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 Campbell scores instant hit

Twelve months ago, Kevin Campbell celebrated new year in a rented apartment overlooking the Black Sea on the outskirts of Trabzon, a town near the Turkish/Georgian border.

"I was playing in the Turkish league, for Trabzonspor, and everything was a big test," recalled Everton's centre-forward as he relaxed amid the ultra-traditional, very British ambience of the Goodison Park trophy room.

"It was a remote area that, although heavily industrial, wasn't at all westernised. Generally the people didn't speak English, so I had to do my bit and learn Turkish.

"It's a different culture and I had to go through all the initiation ceremonies. The big one is where they cut a sheep's neck open on the pitch and you have to dip your hand into the wound and smear blood on your forehead and your boots.

"I wasn't that horrified because it was normal everyday stuff to the Turks and I knew that, to survive, I had to learn to go with the flow.

"I was lucky because my teammates were very good with me and people generally were friendly; everywhere I went I was welcomed with open arms.

"Turkish fans take football personally, though; they take results to heart. If you win they'll give you everything, but if you lose they are quick to turn on you."

Although Campbell's regular goals and ready smile charmed Trabzonspor's notoriously fickle supporters, he became disenchanted once the cash-strapped club began withholding players' wages.

Disillusion turned to dismay when, in what he later claimed to be jest, Mehmet Ali Yilmaz, the Trabzonspor president, described the Englishman as "a discoloured cannibal".

By now it was March and, several thousand miles away on Merseyside, Walter Smith, the Everton manager, knew that he faced not only a relegation fight but desperately required a new idol to replace Duncan Ferguson, the former Goodison centre-forward sold over his head to Newcastle United. When word started circulating that Campbell wanted a way out of Turkey, Smith reached for the telephone.

"A lot of people warned me off Everton," Campbell said with a smile. "They said I would find things even tougher at Goodison than in Trabzon. That was just too incredible to believe, though. I knew there were financial problems but I just had a gut feeling Everton would be right for me."

Joining initially on loan, Campbell scored nine goals in eight League appearances, thereby almost single-handedly averting relegation. A permanent transfer appeared a formality, but Smith – finding himself in charge during the particularly impoverished passage of Goodison history which preceded Bill Kenwright's recent takeover – struggled to raise the £3.5M required to sign the 29-year-old.

"I was in limbo," Campbell said. "When the other Everton players went back for pre-season training in July, I had to train on my own because Walter Smith didn't know if he could afford me and the Turks wanted me back. It was hard because, by then, I knew there was only one club for me.

"The Everton fans have treated me incredibly well. Before I arrived I hadn't realised just how loyal they are. Earlier in my career I'd been at Arsenal and Nottingham Forest, clubs where supporters can turn on the team. It's difficult for players to perform in those situations but, at Everton, they always seem to stay loyal.

"When I first arrived we lost at home against Sheffield Wednesday and things looked bad, but I was amazed when, in the car park afterwards, the fans said, 'We know you can do it'. For me that was brilliant and I think their optimism has spurred me on. You definitely don't want to let down good people like that." Campbell was not just saying the right things. Along with several teammates he joins supporters' club members for weekly lunches and, immediately after our chat, dived enthusiastically into the maelstrom of a fans' Christmas party. With his wife Faynia imminently expecting their first child – she gave birth to a boy on Monday night – he had a ready-made excuse to opt out, but ducking responsibility is simply not his style.

On the pitch, Kevin Campbell has a found a teenage striking soulmate in Francis Jeffers. "Sometimes attacking partnerships just happen and sometimes you have to work on them; with me and Franny it just seemed to click straightaway," Campbell explained.

"I've played with some great strikers, most notably Ian Wright, but my partnership with Franny has been the best. He's very quick, his movement is absolutely lethal – it's really quite similar to Ian Wright's – and he reads my flicks so well. Franny's incredibly easy to play alongside.

"Like me, he prefers the ball played to him on the ground, but he can finish with either foot, he goes past people, he's absolutely fearless on the pitch and never seems to suffer from nerves off it. The big thing about Franny is that he is a home-grown player and he knows exactly what it means to play for Everton."

Tellingly, Campbell believes that many chairmen and managers are overly obsessed with the "globalisation" of the game. He feels they fail to comprehend the innate parochialism of English football followers and consequently fail to appreciate their craving for local heroes. "I still talk to a lot of Arsenal fans and they say that, for all the Bergkamps, all the big names, there are still not enough home-grown players they can relate to," he insisted.

"Fans want local boys in the team but, in modern-day football, players who come up through the ranks have to work twice as hard as anybody else to persuade the manager to put them in ahead of a big-name signing."

Boasting a devastating change of pace, power, two good feet and decent aerial ability, Campbell, who was born and brought up in Lambeth, south London, initially appeared destined for Highbury glory, but George Graham clouded his horizon by signing Wright from Crystal Palace. Loan spells with Leyton Orient and Leicester City – coincidentally tomorrow's opponents at Goodison – preceded a £3M move to Forest in 1995.

"People had high expectations of me at Arsenal," Campbell said. "But I never had an extended run. When the team started doing well, George bought Ian and I was dropped so, in order to get a game, I had to re-invent myself.

