View from the Blue
Columnist: Lyndon Lloyd

Bill Kenwright: None more Blue

We get our share of criticism for being overly negative, critical or subjective at ToffeeWeb, as you know, and now especially, the old mail bag has been receiving its share of messages from disgruntled visitors.

While some of our readers may feel that ToffeeWeb's status as the longest-serving and most popular (in terms of traffic, anyway!) Everton site on the Web requires that we be absolutely fair and balanced in our reportage, that goal is a little difficult to attain — or maintain, I should say — when we're dealing on the one hand with a subject as emotive as Everton and two different editorial perspectives on the other.

As much as we may pretend to be, neither Michael nor I are legitimate journalists — if we were, ToffeeWeb would be a subsciption-based service and we would get some financial return for the long hours we put into making this the premier Everton website! In the main, I think we strike the right balance but the nature of the crisis facing our club combined with the speed with which events are unfolding at Goodison means that our front-page editorial has been skewed towards Paul Gregg while appearing to stick the boot into Bill Kenwright.

My column yesterday was ostensibly an assessment of the mood of the fans and a commentary on how, ironically, Kenwright appears to be losing the PR battle with Gregg. Now, to redress the balance somewhat for those aggrieved at the perceived bias towards the "Kenwright out" camp, here are my own personal feelings on the situation.

I've never met Bill Kenwright but it seems impossible to dislike the guy. He is a genuine, Blue-blooded Evertonian for whom success at Goodison will always be his life's dream. He appears to be personable, passionate, emotional and as deeply injured by the darkness that has enveloped our club since the late 1980s as the rest of us.

Faced with the opportunity to personally affect the future of Everton, he launched a bid for control of the club in 1994, but lost out to Peter Johnson's better financed consortium, and again in 1999 when it became clear that the Johnson regime was driving the club into the ground. The second time he was successful, although it took every last drop of his financial resources and the need to call in every last favour from wealthy friends for him to raise sufficient capital to buy Johnson out of his 68% holding.

With Johnson having financed player purchases by plundering from the club's overdraft facility, the Blues were on a fast track to oblivion with mounting debts and increasingly restless bankers. But when no one else wanted anything to do with Everton, Bill Kenwright stepped forward to effectively save the club with a purpose-built company called True Blue Holdings, made up of himself, Mike Woods and Paul Gregg. At a stroke he atoned for any perceived complicity in the destructive Johnson regime through his membership of the Board during the preceding six years.

Having assumed control, however, and reinstating Sir Philip Carter to the position of Chairman that he had occupied during the Blues's heyday in the mid-80s, Kenwright faced the even bigger challenge of transforming "Everton the club" to "Everton the business". He started by negotiating a loan to erase the club's £30m overdraft that was secured against season ticket sales for the next 25 years.

The club's first Chief Executive was appointed in the form of Michael Dunford, who was promoted from club secretary, and eventually the woefully inadequate press, marketing and commercial departments were overhauled with the appointment of former Guardian writer, Ian Ross, and Andy Hosie to the positions of Communications Director and Marketing Director respectively.

These were undeniably useful changes that led to a succession of positive improvements: the increased focus on attracting corporate interest and support through the C-Blue initiative and the match-day marquee (to compensate for a well below-average quota of executive boxes); the opening of a city-centre branch of the Megastore; the 100 Seasons and 125th Anniversary celebrations; andcosmetic but well-received touches like the blue gravel pitch perimeter and the banners adorning the stadium's exterior

These all bore the hallmarks of Kenwright the impresario, the showman, the Evertonian. Sir Philip may have been the figurehead but Bill was clearly at the helm of the Good Ship Everton, and he was to make his most important change in the spring of 2001 when he made the agonising decision to dismiss Walter Smith and appoint David Moyes as manager. The timing, nine matches out from the end of a season that had threatened to end in the misery of relegation, was impeccable; Moyes's revitalising effect on the club saw the team secure Premiership safety with games to spare.

The following season, Kenwright's decision to sign Moyes appeared to be further vindicated when the Scot steered the club to 7th in the Premiership, Everton's highest league finish for seven years. But 12 months later, the Moyes Revolution had been spectacularly derailed by a lack of investment in the squad, ageing personnel and an apparent dressing-room mutiny that clearly translated to poor performances on the pitch. Everton finished 2003/04 in 17th, just one place above the relegated clubs with the lowest effective points total in their history.

