The Economic Impact of Everton’s New Bramley-Moore Stadium
Once upon a time, Everton played at Anfield. When John Houlding, the owner of the ground, decided to put the rent up, Everton decided to leave the stadium in order to play football matches at a new location that would be called Goodison Park. Now the Blues are gearing up to play in their third stadium in the city when Bramley-Moore opens on the bank of the River Mersey.
From the city’s point of view, how much of an economic impact is the new football ground likely to have and what is the extent to which Everton will benefit from it? The club are referring to it as ‘the People’s Stadium’, but how much are the people likely to benefit?
About the Stadium
The first game that Everton played at Goodison Park was in 1892, with the Blues enjoying some real moments of success there over the years. Whilst it was gradually upgraded and modernised over the years and decades that followed, the reality is that it it had become old and tired by the turn of the millennium. In fact, in 2007 it was revealed that the club had spent half a million pounds simply to repair steelworks in the ground.
The idea of moving to a new stadium had been mentioned more than ten years before, with the King’s Dock selected as a good site for a 55,000-seater venue, but plans were abandoned when funding wasn’t found.
Further plans were discussed to move the Blues to Kirkby and even to share a stadium with Liverpool in Stanley Park, only for Liverpool to decide to re-develop Anfield instead. The re-development of Goodison Park was seen as an impossible job, so in 2017 it was revealed by the then-Everton Chairman, Bill Kenwright, that Bramley-Moore Dock was the preferred site for a new ground.
Plans for a 52,000-seater venue, which could be upgraded to 62,000 in the future, were revealed in 2017, along with confirmation that a 200-year lease had been agreed with Peel Holdings, who owned Bramley-Moore Dock itself.
A ‘Major Catalyst for Growth’
In 2022, the Mayor of Liverpool at the time, Joanne Anderson, said that the stadium, located on the city’s waterfront, would have a ‘transformational impact‘ on the economy of the city. She visited the construction site, declaring that it was a ‘significant re-generation project’ that would have the added benefit of being a ‘catalyst for further high-quality developments’.
One estimate suggested that the new ground could deliver a boost of £1.3 billion to the economy, thanks in no small part to the millions of visitors that would come to the city once Everton started playing matches there. That was the suggestion of the investment firm CBRE.
Bramley Moore Dock from the top of the Liver Building pic.twitter.com/gon4QOHZyV
— NSNO (@nsno) June 30, 2024
The stadium will also provide tens of thousands of jobs, not only during the construction phase but also on match days, when Everton welcome the various teams to the ground to play matches against them. It was one of the largest developments inside the United Kingdom at the time it was being built, offering opportunities to local people and Liverpool-based businesses.
A big part of that is thanks to the fact that Bramley-Moore Dock will undergo re-generation thanks to the the stadium being built there that it has been in desperate need of for decades. The entire waterfront around that area will likely see new businesses move in.
Why is it Different to Goodison Park?
The obvious question to ask is why, exactly, Everton Stadium, as the project is currently known, will bring in so much more money than Goodison Park was able to offer to the city of Liverpool. The first obvious reason is that the new ground has a much larger capacity. Goodison was able to welcome just shy of 40,000 people every match day.
Everton Stadium, meanwhile, is due to have a capacity of nearly 53,000, which means that every time Everton play in their home ground there will be about 13,000 people in attendance that wouldn’t have been able to be there if they’d stayed at their old ground across Stanley Park from Anfield.
@someevertonfan
Those additional people also need to be looked after by stewards, who will be employed by the club, as well as cleaned up after when the game is over and they have left Liverpool.
Then there is the fact that Bramley-Moore Dock is a lot easier to access than Goodison Park from the city centre, which will lead to more of the people coming in for the match heading in in order to enjoy meals, stay in hotels and go shopping in the nearby Liverpool One shopping centre than will have done when they were going to Goodison to watch the Blues. All of that will contribute to the local economy and is where the £1.3 billion figure came from.
What Will it Mean to Everton?
Whilst the city of Liverpool as a whole benefitting from the opening of Everton Stadium is obviously good news, the club itself will also be understandably keen to have a sense of how much its finances will be impacted. It is fair to say that things haven’t been great for Everton in recent years, thanks in no small part to the club’s owner, Farad Moshiri, getting into the financial bed of Alisher Usmanov, only for the Russian to have his assets frozen in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This led to Everton suspending relations with the Russian, which in turn plunged them into turmoil financially that threatened the club’s very existence.
Farhad Moshiri doesn’t care about Everton Football Club. He cares about making as much back as he can upon completion of Bramley Moore. It’s as simple as that.
— Callum (@callumt1878) January 11, 2023
The building of Everton Stadium cost around £800 million, which has been partially financed by Liverpool Council as well as by outside investors looking to get a piece of the action. Even so, the club is likely to benefit from close to £40 million a year once the stadium opens, thanks to its ability to host as many as four ‘major non-footballing events’ every year.
On top of that, the club will be able to earn more money in the form of increased match day revenue thanks to the additional 13,000 people turning up to watch a match. Whilst that is dependent on the Blues selling out for every home game, they will stick make decent money if that doesn’t happen.
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