"George saw I was willing to work for the team in any position so he began picking me in midfield; a lot of the time I played wide left.

"The manager appreciated I was doing a job but the supporters didn't always understand; they thought I should be scoring goals.

"But it wasn't all bad. We won a couple of cups when I played wide – the European Cup Winners' Cup and the League Cup – and I have to say I'd rather be out of position and winning things than playing in my proper position in a poor team which starves you of the ball."

Adopting this utilitarian philosophy enabled him to assess tactics from varying perspectives, to appreciate the broader picture. "Playing out of position helped develop my awareness, it benefited my all-round game, and getting stick from the fans made me a stronger character," he said.

"It changed my attitude. I learned that, to improve, you've got to keep making mistakes, that you've got to keep presenting yourself, keep wanting the ball, even if things are going badly."

Two years ago things were going swimmingly at newly promoted Forest when the board sold Campbell to Trabzonspor behind the back of Dave Bassett, the then manager. "Dave was fuming; I went without his knowledge," Campbell said. "The club tried to say I wanted to go, but it wasn't true. I wanted to stay, but they told me it was in my interests to leave.

"You have to be cynical in modern-day football; everybody has got a price, and if a club need money they can sell you. This game can be cruel. As I discovered, you can end up anywhere."

Ironically, Ferguson never wanted to leave Goodison, but Newcastle's £8M offer was simply too enticing for Everton to resist.

"Replacing Duncan was tough," Campbell admitted. "English football had forgotten about me; people were saying, 'Who is this guy?' They were cynical because the last time I'd been seen playing in this country was in the First Division with Nottingham Forest. I had to prove a point not only to them but to myself.

"When Duncan was sold, lesser men than Walter Smith would have walked away from Everton, but he stuck at the job and got me here on loan. Financially, his hands have been tied. He has had to compete against managers who have spent an awful lot of money, but he has done a tremendous job juggling limited resources. Our squad lacks strength in depth but, without injuries, we're a good team, good enough to qualify for Europe this season."

Replacing the iconic but injury-prone Ferguson for Campbell has proved excellent business. "People here speak very highly of Duncan," said his replacement, carefully. "I've never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I think I'm a very different sort of person – I don't keep pigeons but I do keep a lot of music."

Campbell's home in Cheshire could certainly double as a radio station's record library. "We've got soul, rap, reggae, R & B," he said with a grin. "At the moment I'm managing one of my cousins, who is a recording artist. He's from New York and his name is Busta Raddo. He isn't famous yet, but we're looking to break him – it's a little project of mine."

Raddo's first record, a new, rappy version of Blondie's The Tide Is High, should be released early this year.

"When I retire from football I'd like to get into music," reflected the striker-cum-budding promoter. "I can rap but I wouldn't record or anything, certainly not at the moment. Footballers who make records get given too much of a tough time . . . Anyway, I'm too busy trying to give defenders a hard time."

By apposite coincidence, Campbell was sitting beneath a picture of Dixie Dean, and you could have sworn the legendary Everton centre-forward smiled his approval . . .

 A Real Life for Ordinary Joe

JOE PARKINSON last kicked a football in the Premiership against Leicester City on 9 April 1997.  That was before New Labour came to power.  He was asked to play by Joe Royle, the Everton manager, though Parkinson knew his left knee was not really up to it.  A few weeks before, he had helped out, ironically, in an injury crisis and been asked to mark Juninho.

The little Brazilian had a score to settle from an earlier encounter and delighted in exploiting Parkinson's evident and painful lack of mobility.  By half-time, Parkinson's left leg had developed a familiar dull ache, by full-time he was reduced to walking.  Leicester City was worse.  At half-time, he told Willie Donachie, the assistant manager, that he would have to come off.  "Thanks, Joe, for all you've done,"  Donachie said simply.  And that proved to be the unglamorous end of a journeyman's career.

Last month (November 1999), after nearly three years of uncertainty, of surgeon's reports and medical bulletins, of hopes raised and dashed after riding a thousand miles to nowhere and running a hundred marathons in the gym at Bellefield, Everton's training ground, Parkinson announced his retirement. He had prepared himself for the moment, but the one unanticipated emotion was relief. 

"It means I don't have to lie any more," he says.  "Every home game, fans would come up and say, 'Hey, Joe, we need you back, when will you be fit?' and I'd say such and such a date, knowing I was lying.  Now, they know the truth."

Players often say that one tackle can end their careers, usually as a justification for avarice.  Parkinson reacted to the news of Roy Keane's £52,000-a-week contract with the same phrase.  Good luck to him, get what you can.  But there is a particular cruelty and a peculiar sense of loss in Parkinson’s dignified and unheralded exit.  Partly, it was timing; the injury coming at the age of 26 just as he had established himself – to his own surprise as much as anyone else's – as a decent Premiership workhorse, one of Royle's "dogs of war", with John Ebrell and Barry Horne.

