‘The Goodison Crowd’ has something of ‘The Arab Street’ about it. That’s an imposed label that connotes elements of chaos, of intimidation, of volatility, the voice of the dispossessed challenging the status quo. It is telling that, unlike the Gallowgate End or the old Chicken Run at Upton Park, it embraces the whole ground – indeed it extends beyond geography to the diaspora of Evertonians, generations flung around the globe by economic and social conditions beyond their control for over a century now – and counting.
It’s a disputatious hive mind that now stands at the brink of a phase transition with a move to a shiny new stadium rising above the ground on which the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the current supporters once laboured. Bramley Moore’s facilities will represent a step-change, comfort, accessibility and transport links, infrastructure not so much improved as created. But will the new environment, more akin to a 21st century airport than the mediaeval Assizes that Goodison at its most febrile suggests, foster the unique culture that clings on within the tight terraced roads that surround the old ground?
The answer to that question will emerge in time (many of us did not believe it would survive the transformation from standing to seated a generation ago, but it did). To make that assessment, one first needs to identify The Goodison Crowd as it presents now, in its dying, desperate last days, something I would contend can only really be seen from the inside. I took its temperature in the first match after the Premier League’s imposition of a ten point penalty, Manchester United the visitors for a fixture that was always going to 11, even without a seething sense of injustice.
A couple of hours or so before kick off, on Goodison Road and in the FanZone, the billed bile was not in evidence. But almost all fans were holding square sheets of heavyweight glossy paper, handed out by volunteers who needed little in the way of explanation of their purpose. As the Premier League’s pompous pre-match formalities were enacted with the grim routines that, usually, nobody takes any notice of whatsoever in the ground, four sides of a blue ground turned red, very few outside the away section and Directors’ Box foregoing their chance to register their protest.
As Shakespeare knew, crowds can lurch from one emotion to another with little notice and authorities are well-advised to be wary of dismissing their moods as irrelevant or unfounded, merely an indulgence in the thrill of transgression. The reception for the officiating team (okay, the red carpet is never rolled out for the referee and their assistants at any ground) spoke to the antipathy directed towards the Premier League, seen (and not just by The Goodison Crowd) as heavy-handed with their penalty, pursuing an agenda more driven by the threat of government regulation rather than the settled facts of Everton’s contravention of profit and sustainability rules.
The three men in the middle are managed by PGMOL, a separate company, but jointly owned by the FA, the Premier League and the Football League – they were the closest the fans could get to their villains and they let them have it with both barrels. They turned in a somewhat uneven 100 minutes, not biased though as their decisions were somewhat arbitrary in favour and against both clubs. The atmosphere probably did get to Everton’s players, especially in their snatched finishing, but it would be hard to argue that the officials were impervious to the heat in the cauldron.
Where to go from here? I’m not sure the fans can keep up that level of intensity, but football supporters can foster grievances for years, decades even. That’s not healthy for anyone, least of all the men who used to be in black, the only target for the ire.
But it needn’t be so. Andy Burnham, Evertonian and Mayor of Manchester, was there, a fully paid up member of The Goodison Crowd and will have been reminded of a similar atmosphere, albeit one with very different roots, just across Stanley Park. In 2009, in his capacity as Culture Secretary, he was visibly moved at the service marking the 20th anniversary of The Hillsborough Disaster, speaking directly to the people who spoke back to him. That campaign, and that man, were never the same again, both growing in strength from the encounter.
I’m not expecting anything like that in 2024 as Goodison prepares to close its rickety turnstiles one last time, but if fans are told continually that ‘the game is nothing without them’, don’t they deserve a little more context and explanation for the swingeing, unprecedented penalty? Maybe also, an account of the procedures that isn’t quite so cold, so legalistic, so removed from the irrational, carnivalesque, transgressive escape that is at the heart of supporting a football club?
If no reckoning is made with fans’ feelings, the only upside will be stone cold certainty that the sense of injustice will move to the dockyard site a couple of miles northwest of Goodison and it will never become a Stansted-on-the-Mersey. Plenty might welcome that, but not one of the 30000+ Evertonians who let anyone with eyes and ears know exactly what they thought yesterday, would concur.