It is easy to make fun of Everton and Evertonians for those that don’t support the club. When the Blues got knocked out of the FA Cup by Bournemouth on the eighth of February 2025, it signalled 30 years since the club had last won a major trophy.
Whilst their neighbours Liverpool had won everything there was to win in that time, Everton suffered. It was an unwanted record, but the club had achieved numerous famous firsts thanks to their football ground Goodison Park. As they move to the new stadium on the waterfront, it’s worth looking at the Goodison Park firsts.
The Purpose-Built Football Ground
Everton were not shy of a few firsts as a football club. There were founding members of both the Football League in 1888 and the Premier League in 1992, as well as being the first club to be presented with the League Championship trophy. When they were on an overseas tour in 1905, they became the first English club to do so. In 1933, the Blues became the first club to have their players were shirts numbered 1 to 11. That sense of being pioneers was something that also carried over to the ground where they played their football.
When the owner of Anfield Stadium decided to put his rent up in 1892, Everton decided not to pay it. Instead, they chose to move to a purpose-built ground on the other side of Stanley Park. That was Goodison Park and in being specially designed specifically for football matches, it was England’s first purpose-built football stadium. That might well help to explain why it also became the first football club’s ground to be used to host the FA Cup final, which took place on the 31st of March 1894 and saw Notts County defeat Bolton Wanderers 4-1.
A Ground-Breaking Stadium
When Goodison Park was built in 1892, it set the trend that other stadiums would go on to follow. The Mere Green venue saw as much as £3,000 spent on laying out the ground and building stands on three sides. Walton resident Kelly Brothers built two uncovered stands that could each house 4,000 people with another covered stand that 3,000 people could be located within, costing £1,460. Hoardings outside cost an addition £150, whilst gates and sheds added £132 and ten shillings to the overall bill, with 12 turnstiles costing £7 15 shillings.
Goodison Park looked like this when I first went, although it was blue & white and magical pic.twitter.com/1kM4lWn2Kx
— Keith Mullin/TheFarm (@KeithMullin) February 17, 2025
The fourth section of the ground had cinder blocks put there to allow people to get a view of the whole pitch, with all of it leading towards Everton being the richest club in the country at the time. It meant that the Blues were able to continue their development of the stadium, building a new Bullens Road Stand in 1895 at a cost of £3,407, whilst a cover was put on the open stand for £403. After the turn of the century, further changes were brought in to improve it and add more ‘firsts’ to Goodison Park’s list of achievements.
@kylejohnlover #fyp #foryou #football #footy #everton #efc #goodisonpark #premierleague #emotional #sad #memories @Reece Welch @Lewis Dobbin @Jarrad_Branthwaite_Lover94 @Omari Benjamin @Billy Crellin @André Gomes ♬ original sound – Kyle John
In 1907, for example, a double-decker stand was built at the Park End, costing £13,000 and beginning the journey to the stadium being the first to have four-sides with two-tiers. It meant that Goodison Park was considered to be the best-equipped ground in the country, leading to its selection as the host for the FA Cup final replay in 1910, with Newcastle United taking on Barnsley. Three years later and it became the first league ground that a ruling monarch attended, seeing George V and Queen Mary visiting local schoolchildren there.
At the Vanguard of Development
It might seem extremely unlikely to modern football fans, but Everton’s position as one of the country’s richest football clubs allowed the Blues to continue to make improvements to Goodison Park as and when necessary. In the 1930s, having visited Pittodrie in Aberdeen and seen the dug-outs there, Everton became the first English club to introduce them and soon clubs up and down the land followed suit. In the October of 1957, another first arrived at Goodison thanks to the installation of floodlights, but it wasn’t the last of the ‘firsts’.
A year after the floodlights were switched on for the first time for a friendly against Liverpool, the Blues continued to be revolutionary. They spent around £16,000 in order to see 20 miles of electric wire put in place underneath the pitch. It allowed for the effective melting of frost and snow, with the only problem being that the drainage system couldn’t handle it. As a result, the pitch was dug up in 1960 so as to put new pipes in that would ensure that any water could be drained away from the pitch without any issues. It was the first undersoil heating to be used in football.
In the 1960s, England hosted the World Cup. Whilst Goodison Park wasn’t the only stadium to host matches for the tournament, the only stadium that hosted more games than Everton’s home ground was Wembley. That included both the quarter-final between North Korea and Portugal and the semi-final between West Germany and the Soviet Union. Come 1971 and Goodison was to witness another first, with the Main Stand being demolished to make way for a three-tier stand, which was the first of its kind built in a football ground.
What Went Wrong?
Modern day football fans will not think about Everton as being a forward-thinking club, nor Goodison Park as being one of the most revolutionary in the country. That is in no small part due to the fact that the club has been mis-managed over several decades by owners who have seemed to be more interested in hating Liverpool than in loving Everton. It has meant that around half a century of underinvestment in both the team on the pitch and the facilities off it have seen Everton fall by the wayside of success in English football, much to the chagrin of supporters.
On this day – Goodison Park was officially opened on 24 August 1892!
England’s first purpose-built football ground. 💙pic.twitter.com/AyQliLlZih
— The Everton FC Podcast – All Together Now (@ATNCAST) August 24, 2020
By gaining financial support from the likes of Liverpool Council, Everton have been able to leave Goodison Park and move to Bramley-Moore dock. Whilst many would’ve loved to see the club invest in fixing the ‘Grand Old Lady’, the reality of the matter is that it would have cost significantly more money to do so than to build an entirely new one. Goodison was once at the forefront of football stadium design but was allowed to rot and fester to the point that it slipped almost beyond repair. Bramley-Moore will never have its personality, but if the Blues could win a trophy there then the supporters won’t be complaining.