Then there was the innocuous nature of the injury itself.  "Cruciate, was it?" he is asked most often.  "No, cartilage".  The sort of injury that modern surgical technique heals in a fortnight.  Parkinson remembers the tackle on him, a run-of-the-mill training-ground tackle.  As he fell, he heard the click in his left knee and felt the pain shoot up his leg.  It was just before Christmas 1996.  “I played on for six weeks," he recalls. "But it just got stiffer and stiffer, so I had to stop. That was it then."

He would have the knee looked at and cleaned out, get back training, only to break down again.  Eighteen months ago, he underwent pioneering surgery in Sweden.  His cartilage was removed, artificially regenerated and put back. Parkinson spent a year doing nothing but riding the exercise bike until the walls of the treatment room resembled a prison cell. 

He completed pre-season this year for the first time, running hard in a straight line, but the first day he had to twist and turn, to play properly, he knew it was all over.  The surgeon in Sweden confirmed it.  No more football, not even a kick-around with his young lad. Parkinson went back to the hotel room and sat on his own for 10 minutes and decided to get on with his life.  But the sadness goes deeper than that.

All Parkinson wanted to do as a boy was play football.  Brought up in Wigan, he spent most of his schooldays dreaming of wearing the red shirt of Manchester United.  He played every weekend wherever and whenever he could – for his school, for his club, for representative sides – and when he was old enough, he signed as a trainee for Wigan Athletic on April Fool's Day in 1989 and made his League debut at the age of 16.  Four years and a few managers later, he went into the office to ask for a pay rise.  It was rejected so he moved on – not to Old Trafford quite, but to Bournemouth.

It was a quiet solid career going nowhere, but he was happy being paid for doing what he loved.  He bought a house in Bournemouth, had just started a family and had shelved the idea of ever playing in the highest division.  Until, that is, Tony Pulis, then the Bournemouth manager, appeared at his door, saying Everton were interested and did he fancy a move.

Two weeks later, he was at Bellefield, training with the players he had just been watching on television.  At the time in the spring of 1994, Peter Johnson had just arrived as chairman, Mike Walker was in charge and Everton were deeply entrenched in a battle for survival.  Parkinson struggled to shed his lower-division inferiority complex.

Then Walker was sacked, Royle was appointed and rewarded Parkinson's evident commitment with a permanent place in the midfield during a brief revival of spirits at Goodison which culminated in a famous victory over Manchester United in the FA Cup final.  

The day remains a bit of a blur to Parkinson, the whole occasion a bit too flash for his down-to-earth tastes.  He preferred the semi-final and the less formal craic afterwards.
The strange phenomenon, though, is that Parkinson played barely two full seasons in Everton's first team, yet he remains one of the most popular figures at the club, the symbol of a more homely age before football was seduced by exotic foreigners and transient values.

Parkinson did not realise the full extent of the bond until he walked on to the pitch on crutches to make the half-time draw one Premiership Saturday.  The reception brought a lump to his throat.  His retirement prompted a flood of letters and faxes from fans, and the club have just granted him a testimonial.

"I'd like to think that’s a reflection of what I've put in to the club and the attitude I've had," he says.  "More than rubbing my hands and hoping to make some money, it's an honour.  It's to say thanks to me and for me to say thanks and goodbye to them, so there's bound to be some tears. Probably only then will the whole thing hit home, how much I'm going to miss it all.

"I could be bitter about it, but that's not the way I am.  Yes, my career was cut short but I've looked after myself, I've got a nice house, good family, a decent life and I've won a few medals.  I look back on football as a chapter of my life that's closed now. I've got the videos and the cuttings, kept all my shirts and my medals.  But what's the point in being bitter?  It only rubs off on the people around you and they end up disliking you."

Besides football, which has been his life, Parkinson's other passion is animals.  Last week, he went to Chester Zoo to inquire about becoming a keeper and, in the new year, he hopes to do some voluntary work.  "I'd be happy to do my apprenticeship or whatever.  I wouldn't want to be sitting behind a desk.  I want to be outside, in the fresh air, doing some manual work.  People are shocked when I tell 'em because it's such a contrast, but I'd do it for pleasure, not money."

Only one thing has angered him through the whole draining saga. "Watching players playing for Everton who weren't bothered when we got beat.  It's the problem of bringing in foreign players.  That got me down because I'd have played for peanuts."  Everton fans knew that well enough.  That's why Joe Parkinson is an old-fashioned folk hero.

 Smith is losing the Goodison patience game

Considering the clamour and anguished sense of betrayal that swept through the terraced streets around Goodison Park a year ago, the antipathy this week was remarkable. It was the anniversary of a pivotal moment in the recent history of Everton Football Club on Tuesday but the only mark of remembrance was indifference.

Who? What? Even you have probably forgotten, but 12 months ago the selling of Duncan Ferguson to Newcastle seemed to signify an acceptance of a second-class existence. Big clubs keep their better players and here we had Everton, a football institution with aspirations of grandeur, selling their principal asset. Worse, it was done with furtive secrecy akin to flogging the family silver at the back door with even the manager, Walter Smith, unaware of the negotiations.

