The deep rumble of feet pounding on planks when a blue shirt walks to the corner flag, a thundering drumbeat that vibrates through the legs, up into the torso, direct to the heart. The chants started in the belly of lower stands which spill out into the air in swirling eddies, echoing disjointedly around the ground. Everton Football Club are leaving Goodison Park β their home for more than years β and moving to a state-of-the-art 52,capacity stadium at Bramley-Moore dock, on the banks of the Mersey.
My dad took me to my first game at Goodison when I was three. One of my earliest memories is being very small and hot in my winter coat, surrounded by a sea of loud shuffling men leaving the Lower Bullens stand. Goodison was always a place where I felt safe. Like tens of thousands of other Evertonians, going to the ground with my family was more than my Saturday routine; it was a central part of my identity.
As a football-obsessed girl, it meant my passion was taken seriously. I was allowed to talk about football, because I went to the match. Dennis Bergkamp got it. Because in the multibillion-dollar era of industrialised football β where fan eyeballs are units on a spreadsheet, where clubs are not passion projects but investment vehicles β the bones of a place still matter.
History, memory and belonging still matter. Goodison is, unarguably, a relic. Built in , the oldest purpose-built football ground in England is surrounded by densely packed terraced houses making outward expansion impossible. Inside, the corporate boxes squashed into the main stand resemble badly maintained cattle pens.
Watching the game from the back of the lower Gwladys Street or the Lower Bullens stands is like spying out of a letter box, while a wealth of steel struts provide an unrivalled choice of obstructed views. But relics are precious. They tell stories. The Bullens Road stand, designed by Archibald Leitch , with a distinct criss-cross balcony motif β is 99 years old. The ground has hosted more top-flight games than any other stadium in England. Dixie Dean scored a record-breaking 60th goal of the season at Goodison in But when you leave you no longer have that continuous thread going back to the years of Dixie Dean, Tommy Lawton, or more recently, Kendall, Harvey and Ball.
