Being a fan from the bottom looking up

Or how I learned to accept the concept of relegation. Or have I?

Readers note: the following is going to mostly be about an English Premier League football team, or soccer team if you prefer. I will try to explain some basic terminology for people who aren’t familiar with it. If you already are, I beg your indugence.

If you look at the current standings of the English Premier League (or the league table as it is called by our former colonial overlords) there are certain places you want to be and certain places you do not want to be.

Here is the current table from ESPN’s website (I almost got it all to fit):

Premier League Table as of March 1, 2023. Columns go Games Played, Wins, Ties, Losses, Goals Scored, Goals Allowed, Diffference, and finally Points (3 for W, 1 for T).

The best place to be is, obviously, first place, which is currently occupied by Arsenal, which is a bit of a surprise because that club has a recent history of underarchieving, but, as you can see by the final column, points, shows the team five points ahead of second place Manchester City, the defending champions and general behemoth of the league, thanks to the backing of the United Arab Emirates. Arsenal is owned by LA Rams owner Stan Kroenke.

Traditional powerhouse Manchester United is third. United hasn’t finished first since 2013, which in Manchester United terms is an eternity. For comparison, think of Yankees fans complaining about not winning a World Series since 2009. Then double it. Then double it again. Keep on doubling until you get tired. It likely won’t be enough to match the feeling that Manchester United fans have. They’ve won the league 20 times. It’s not enough for them. Manchester United is owned by the Glazer family, who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

In fourth place, sits star-crossed Tottenham Hotspur, aka Spurs, who have won the league twice and not since 1961. Spurs fans are cursed by rooting for a team that is always pretty good, but never very good. If the team was ever given a letter grade, it would be B+.

The top four teams in the league will play in the extremely lucrative UEFA Champions League, an all European (except for Russian and Belarussian teams) competition, NEXT season. The fifth place team, currently Newcastle, gets a spot in the Europa League (think of it as the NIT of European soccer) and most likely the sixth place team will make the Europa League and the seventh place team will make the Europa Conference League (which is like one of those really weird college baskeball tournaments like the CIT.)

And then if you go all the way to the bottom, to the teams in spots 18, 19, and 20, you will see the teams that face the ultimate penalty. No, they don’t get a high draft pick. (There is no such thing in European football or pretty much anywhere in the sport outside Major League Soccer). Those teams get kicked out of the league and moved down to the next level, the Championship. This is known as relegation. Every three teams go down and three teams get promoted. If you prefer, this is what happend to AFC RIchmond at the end of Season One of “Ted Lasso.”

This shot is going in the net.

The teams facing relegation right now are: Everton, Bournemouth, and Southampton. And as you might guess that since Everton shows up in yellow in the table, there must be a reason for it. And that reason is: I’m a fan (or supporter if you prefer) of Everton.¹

Why did I come to be a supporter of the team? Well, when I developed a rooting interest in the Premier League around 2010, Everton was a fun squad to watch and also had two prominent American players on it in Tim Howard and Landon Donovan. And Everton had a long history of success (nine league championships). And the team was almost always good and very rarely was it ever bad.

Since I became a fan, their best finish was fifth place in 2013-14. That earned them a berth in the Europa League and they made it to the Round of 16. They also had a seventh place finish in 2016-17 and finagled a Europa League spot out of that but didn’t make it out of group play. Since then they have finished eighth, eighth, twelfth, tenth, and sixteenth

Last year’s squad barely escaped relegation, needing a somewhat miraculous second half rally in the second to last game of the year, coming back from a 0-2 halftime deficit to Crystal Palace, for a 3-2 win, that pushed the team to safety. It marked the only time that Everton had rallied from a 2-goal deficit at halftime to win a game since English football adopted the Premier League format back in 1992.

This year, Everton has been worse. Years of mismanagement compounded by financial problems² has put the team in a difficult spot. The team is very bad at scoring goals, which has proven to be a valuable asset in winning soccer matches over the last 150 years. Everton has just 17 goals in 25 league matches this season.³ By comparison, the top scoring team, Manchester City has scored 64 goals and its leading scorer, Erling Haaland has already scored 27 goals on his own. Everton’s leading goal scorer is forward Demarai Gray. He has three goals.

Everton has already fired a manager this season. Frank Lampard, who saved the team last season. The team brought in Sean Dyche as the ninth different manager since I started paying attention to the team. All but two of the nine were fired. David Moyes left to take the job at Manchester United (where he was terrible) and Carlo Ancelotti left to take the job at Real Madrid (where he promptly won the Champions League). But all the other guys have been terrible and all in their each unique way, which I won’t bore you with.