Smith was livid but a year on it is apparent it was the making of his Everton mangership. Until that point the whispers on Merseyside questioned whether the man who had monopolised Scottish football with Rangers could cut it in England, but his stand against the sale established him as the supporters' figurehead. Rightly or wrongly, he was seen as the man who said "either you go or I go" to the despised holder of the controlling share-holding in the club, Peter Johnson.

But for how long? Yesterday Smith issued a barely veiled threat that he will leave Everton when his contract runs out in 18 months' time if the club remains in its current financial no-man's land. His patience might not stretch even that far.

"If things don't change I will have to see whether I want to stay," he said, looking at a sheet listing the talented but threadbare squad he has at his disposal for the game against Aston Villa today. "With every job you have to feel you are moving forward. You need that motivation. At the moment we are only stabilising, we are not building for the future. We are keeping the club's head above water and nothing more. Not just me but the directors and everyone working at Goodison."

Smith has been performing minor wonders this season with a squad that was stripped of £15M worth of players in the summer to placate the bank manager. He has no money for transfers, the wage bill has to be cut and sooner or later the players are going to get fed up with the lack of wages and success. But the situation will remain the same until Johnson is bought out by someone with the financial clout to also pay off the debts and still have cash to spare for reinforcements. How much is needed is anybody's guess, but we are talking nearer to £100M than £10M.

It will be a year ago on Tuesday when Johnson said he was willing to listen to offers but there is still no sign of a white knight on the horizon. Yet the team are unbeaten at home and, if they had held on to their lead against Chelsea last week instead of surrendering an injury-time goal, they would have been eighth.

The fans appreciate Smith's work even if they are curiously quiet about Johnson and only last Saturday Liverpool's sports paper, the Football Echo, carried a letter from a member of Everton Independent Supporters thanking his maker for Scotland's performance at Wembley. The thought of England hammering the Auld Enemy had turned his stomach, he wrote, because "if Craig Brown had been harassed out of the Scottish job, Walter Smith would have been high on the SFA's shopping list."

Yet the very moment the Echo was hitting the streets, the first overt signs of Smith's frustration about Everton's position were revealed. He has been dismayed for months, but had kept his thoughts concealed behind a deadpan expression until the unexpected nature and the very lateness of Chelsea's goal tore it aside. "That's shite," he exploded when someone pointed out the result preserved the home record, "it's no consolation at all."

There was concern, too, hidden in the humour of the throw-away comment when someone wondered what it would take for Everton to assume a place at the top of the domestic game. "Players," Smith replied. "You don't come from round here, do you?"

Yesterday at Everton's Bellefield training ground even the mask of mirth had been stripped away. "The frustration is there," he said. "Not just with the present circumstances but with things that have gone on for 18 months. I had hoped the first year would be a settling-in period and it hasn't worked out that way. That's tempered by the fact that all the players we have are doing well for us but we are still at the stage where we are at the mercy of a wee bit of good luck. If we get injuries to certain players or if we are hit by suspensions it could affect us quite badly."

The word "frustration" cropped up repeatedly in his conversation, an emotion borne out of a helplessness and a growing empathy with the area he has been transplanted in. Smith was attracted to Liverpool originally because he felt that, like Glasgow, where he had turned Rangers into a trophy-gorging leviathan, the labouring people of the city and football have not undergone an irredeemable separation.

"The reasons for coming to Everton 18 months ago are as strong if not stronger now, " he said. "You get more involved and you realise what the team means to everybody. I feel frustration that a club of this standing, with the level of support and depth of feeling, should be in this situation. There is no point in complaining every day because if I did it would have a negative effect. But if Everton finish out of the relegation zone this season it will be an achievement because of the problems we have."

The paradox is that while Everton continue to thrive, never mind survive, the ire aimed at Johnson is doused and his share holding becomes more valuable. The alternative is for bad results that will also bring pressure to bear on Smith.

The manager cannot win. Perhaps the supporters ought to be getting angry.

 No end in sight for Everton's anguish

Another potential suitor has apparently thought better of Everton, walking away on Tuesday from the sagging Grand Old Lady of English football, leaving her still in desperate need of a makeover. Warburg Pincus, a US finance house supporting the proposed bid by Paul Finnegan, a Merseyside computer games entrepreneur, may yet return. But their withdrawal from bidding for Peter Johnson's controlling interest leaves running the saga, of high farce and financial machinations, which has now enveloped Everton and Tranmere Rovers for more than a year.

Johnson has been offering his Everton shares for sale since early this year, while also owning Tranmere. His dual ownership is a flagrant breach of the rules of all three football governing bodies (the Football Association, the Premier League and the Football League), which forbid one man owning two clubs. While the authorities watch helplessly, Johnson has reportedly attracted a rich collection of bidders, from the Sultan of Brunei to Chris Evans and Terry Venables.

Although Everton's parlous finances alarm some suitors, there are reported to be three realistic bidders: Finnegan, a consortium fronted by the theatre impressario Bill Kenwright and another consortium, "The Toffee Project", comprising a group of local Everton-supporting businessmen. The US diamond dealer Hedy Shor is another whose name has been thrown up. Johnson, a Jersey-based tax exile since February 1997, is keeping Everton supporters and the powers-that-be waiting while seeking a deal acceptable to him.

