Everton, a club in chaos, reaps the rewards of the Premier League's financial revolution | Everton

YoIt is 40 years since the greatest season in Everton's history, when they won the league and the Cup Winners' Cup and reached the FA Cup final. But it was a rare glory, coming at a time when it was difficult to see how English football, ravaged by tragedy and disaster, could continue. Everton were, along with Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham, one of the “big five” clubs that led the way. Premier League It split up in 1992, an event now widely regarded as a necessary step in the game's revival.

But the move also led to football's embrace of neoliberal economics: Everton's only trophy since the split is the 1995 FA Cup and, after three consecutive league defeats at the start of this campaign, they look set to spend a fourth successive season battling relegation.

Change was needed. Five days after Everton won the 1984-85 title, 56 people were Died in a fire in BradfordThat same day, a 15-year-old Leeds fan was killed when a wall collapsed on him during a fight at a match in Birmingham. Four days later, Everton won Rapid Vienna in the Cup Winners' Cup finalTwo weeks later, 39 people died after an attack by Liverpool fans at the European Cup final in Heysel Stadium in Brussels.

The week after the Bradford fire, the Sunday morning published his famous editorial in which he observed that football had become “a neighbourhood sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum dwellers” and demanded the implementation of minimum safety standards.

But how to fund them? The editorial rejected the idea of ​​subsidies, arguing that if some clubs were to go bust, a more agile game could be “more efficient, healthier, safer, more prosperous and more fun… football, like any other professional entertainment, is nothing if it does not draw crowds on its own merits.”

What is it? Sunday morning What the vast majority of people in football didn’t seem to understand was that improving the fan experience would quickly pay for itself at all levels. In the 40 years since then, league attendance has doubled. Was the break-up and the economic model it introduced necessary to do so? Those linked to the biggest clubs would perhaps say yes, they needed to get richer to raise standards and clubs at all levels of the pyramid have benefited.

It might even be partly true, however discredited trickle-down economics may be today: it may be that the exposure that major clubs gave to football by signing glamorous foreign stars (who were often out of date to begin with) was the best possible marketing tool for English football as a whole. Given that this was how European football was evolving with the arrival of the Champions League, perhaps the Premier League was necessary for English clubs to compete.

But others are sceptical. Sir Bob Murray, for example, who was chairman of Sunderland at the time, believes that better facilities and satellite TV revenues would have seen football rise anyway – in other words, the Premier League is taking credit for a phenomenon that was already happening: an economic revolution carried out under the guise of projected need.

Perhaps even the terms of reference are wrong. It has become so common to talk about football in financial terms that suggesting the priority should not be profit but sport seems curiously utopian. With a less overtly commercial model, with a more equitable distribution (although, to be fair to the Premier League, it has at least maintained a relatively even outlay of domestic television rights), more teams would be competitive and the gap between the Premier League and the Championship would not seem so great.

Was this the future the original big five imagined? Did they imagine that their lightly regulated capitalism would attract global oligarchs and sheikhs, states and private equity funds, swaggers and opportunists? Only three of the original big five have won the Premier League (United, Arsenal and Liverpool), and one of them only once (Liverpool). Only one league title in the last 11 years has gone to a big five club (Liverpool). There is a sense that they have been outclassed by the economic structures they put in place. Everton face a fight not to be the first of the five to be relegated.

In the decade to 1992 Everton won two league titles, two FA Cups and appeared in two further finals. They were the third most successful team in English history. Had it not been for the ban imposed on English clubs following the Heysel disaster they might have become only the fifth English team to win the European Cup and followed up on their title successes of 1985 and 1987. The Big Five had been the clubs with the five highest average attendances for most of the late 1980s.

Were Everton always overachievers? Was the problem that they never had the financial potential of others? There were years of financial prudence and top-10 results under David Moyes, but the financial gap was always apparent. Could different leadership have changed that, or was it inevitable that they would never be able to occupy a top-table place?

There has been a growing sense that the club is unsure of its place and unwilling to adapt to a declining status. Talent has been bought on the way down, not up; under Farhad Moshiri, there has long seemed to be an almost pathological attachment to signing the veterans and the lost, as if signing the young and those who have not proven they can be sold at a profit was somehow beneath them.

The result is the current chaos: four successive seasons in which more money has been taken in than spent, but still struggling to meet profitability and sustainability standards, while a selection of questionable potential owners fight over the remaining scraps of The fiasco of the Moshiri years.

At least there is the prospect of a new stadium. It may be a waste of resources in the short term, but in the long term it should generate revenue, which is what makes modern football.

But they have to get to that future. The first 87 minutes against Bournemouth last weekend He suggested they have the ability to do it; what followed called into question whether, amid all the turmoil and negativity, they have the necessary mindset. But those are details. The underlying factor is the economic change that reshaped the game in 1992 and a revolution that is beginning to devour its children.