The Old Lady's Last Ride

Goodison Park's days are officially numbered but it leaves behind an indelible legacy

The Grand Old Lady is preparing to dust off her glad rags for one last time.

This weekend heralds the official start of Goodison Park’s final season in operation. For the past 132 years, it has been a staple of English football; a name which evokes heritage. It has hosted some of the game’s most illustrious figures and, in some cases, their last breaths. Five years apart, Dixie Dean and Harry Catterick passed away at the place where they had been most synonymous. The ashes of Everton’s record all-time goalscorer were later scattered on the same halfway line which he once prowled.

But summer 2025 ushers in a new chapter away from this cosiest corner of Liverpool 4. Saturday’s visit of Brighton & Hove Albion marks the first of many ‘lasts’ for Sean Dyche’s side in their spiritual abode. A final Premier League opener will be followed by its last-ever Merseyside derby and at least one big game under the lights, all before an emotional last dance against Southampton on the weekend of May 18 next year. The clock officially began ticking in February 2021, when planning approval was granted for Bramley-Moore Dock. Back then, those four years still felt an eternity away with games still being played behind close doors due to COVID-19 lockdown.

Even at that stage, English football’s first purpose-built stadium had long surpassed its shelf life. It is increasingly a relic of a bygone age; barely distinguishable from the heydays of Dean, the Holy Trinity and the club’s all-conquering team of the mid 1980s. Restricted vantage points and cramped confines are commonplace on virtually all sides of the ground while anyone who’s ever tried to navigate its press box without pulling a hernia would struggle to argue that a modernised successor is long overdue.

And yet, there is still an emotional wrench about what will soon be left behind.

In an ideal world, Everton would have found ways to redevelop Goodison into a sustainable long-term home. Plans were put forward by The Blue Union as recently as 2015 but never seriously entertained. Another potential legacy of the stadium being preserved with downsizing for use by the women’s and academy teams, as Manchester United are now exploring in Old Trafford’s expansion plan, was similarly off the table. The latter would have been particularly fitting, given the stadium previously hosted a match which went down in the folklore of the women’s game when Dick, Kerr Ladies faced St Helens Ladies in 1920 before a crowd of 53,000. Beyond that, it was a venue of choice for two FA Cup finals and five 1966 World Cup fixtures, including a semi-final.

Progress, however, comes at a price and Goodison’s rustic charm that was previously the club’s greatest strength has also held them back. Its tight-knit nature, hemmed in by rows of terraced houses and an A-road, stymied potential growth. Even the 1994 redevelopment of the Park End lacked the foresight to take capacity beyond 39,572. Its twilight years have been, to put it politely, fraught with their lifelong tenants engulfed in widespread tumult to the point that some Evertonians are already relishing an end to the ‘curse’ with the move to pastures new. There may still be one final indignity if the Toffees end the season by entering a third decade since lifting major silverware.

Bramley-Moore represents a potential game-changer financially for the club but also a fresh start away from the pressure cooker that Goodison has often become. Ben Foster revealed in 2022 that the secret to winning the battle of wills at the stadium was to ‘get right on top’ of their hosts early on as it would internalise the fury of supporters. But while the former goalkeeper’s point contained a grain of truth, the Grand Old Lady has also produced some memorable moments for its long-suffering supporters.

The leaving of Goodison has already sparked widespread reflections and recently brought to mind a conversation with the late Howard Kendall one sunny midweek afternoon in October 2013. Sat overlooking the pitch that witnessed his crowning moments as both player and manager, the man who straddled Everton’s two greatest eras discussed the prospect of their departure, with two failed stadium moves in the rearview mirror and a third still to come before Bramley-Moore entered the equation.

At a time when West Ham’s looming move to the London Stadium had become a hot topic, Kendall sounded a note of caution about the challenge associated with leaving two of English football’s iconic venues. "Here, you've got a tremendous atmosphere and at Upton Park you have a tremendous atmosphere,” he said. “That will be missed if they don't get that type of stadium whereby it becomes a fortress and the fans are on top of you rather than miles away from the touchline. If Everton moved to a 55,000 to 60,000-seater stadium, I don't think they'd fill it either … If West Ham are not doing that well, they're not going to fill that Olympic Stadium with 50,000 people every week so you're losing some of that atmosphere, whereas this place has got the atmosphere."

Kendall’s point was a valid one and taken into consideration when his former club designed the impressive, spaceship-like structure still evolving on Regent Road. Unlike West Ham’s home, fans will remain in close proximity to the pitch; albeit not so near that they could slap a player’s backside, as Crystal Palace’s Joachim Anderson discovered when Everton salvaged their Premier League status in May 2022. Only the fullness of time will reveal whether the Goodison roar which greets the pre-match crescendo of Z-Cars will sound as vociferous on the banks of the royal blue Mersey as it does pinging off the Archibald Leitch-designed rafters in its current domicile.

Further adjustment periods will be required in the move to Bramley-Moore as fans’ matchday rituals invariably change. The top floor of St Luke’s Church will no longer be abuzz with historical fanatics popping in to visit the popular matchday exhibition held by the Everton Heritage Society. Many that habitually frequent, among others, The Winslow, The Spellow and The Brick will have to discover new haunts, although the Bluehouse and Hot Wok are already confirmed to live on in the new surroundings.

Routes to matches are also set to change, with Goodison’s accessibility from various points of the compass being replaced by a stroll downwind of Liverpool’s iconic waterfront. That in itself marks another departure of a time-honoured tradition. This Substack is titled ‘A View From Stanley Park’ in a nod to the current divide between the city’s two clubs. Few regions across world football can boast housing two elite-level stadia in the same geographic postcode. Only Dundee and Nottingham come close in staking a similar claim of their own teams residing within touching distance.

When Everton preserved their top-flight standing with a ‘perfect week’ at the end of last season, with a hat-trick of wins over Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Brentford, it was soundtracked by Elton John’s I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues. Fans sang it long into the night after a first victory over their local rivals on home soil for 14 years and, quite possibly, the club’s last great evening beneath the old floodlights.

Its opening line of ‘Don’t wish it away, don’t look at it like it’s forever’ now serves as a mission statement for what promises to be an emotional nine months ahead.