Johnson, the owner of the Birkenhead hamper company Park Foods and a Liverpool season-ticket holder for 25 years, paid £10M for Everton in the summer of 1994, beating off a five-man Everton-supporting consortium, which included Kenwright. At the time he owned Tranmere, the local club whom he had steered from the old Fourth Division to the brink of the Premier League. "I'm loyal to wherever I am at the time," he said on taking over. "You can move your passions."

Johnson said he wanted to restore Everton to their former glories, but he has never convincingly denied his intention was also to make a fortune by floating the club. First he had to satisfy the authorities that he had sold Tranmere. The ban on owning more than 10% of more than one club was introduced following Robert Maxwell's late-80s exploits, owning Oxford United and Derby at the same time.

In June 1994, Johnson's advisors gave written assurances to both leagues that he had sold his Tranmere shares to his associate, Frank Corfe. Johnson even owned shares in Liverpool, which he had also undertaken to sell.

Minutes of Everton's board meeting on 1 July 1994 record that the Premier League was "content that there was no breach of the rules", and that "the Football League's requirement had also been met".

Corfe was said to have bought the shares and taken on the loans made to Tranmere by Johnson. Installed at Everton in 1996, Johnson invested another £10M in a rights issue. Everton's subsequent failures under him, continually surfing the relegation zone, resulted mainly from unsuccessful signings. Off the field, assured management was often lacking, seen most clearly in the near-£22M overdraft which resulted in the sale of Duncan Ferguson and also in the failure to achieve a move to a new stadium, which has never progressed much further than a sketch in a brochure published in May 1997.

The controversy which has enveloped Johnson and both clubs in scandal began last September. Corfe, who was in financial difficulties, was forced to resign by a fellow director, Fred Williams, who had uncovered what are said to be "discrepancies" in the running of Tranmere. Merseyside Police confirmed yesterday that a fraud squad investigation is "proceeding", although Corfe has denied reports of wrongdoing.

Johnson, said to still be owed £6.8M by the Prenton Park club, returned to take control of the Tranmere shares he had originally sold to Corfe. He has never publicly disclosed how he had the right to do so but David Dent, the Football League secretary, said that Johnson referred to a clause, in his original 1994 agreement with Corfe, enabling him to claim the shares back. "We were given assurances in 1994 that Johnson had no links remaining with Tranmere," a Football League spokesman confirmed yesterday.

If Johnson's arrangement to take back the shares is proved to conflict with assurances he gave the League, Johnson may have been in breach of the dual ownership rules for four years. Regardless, he has been in open breach since last September. Yet the authorities have been unable to act decisively against him, waiting only for him to sell one of the clubs. With no bids accepted for Tranmere, he is holding out for the Everton sale. Sources close to the dealings say that Kenwright was talking of a £30M bid at the beginning of the season, but has heard nothing since from Johnson. Sources say that Johnson, encouraged by lucrative recent share dealings in Leeds United and Liverpool, is now looking for £35M. Whatever the price, the Jersey-based Johnson will not be subject to UK tax on the deal.

Andy Williamson, a senior league official, has been placed on the Tranmere board as an observer, and financial dealings between the clubs, including transfers, have to be vetted by the League. This follows last year's sale to Everton of Tranmere's goalkeeper, Steve Simonsen, a deal arousing severe scepticism amongst supporters but whose legitimacy appears to have satisfied the authorities.

Beyond this, however, no sanctions are being imposed on Johnson, and no firm deadlines have been set. Tranmere's indebtedness to Johnson, which dates back to the glory years, which were financed by his loans, means that if his hand were forced, he could put Tranmere out of business. Hence the authorities' reluctance to act.

The League, however, suggested yesterday that it may move against Johnson for the breach of the rules – but not before Everton has been sold.

"We are looking for the dual ownership issue to be resolved," said the spokesman. "When it is, we might then look further into the issue of what Mr Johnson disclosed to us in 1994."

The wait has proved too much for Peter Kilfoyle, the Labour MP for Goodison Park's Walton constituency. In June, he wrote to all three governing bodies demanding they enforce their own rules. Dissatisfied with the response, in September he asked the Department of Trade and Industry to investigate. The DTI would not say yesterday what its response has been.

"Football clubs are great community institutions, to which supporters feel a huge sense of belonging," Kilfoyle said. "But the reality is that they are owned by private businessmen, using them for their own purposes, who can ride roughshod over them. And the authorities are absolutely incapable of monitoring the game."

The affair raises many serious questions, shining an unforgiving light on the administration of English football. At Everton's AGM a fortnight ago the manager, Walter Smith, said Johnson had been guilty of "gross mismanagement" of Everton. Yet the authorities' apparent solution to Johnson's breach of the rules is to allow him to retain control of Tranmere, where he has installed his girlfriend, Lorraine Rogers, as chairman and chief executive.

The absence in football's rulebooks of any vetting of club takeovers is a longstanding weakness in the regulatory framework. Yet this case exposes an even greater problem. Johnson has broken one of the few rules there are, yet the authorities seem powerless to act.