Fed up with years of decline and false dawns, the backlash from the fans was swift and impossible to ignore. A list of ten questions to the Board was drawn up and distributed by supporters at the final game of the season at Manchester City. It was essentially a demand to know what the club's custodians planned to do to arrest the decline and how they were going to provide the funds Moyes would need to turn his woeful squad inside out with new players.

Typically, it was Kenwright who stepped forward and, honestly we have to assume, addressed the fans concerns in two articles^{1 2} in the Liverpool Echo. While his forthright responses, combined with the coup of appointing renowned troubleshooter Trevor Birch as CEO, assuaged supporter fears in the short term, the subsequent announcement that the anticipated £5m for Moyes's transfer kitty simply didn't exist, Kenwright's credibility was massively undermined.

Three explanations exist:

1) Birch had took one look at the books and confiscated the Everton cheque-book on the grounds of a financial crisis Kenwright and the Board didn't fully grasp

2) Kenwright knew the cupboard was bare but was convinced he could shake enough cash from behind the sofa to fund some of the much-needed player purchases

3) Bill's Echo responses were merely elaborate — not to mention uncharacteristic — spin to mask the horrible truth that there simply was no money and wouldn't be this summer.

Whichever you pick, Kenwright and the Board look culpable because it was their failure to provide any meaningful investment in the squad that meant that Moyes's deadline day signings the in August 2003 had apparently been drawn straight from the overdraft. With the club losing money year on year and not likely to earn any revenue from the team's exploits on the pitch (indeed some £4m in prize money was lost by not finishing in the top half last season) the debts were only going to get bigger without massive change.

And this is the crux of the matter where Bill is concerned. While he has proved himself adept at capturing the mood of the fans, as evidenced above, he has fallen short of delivering on the crucial financial side of the club. The classic example was the very "Kenwrightian" decision to buy Duncan Ferguson back from Newcastle United for almost £4m, a move that ran contrary to all conventional wisdom and, together with the massive five-year deal he gave Kevin Campbell, sucks £4m from Everton's kitty every year until 2005. It takes over 800 season tickets to pay their collective wages for just one week.

With £2.8m of annual season ticket sales going to pay off the 30-year Bear-Stearns securitzation loan, the club is haemorrhaging money without making enough in other areas to stay in the black each season. While Kenwright has surely been working hard to secure inward investment, he has singularly failed to bring in any significant influx of new money to the club.

Which leads us to Paul Gregg whose patience with the lack of investment and the escalating debt appears to have reached its limit. If reports are to be believed, the Oxford-based entrepreneur has been registering his frustration to Kenwright for the past 18 months. Now, with supporter pressure growing by the week and relegation a very real possibility if David Moyes isn't given funds for a number of new players, Gregg has peered over the precipice and has resolved to bring about the dissolution of True Blue Holdings in order to bring new investors onto the Board.

So Bill has until Friday to prove that he can match the £15m of investment Gregg hopes to bring into the club once TBH is dissolved. If he can't, he may well feel it is time to step down as Chairman less than two months into the role, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Clearly, if he accedes to the dissolution of TBH and allows his shares to be diluted, he could still remain as chairman should Gregg be agreeable. Even if he doesn't stay in the hotseat, there's no guarantee or need for him to be booted off the Board unless his clash with Gregg is such that it makes his continued membership impossible.

This latter scenario would truly be a shame because Bill, being the Blue that he is, is the link between the fans and the Boardroom. His knowledge of our history and feel for how we should proceed remains a valuable commodity in an age when ruthless money-men are running the game.

In an ideal world, Gregg is able to usher in the £30m in investment he has promised to right the ship making Everton FC ripe for takeover by a truly forward-thinking and well-backed consortium, while Kenwright retains his place on the Board. Because while he hasn't been able to bring about the revolution he no doubt hoped for when he wrested control of the club from Peter Johnson four years ago, his heart is very definitely in the right place. We may just need his influence to make sure Everton moves forward in accordance with its rich traditions.

Lyndon Lloyd

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