There is a possibility that Dyche, who is something of an expert in coaching untalented, low-scoring teams when he was the manager of Burnley (relegated last year, but almost assuredly headed back up), but there are a lot of problems and the Everton fanbase is very upset. So much so that the team’s owners don’t show up for home matches for fear of their personal safety. (Fans disagree with that assertion.) The team is reportedly up for sale and is also facing a mountain of debt trying to build a new stadium. During the month of January, one of two months when teams can acquire new players (the other is August. Why? You don’t want to know), Everton acquired no one. Either the owners would not pay enough to buy a contract or the player did not want to play for Everton. (Trading players is very rare and not done in the manner that North American sports does.)

Presently, Everton and Liverpool both play in the same part of town. The actually play on opposite ends of a large municipal park called Stanley Park. Liverpool FC, owned by the same group who own the Boston Red Sox, play in a recently renovated facility simply known as Anfield. Everton plays in a very old stadium called Goodison Park. The team has played on that site since 1892, although the current structure of most of the stadium was built from 1969 through 1971. I went to a match there in 2016 and was quite taken aback at how ramshackle a place it was for a league that was so wealthy. The new stadium would be far away from Anfield closer to Liverpool’s dock area. In theory, the new stadium opens in 2024.

But, what if the team gets demoted to the Championship. Going down from the Premier League to the Championship is a tremendous loss of revenue in television dollars. In the U.S., you can see every Premier League match if you want (you can’t do that in the U.K.), but only 1-2 games from the Championship turn up on American television, all of them on ESPN+.

Everton has not been relegated since 1951 when the team finished in 22nd place (aka last) in what was then called the First Division. Everton spent three seasons in the Second Division before earning a promotion in 1954 and they have not been demoted since. It’s the second longest active streak of avoiding relegation behind Arsenal’s streak which dates back to 1915.⁴

What else could befall Everton if they were relegated after this year? Besides the loss in TV revenues, the team would also face the problem of having players under contract who are signed to Premier League level salaries, but Everton wouldn’t be taken in enough revenue. So they’d be selling off players left and right and replacing them with lower quality players. It would be a mess.

I would have to ask if I would still be a fan of Everton? I have been told that you change your spouse and you can change your underpants, but you can’t change the team you root for. And I guess there is some truth to that as the ESPN website wouldn’t let me unmark Everton as a “favorite team” which made their standings show up in another color.

Would Everton be able to retain enough talent to play well in the Championship? Most of the teams that get relegated tend to get promoted back the next year. Norwich City seems to bounce back and forth, although they probably won’t make it this time. Burnley, relegated last year, should be back along with Sheffield United, relegated two years ago. The third promoted team comes out of a four team playoff and could include the team with the devilish spelling of Middlesbrough, who goes by the nickname of Boro. (I’ve spelled everything right too.)

In American pro sports, there is no comparison to relegation. The teams in the top leagues usually own or have some sort of agreement with the minor leagues below them. (Except for the NFL, whose minor league is the NCAA.). The closest comparison for Everton may be like being a fan of a college football team that once was great in the past, life Lafayette, which was a national power in college football through the 1940s and won three national championships. And then, just sort of disappeared and now lives out a humdrum existence in the Patriot League.

So most likely, if Everton is playing in the Championship, my contact with them will be getting push notifications on my phone about scores. I will rarely see them on television. They will still exist, but it won’t be the same experience. The weird scheduling of my time to catch matches on television will be over. Will I even care who wins the Premier League when I have no team in it to root for?

Everton still has 13 matches to play and it would only take 2 or 3 wins to make a big move up in the standings. But it is hard to be optimistic or enthusiastic about a dreary bunch of players who all look about a step slower than their opponents. And even if Everton stay up⁵, what will prevent the team from rotting further? Fandom is supposed to be fun, but this season with Everton it feels very much like a chore.

On Wednesday, Everton made up a game at Arsenal that has been cancelled in the wake of the Queen’s death. And even though Everton had a surprising 1-0 win at home against Arsenal on February 4, Wednesday was no contest as Arsenal cruised to a 4-0 win. And it was a slog to watch as an Everton fan. I sort of looked like the player on the left.⁶

Arsenal celebrates one of its four goals against Everton on March 1, 2023.

1. In case you didn’t know or didn’t want to look it up, Everton (the name of a neighborhood) plays in the city of Liverpool, although is not nearly as successful as Liverpool FC. Everton does have a lot of support among fans in the city of Liverpool, but far less of an international following. The rivalry between the two clubs has been dominated by Liverpool for most of the last 15 years. Liverpool FC famously sings the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before matches. Everton walks out on to the field to the theme song from a 1960s British TV series called “Z Cars.”

2. Pro tip: don’t root for a team that is primarily bankrolled by a Russian oligarch.

3. This ratio of goals scored to games played is referrred to as “bad.”

4. For those not relegating at home, Liverpool was last relegated in 1962. Manchester United was relegated last in 1974. Manchester City was last relegated in 2001, before they received the largesse of the UAE.

5. Getting very English here and using a plural verb with a singular collective noun!

6. The one Everton player in the photo is defender James Tarkowski.