The case of Everton, a founder member of the Football League and one of its greatest clubs, is exposing dramatic weaknesses in football's administration which are surely long overdue for correction.

 Nero Johnson

Yet, just a few hundred yards from one of the biggest recipients of this newfound City largesse, one of the country's truly big football clubs sits mired in debt and depression.

It doesn't have to be this way. The only thing holding back Everton is a recalcitrant owner demanding £50million for a team worth less than half that.

While Liverpool spend Granada's lolly, Leeds become the latest Sky stablemate and Newcastle revel in NTL funding, Everton find themselves being overtaken by clubs with a fraction of their history and potential.

The fans want Peter Johnson out. All three football authorities have issued dire but toothless warnings that he should sell up. He is without support either in the boardroom or among the managerial team. And a pay-off of at least £20m is waiting as soon as he decides to jump ship.

But the food magnate, breaking all the rules by owning controlling stakes at Goodison Park and in Tranmere Rovers, is sitting tight, allowing another self-imposed 'deadline' for selling up to pass last week. While he dithers, Everton drift aimlessly, if not toward relegation then, at best, mediocrity.

Theatre impresario Bill Kenwright has been reduced to tears by the endless delays and problems which have beset his takeover attempts ever since he and his backers lost out to Johnson's £10M bid back in 1994.

Then, shareholders voted overwhelmingly to grant control to a man willing to offer a further £10M in bank guarantees. Today, many Everton supporters spit when they mention the name of this former Liverpool season-ticket holder and shareholder.

Kenwright and his backers are offering an end to this bitterness. And all they want to do is harness the power of the supporters themselves, tapping into the loyalty which has kept gates at an average of 34,000 over the past five years of struggle.

A share issue among supporters, with the potential to raise many millions, has been discussed, while the financiers backing Kenwright's judgment are willing to offer serious investment. Like Granada, NTL, BSkyB and other major companies, these bankers see a bright future in Premiership football. They want Everton and, more importantly, the club's loyal market to be part of that.

The problem is a price which would take the total spending package required to transform the club over the £100M mark.

Kenwright, an Evertonian whose blue blood has nothing to do with royalty, would gladly pay Johnson his £50M. Those providing the bulk of the cash, however, flinch at paying anything over £20M every time they look at the books. The HSBC has already walked away, forcing Kenwright to find alternative backers.

The money men with heads clear of emotional involvement see a club forced to sell Duncan Ferguson as a matter of urgency when the overdraft soared past £20M.

They have also noted John-son's past statements about the club needing a new stadium, another potential financial black hole.

Then there is the team, in need of at least £20M worth of new talent over the next couple of seasons if Everton's proper status is to be regained.

The board have also halted construction of the club's new youth academy because of lack of funds, while offers for the trio of Bakayoko, Dacourt and Materazzi – all bought in by manager Walter Smith at the start of last season – were accepted this summer to aid survival.

Smith, who threatened to resign when Ferguson was sold without his authority, no longer has to sell but spending will be limited. All in all, Everton are not an attractive proposition for investors and Johnson's position is akin to that of someone who buys a corner shop, runs it into the ground, then demands a 150 per cent profit when selling up.

In an effort to prop up this stance, he has even discovered a 'rival' bidder to the Kenwright group, old friend Gerry White declaring an interest. Everton insiders viewed his convenient arrival on the scene with scepticism.

No official bid can be put down on paper because, if it is rejected, Kenwright would have to wait another 12 months before making another.

While Everton remain in limbo, the likes of Derby, Middlesbrough and Leicester have passed them in the race for a place in the promised land of European super leagues, pay-per-view television and huge profits all round.

The FA, Football League and Premier League have joined forces to apply pressure on Johnson to get rid of either his Everton or Tranmere shares. They issued a statement at the start of the season, demanding that he sell up at Everton. Yet the constant meetings and warnings are without the threat of an ultimate sanction behind them.

As one insider said: 'No-one is even contemplating this situation going on much longer – it just can't be allowed to happen.'

Johnson doesn't comment publicly but, through hints and nudges, the message is always that a deal is on the verge of being completed. If it doesn't happen soon, surely the authorities must take some action against this Nero figure – with bringing the game, and Everton, into disrepute the first charge.

 Smith in Hall of Mirrors

WALTER SMITH recognised the scale of his problems at Everton when he realised that his wife had learned about the £7M sale of Duncan Ferguson to Newcastle United before he did. News of the deal reached guests in the Goodison boardroom during the interval at a Monday night match but Smith, busy supervising the 1-0 defeat of Newcastle that was his club's first Premiership win of last season, was left in ignorance. It was an experience that let him know just how many illusions had been fed to him when he became manager of Everton five months earlier. He confirms that he would have resigned if Peter Johnson, the chairman who had negotiated the Ferguson transfer, had not swiftly decided to step down.

Nine months on, and in spite of another worrying start to a League season, Smith insists he has no regrets about staying. He says that none of the disappointments he has endured on Merseyside has invalidated his reasons for opting to follow luxuriant success as manager of Rangers (six Scottish championships in a row, a total of 13 trophies won) with acceptance of one of the most daunting challenges in English football.

