The End: From Glory to a Whole New Ball Game: Everton 1985-1994

‘For twenty years I have been disappointed with the results at Everton. It’s up to everyone connected with the club – directors, management and players – to get results in the next year or make way for those who can, and I include myself in this.’ John Moores, 1960

‘Champions seven years ago, and members of the “Big Five” who led the revolution against the Football League, Everton are now only 90 minutes away from finding themselves on the outside looking in at the rich man’s club that they did so much to create. They have only themselves to blame.’  The Times, 7 May, 1994

In May 1994, Everton Football Club found themselves on the brink of disaster – an outcome no one could have imagined just a few years earlier. More than three decades after John Moores set out to make Everton the dominant force in English football, the club faced the grim prospect of relegation in the final match of the 1993/94 season against Wimbledon.

Once known as the ‘Mersey Millionaires,’ Everton had fallen to ‘Mersey Mediocrities.’

This downfall was unthinkable just nine years earlier, when Howard Kendall had led the club to the League Championship and European supremacy. However, Everton became collateral damage in the aftermath of the Heysel disaster, caught between English football authorities and UEFA. When Kendall departed in 1987 after securing a second league title, the club began a steep decline, leading to a period of intense instability that eventually threatened their long-held status in English football’s top flight.

In The End, Gavin Buckland’s final book on the Moores era at Everton, the author explores the club’s journey from towering success to the brink of relegation. The narrative captures how boardroom complacency and indecision combined with uncertainty over the club’s ownership to allow Everton to fall behind their peers as a new era of English football dawned.

Meticulously researched and piecing together interviews, archival materials and behind-the-scenes stories, The End is the authoritative and vivid telling of footballing aristocracy falling on hard times. Offering rich detail and insight, The End is a must-read for any football fan or historian of the modern game.

Gavin Buckland is official statistician to Everton FC and has written a number of books about the club. He is a founding member of Toffeeopolis.