.

“We’ve had a couple of brushes with relegation and we were in a cycle of where we were unable to get out of the mess. Then we had Walter Smith in charge who downplayed our ambitions and made out that we were a team lucky to avoid relegation. For all Roberto Martinez’s fault, he came in and said ‘this club need to be winning things’.”

Martinez could not deliver and was replaced by Ronald Koeman, who said: “If Everton was not an ambitious club then I would not be here.”

Under the new owners, you can believe Koeman’s words and sources at the club tell us that diligence was done on Moshiri.

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Everton had been approached by several potential suitors who saw their potential. One, Carson Yeung, who went on to be involved with Birmingham City, was politely declined.

The new investment is helping the club promote talent via a youth system now headed up by director of football Steve Walsh, who excelled at Leicester City, while the club still want to stay true to their values. Every Premier League club has a charitable foundation doing good in the community, but Everton’s goes where others shy away from.

They are raising money to purchase and operate a home close to Goodison which will offer 16 to 23-year-olds who have fallen on hard times, or have fallen out of the care system, a place to stay in Liverpool.

Former player David Unsworth, now manager of the league-leading U23 team, says: “Modern-day footballers are in an incredibly privileged position and are supported by their club with everything, including dietary and fitness support and psychological matters.

“The home will see us offer that same level of support to the most needy across Liverpool and draw upon areas of expertise within Everton in the community to ensure that those young people accessing the facility will be given tangible life opportunities and skills.”

“We want to give all those people on the streets of Liverpool a helping hand and get them off the streets and somewhere safe where they can get back on their feet again. Everybody should have a roof over their head and we are going to give our all to this campaign to ensure that we can help as many young people as possible.”

The home is where the heart is, yet they donated £200,000 towards the cancer treatment of Bradley Lowery, a young Sunderland fan.

“Everton are firmly involved with salt of the earth type of people,” Norman Whiteside says. “They care and they don’t let anyone get too big for their boots. They’ve started a free school and they help disadvantaged people, but I hear stories which never get any publicity. Once a month, they take any former Everton players who are in care homes to the beach and buy them fish and chips and an ice cream.”

Future is bright, future is blue

Everton are comfortable in a 2-0 win against the league’s bottom club, but the atmosphere is flat, with low groans when things do not go right and a primal collective ‘Go on!’ when they do, as when Lukaku, 23, is fast enough and strong enough to hold off former Evertonian Bryan Oviedo to score the second.

Goodison can be enchanting for a big game, especially at night.

“It’s a special stadium, it’s iconic,” Neville says. “The sound bounces of the walls from the stands which come close up to the pitch. It’s an old school stadium – like Valencia – that supporters will be reluctant to leave but one which opposing players don’t want to play at.”

Sunderland at home is not a big game and Moyes’s presence receives no reaction. It is odd when he managed the club for 11 years, but maybe it is pity, for his record against Everton since leaving in 2013 is played 4, won 0, drawn 0, lost 4, scored 0, conceded 8.

“David Moyes blotted his copy book with his pursuit of Fellaini and Baines, and the comments he made at that time after he joined United,” Ennis says.

Perhaps history will judge him better.

“David Moyes was trying to move the club forward and he finished fourth, fifth and sixth,” Neville explains. “He was the perfect fit for the club at the time, a hungry manager who had to work on a budget at a club which was struggling. It needed freshness and energy and David gave them that. They’d become a club for which Premier League survival was a success.

“David sieved out the expensive old stars and brought in young players. He built a team, he got Everton back into Europe, he lifted expectations and started to develop youngsters. He set the ball rolling for a team that challenged the top sides again and are still doing that. The biggest clubs began to look at Everton’s players and thought ‘if we buy Everton’s best players they’d improve our team’.”

The game finishes and the music pipes up from the public address system. “It’s a grand old team to play for, it’s a grand old team to see, We don’t care what the red side say.” It sounds like a track from 1950s music hall and many of those in the main stand would probably know. The song cuts out at the end so that the fans can continue it, but few do so, as the fans shuffle awkwardly to the doors and past those images of 80s heroes.

The club is now pushing to get back to where they were.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” Neville says. “There’s a big gap between the biggest six clubs [the two Manchester clubs, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur] and Everton. But look at Tottenham, who’ve established themselves in the top six under Mauricio Pochettino, reaching the [Uefa] Champions League, and are building a 61,000-capacity stadium. When I was at Everton we were a better team that Tottenham, but Everton do have the ingredients to make the top six or top seven.

“They have to make the ground bigger, they have to improve the facilities, they have to keep moving forward or they’ll get left behind again.”

“Everton became a Spurs of the north,” Whiteside adds. “They struggled for years, but they’re looking better now than they have for a long time.”

“They have to keep hold of their best players like Romelu Lukaku and more importantly they have to keep hold of the manager Ronald Koeman,” Neville adds. “Without that kind of quality you won’t get in the top six, but it’s a very good club to play for.

“Finch Farm is as good as any training ground in England and it’s on the outskirts of the city so you can easily live in South Manchester, as a lot of Everton players do, and play for Everton. And when they do, they’ll never forget it.”

Editor’s note: This story is updated to correct an earlier version that stated Wayne Rooney as Everton’s youngest ever scorer. It has been corrected to James Vaughan.

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