"After leaving Rangers, where we had all sensed it was time for a change, I took a few months off to think about my future," he recalled last week. "While I was at the World Cup finals, I was offered a couple of jobs. I could have gone to Spain but I was more interested in an approach from Sheffield Wednesday. The people at Wednesday were great and there is no truth in the suggestion that I came here because the money was better. I was drawn to Everton by the special traditions of the club. Liverpool as a city has obvious similarities to Glasgow. Football has retained a strong working-class base in both places. A lot of clubs have drifted away from their origins but that's definitely not the case here, where the game is a vital part of life. Despite all the recent troubles, our average gate remains around 36,000."

For this 51-year-old Glaswegian, football's working-class roots are important. He once told me that all the Rolex watches and mobile phones in the Rangers dressing room made him wonder what he was doing there. Sufficiently modest about his playing abilities to serve his apprenticeship as an electrician, he had a career as a wing-half, mainly with Dumbarton and Dundee United, that was never likely to engulf him in celebrity. It was when he graduated to coaching under Jim McLean at Dundee United that he began to achieve prominence, and his talents flourished at Ibrox during five years as assistant to Graeme Souness and seven more in charge of the Rangers success machine.

Coming to Goodison after all that, he must have felt as if he had fallen through a trapdoor on the winner's podium and landed in a hall of mirrors. Hardly anything at Everton was how he had imagined it to be. He was given £18M to spend on players, but the 1998 recruitment drive was shown to have been a pointless exercise when the banks closed in with some harsh realities.

The revolving-door principle was applied, with expensive acquisitions such as Olivier Dacourt, Marco Materazzi and Ibrahima Bakayoko being hurriedly lined up for sale to reduce an overdraft that had assumed doomsday proportions. Lesser names were also swept up in the outgoing traffic in players as Sir Philip Carter (the former chairman who had returned to the post after Johnson's departure), club secretary Michael Dunford and Smith sought to satisfy the bankers. Their efforts to strengthen the position of the club have hardly been helped by the huge shadow of uncertainty hanging over the future of its ownership and specifically over the attempts of Bill Kenwright, the showbusiness impresario who is vice-chairman, to organise a buy-out of Johnson's majority shareholding. Amid the turmoil, the manager has been obliged to come to terms with the true nature of his task.

"At least now we know where we are," he said when we talked at Everton's Bellefield training ground. "Until October-November of last year we were operating in a world of illusions. The results still aren't good but we have proved that the lads who are here are more together than Everton teams have been for some time. Last season we never threatened to compete on the pitch with Manchester United, losing 4-1 on our ground and 3-1 at Old Trafford. Getting a home draw with them in the first match this season meant something, even if we lost our next two games. There is an encouraging spirit in the ranks and that in itself is remarkable considering what we have been through. When I arrived, Peter Johnson told me he was going to have one final attempt at lifting the club back to its proper level. I felt we had to progress in two stages. The first was to reach a standard that would make coming here attractive to top players. Then we could try to improve further and put ourselves in contention for honours instead of struggling to fend off relegation, as Everton have done in five of the past six years. But the stability we needed was impossible when the state of our finances was exposed, and there was no shortage of anxiety before we finished 14th in the table.

"What happened with Ferguson was a symptom of the serious problems that had been around for a while. I would never have agreed to selling big Dunky and the chairman, obviously under severe pressure, did it without telling me. Ferguson hadn't played against Newcastle that night and I was actually on the television talking about the job he might do for us in our next match, with Charlton, when he was already transferred. It would have been out of the question for me to have worked with Peter Johnson after that. I thought Dunky was doing well for us. He was captain and was reacting well to the marvellous relationship he had with our supporters. If he had been allowed to link up over a period with Bakayoko, who joined us from Montpellier, we might have had more of the goal threat we so desperately lacked. And just how terrible we were in that department can be gauged from the fact that we were into December before we scored at the Gwladys Street end.

"Yet I must say that the disappointment I suffered about the Ferguson fiasco paled beside the shock of discovering how we stood financially. I began to appreciate that the coming and going of players at Everton had been a continuous process for half-a-dozen years. If you picked from all the footballers that have passed through here in that spell you could produce a really good team but the best of them were never on the staff at the same time. When somebody decent was introduced, somebody else was put on the market to make up the shortfall. The likes of Gary Speed, Andrei Kanchelskis, Andy Hinchcliffe and Earl Barrett were all sold and so was Dave Unsworth, a dyed-in-the-wool Evertonian who should never have left. Dave is back here and represents the improvement in spirit that could mean a lot to us."

Perhaps the most significant of Smith's imports from the Continent, John Collins, the Scotland midfielder secured from Monaco, has wisely been kept and – with the contractual difficulties of the exciting 18-year-old Francis Jeffers apparently resolved and last season's on-loan saviour, Kevin Campbell, duly signed – the manager has tentatively revived his dream of a stable squad. However, the sight of two splendid veterans, Dave Watson and Richard Gough, functioning as a centre-back partnership with a combined age of 74 surely indicates that the calendar will soon have a say in team selection. When Smith promises "a bit of wheeling and dealing to add a player or two", he may be under-estimating his requirements.

