Demolition of Goodison Park Off the Table
When Everton got the funding to build a new stadium, one of the key questions that came up was around what would happen to Goodison Park.
The famous football ground was the home of many firsts, such as the first place to use undersoil heating for football matches and the first to have a scoreboard installed.
Whilst the state-of-the-art ground at Bramley-Moore Dock will obviously be great for the city as well as for the club itself, there was fear from many that Goodison would be forgotten over time.
Now the demolition has been cancelled, with Everton Ladies due to play there.
Everton Ladies Moving In
In the February of 2021, Liverpool City Council voted in favour of the plan to redevelop Goodison Park, which was due to cost around £82 million and would see it become a mixed-use scheme that would see more than 170 homes built and the likes of office space and retail areas, in addition to a park.
The thought around the redevelopment of the area was given the label of the ‘Goodison Legacy Project’, but on the 13th of May 2025 it was confirmed that the stadium would no longer be demolished. Instead, Everton Ladies will call it their new home from the 2025-2026 WSL season onwards.
@ellascottsports Biiiiiig statement from Everton FC and their commitment to growing their women’s team’s fanbase! Goodison Park — the home of the WSL side from 2025/26 #everton #womensfootball #womenssuperleague ♬ original sound – Ella Scott 🪐
As part of that, the ground will undergo some changes in order to help modernise it and ensure that it isn’t far bigger than Everton Ladies will have use for. For starters, it looks likely that the upper sections of the Gwladys Street End, the Bullens Road Stand and the Goodison Road Stand will be kept shut, adorned instead with Everton Ladies branding.
Those stands could still be opened if major matches called for it, but it is more likely that they will stay closed until such a time that women’s football becomes as popular as the men’s game and the amount of people in attendance goes up accordingly.
Great News for the City
The news that Goodison Park will take over from Walton Hall Park as the home of Everton Ladies should be seen as great news for the city as a whole. Whilst Walton Hall Park has been a great place for Everton Ladies to play most of their matches, it is obviously limiting in terms of the potential growth of the team.
Just 2,200 people could watch matches in the Southport venue, which is around a tenth of the 22,000 supporters who turned up to Goodison Park to watch the Blues host their city rivals in the Merseyside derby back in 2023, so moving them there is a brilliant thing.
I believe it’s a fantastic decision to keep football at Goodison Park. Who knows where the growth in ladies football will take Everton in the years ahead. Crowds in excess of 20,000? I’d expect this to become reality sooner rather than later. Great news on so many levels.
#UTFT #NSNO #EVERTON— Colm Kavanagh (@colmkavanagh.bsky.social) 13 May 2025 at 16:13
It means that the city of Liverpool will have three top-class football stadiums for people to visit, including Anfield, the Hill Dickinson Stadium and Goodison Park itself. That will result in tens of thousands of people heading into the city on a regular basis to watch football matches, which will see a good amount of money heading into the local economy as a result.
The historic nature of Goodison Park also means that people will likely want to come along just to go to the Grand Old Lady and enjoy some time there, which they may not have been able to do for an Everton match.
It Could be the Start of Something for Women’s Football
Many people don’t realise just how popular women’s football was when the sport in general was just starting out. There is perhaps no fixture that best draws attention to that than the game between Dick Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies back on Boxing Day 1920. The match was played at Goodison Park, with around 53,000 people heading along to watch the game and many more kept outside for safety reasons.
That remained a record attendance for a women’s football match for nearly 100 years, demonstrating the desire to watch women play the game as well as Goodison Park’s history with it.
The Football Association, in its infinite wisdom, decided to ban women players using their pitches in 1921, all but killing the sport for the gender for the decades that followed. By giving Goodison Park to the Everton Ladies team instead of demolishing it, Everton Football Club’s owners, The Friedkin Group, have given the team a real chance to grow and develop.
There is a hope that other clubs will soon follow suit, allowing their women’s team to play its matches in the same stadium as the men, for example, or even building purpose-built locations for their games to be played in. If the city of Liverpool can be at the forefront of that, then that can only be a good thing.