His inherent realism will keep him alert to the likelihood. Everton's fortunes are in the hands of a genuine football man whose thinking is not cluttered with egotism or an inclination to dwell on past glories in Glasgow. He is determined to prove his worth to an English audience and, if Everton's money worries can be eased, he and his able lieutenant, Archie Knox, are unlikely to fail the Merseyside public they respect so much: "The basics of the job – training, tactics, working with the players – are similar to what we were doing in Scotland. It is only off the field that we feel a difference. When our lads get off the bus for an away match they are liable to receive a ripple of applause. With Rangers, I could not have imagined being clapped into our opponents' ground."

 Two clubs, one owner: a recipe for war

The new season may still be shrink-wrapped and awaiting its grand opening ceremony but on the banks of the Mersey, where the beautiful game does still represent something more than a saleable commodity, the people are already spoiling for a fight.

The synopsis of a grim, ever-darkening tale which sees Everton and Rovers cast in the leading roles is simple. To the disgust of two sets of supporters and the chagrin of the sport's various governing bodies, one man owns both clubs, a curious state of affairs which mocks rules and regulations so slavishly applied to matters of far less import.

The man in question is the 59-year-old local lad made good Peter Johnson, who squirrelled away a fortune after cornering the food hamper market, preying on the willingness of family matriarchs to save up all year in order that Christmas might be made enthralling by way of a wicker basket full of goodies which would not look out of place at a mediaeval pig roast.

On Saturday, when the impoverished Rovers squared up to the stony-broke scousers at Prenton Park, the plan was for a combined show of rebellion – a sort of Greenpeace-style display of civil disobedience aimed in the general direction of Johnson and his genetically modified acolytes. But, either mindful that Morrissey's big pay day would have been ruined by a bill for increased policing or, more likely, fearful for his own neck, Johnson stayed at home.

The other notable absentee was Johnson's girlfriend, Lorraine Rogers, younger and prettier than the Wirral grocer but a woman who is suffering a bad case of guilt by close association. Rogers, you see, was recently installed as Tranmere's chief executive – and a club director – by her lover in football's latest display of crass nepotism.

Many people are currently attempting to cut a swath through the tangled web which Johnson has woven with such baffling incompetence of late, but the most prominent fly in the ointment is the theatrical impresario Bill Kenwright. Everton's vice-chairman and would-be knight in shining armour announced his intention to seize control of his club – his obsession – some six months ago, shortly after Johnson had soiled his own doorstep by flogging, hamper-style, Goodison Park's one true icon, Duncan Ferguson, to Newcastle United.

Kenwright's attempted take-over is underpinned by a tidal wave of goodwill, has been sustained by his own irrepressible brand of optimism and has engendered a sense of renewed hope where, perhaps, there should only be continued mistrust. The only problem has been raising sufficient cash to transform ebullient rhetoric into the flesh and blood of a genuine, realistic bid.

But Kenwright still hopes to be able to announce that he has made Johnson some form of offer before Everton's annual fight for Premiership survival opens up against Europe's most accomplished side, Manchester United, next Sunday afternoon.

Eighteen months ago, it is believed, Johnson rejected a £65M offer for his 68% majority share holding from the billionaire financier Joe Lewis, a bid which valued the Merseyside club at a respectable £100M. Astonishingly Everton – lock, stock, smoking barrel and uncomfortable debt – is now worth only 30% of that figure. Even more astonishingly, Kenwright apart, there are no takers.

If he is lucky – and he may not be – Johnson will shortly receive an offer from Kenwright and his backers of around £20M for his portfolio; that is to say, the simple return of his initial, total investment.

Since those heady, "I'll make this club great again" days Johnson's personal fortune has withered dramatically and that, coupled with the erosion of his ambition, has prompted him seriously to consider the virtues of opulent retirement. The former Liverpool season ticket holder is anxious to divest himself of the albatross of a share holding in a club which he had no genuine affection for but, perhaps worryingly for Kenwright, he seems equally anxious to make a profit on. Old habits die hard in big business.

The fear inside Goodison is that, even if Kenwright can raise the capital to lodge a bid, Johnson may reject it in the wholly logical belief that Everton's value has now touched rock bottom and can only rise.

If Johnson should opt to ring-fence his shareholding – unlikely but still a possibility – the consequences for both Everton and Tranmere could be extremely unpleasant. Everton would find themselves marooned, potless and presumably hopeless at the court of the puppet king, while Tranmere's future would be bleak at best.

With football's hierarchy having grown tired now of Johnson's reluctance to concede that he is not a special case who can work outside the accepted regulatory parameters, there are moves afoot to examine the precise manner of his sweep to power at Everton five years ago. Moreover, if he is deemed to have rejected any "reasonable" bid for his Everton shares, Johnson will be instructed to pack up and move out of Tranmere with immediate effect, a divorce which, while it would meet with the full approval of the Birkenhead public, would leave the First Division club closer to extinction than salvation.

Saturday's game ended in a rather tame 1-1 draw. This was fitting for, as long as Peter Johnson is in charge at Everton and Tranmere, winners will be rather hard to find.