Everton have been put up for sale less than two years after The Friedkin Group rescued the club from the brink of financial collapse, with the American owners confirming on Friday that they are exploring “the potential sale of a controlling interest” in the Premier League side.
In a statement released through the club, TFG — the Houston-based group led by billionaire Dan Friedkin, which completed its purchase of Farhad Moshiri’s 94.1 per cent stake in December 2024 — said the completion of the £813m Hill Dickinson Stadium and the stabilising of the club’s finances meant “the time is right to consider the next chapter for Everton”.
Investment bank Moelis & Company has been retained to run the process. The announcement arrives with David Moyes’ side in the strongest early-season form they have enjoyed in a decade: unbeaten in the league, seventh in the table on nine points from their first five matches, and unbeaten in seven across all competitions.
What the owners actually said
The language of the statement was carefully chosen. “When TFG became custodians of Everton, the Club faced significant financial uncertainty and challenges both on and off the pitch,” it read. “The immediate priority was to provide the stability, investment and support needed to secure the Club’s future, including helping to bring the long-promised stadium to completion for its deserving supporters.”
Crucially, TFG framed any exit as conditional rather than inevitable: “We will only entertain interest from parties who we strongly believe will be the right stewards to take the Club forward and build on the momentum that has been established.” Neither the group nor the club will comment further while the process runs.
This is an escalation rather than a surprise. The Financial Times and The Athletic reported on 3 September that TFG’s advisers were testing appetite for a significant minority stake while the group retained control. Minority conversations involving the former Dallas Mavericks coach Jason Kidd and the American financier Christopher Sarofim were already public. What has changed is that the majority holding is now on the table.
Two years that rebuilt a balance sheet
Whatever follows, the ledger of TFG’s tenure is unusually clear. Everton were, in late 2024, a club with roughly £600m of liabilities, a half-finished stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, two points deductions for breaches of profit and sustainability rules behind them and a collapsed takeover by 777 Partners hanging over the accounts.
TFG’s restructuring was comprehensive:
- £450.75m of Moshiri-era shareholder loans converted to equity
- The expensive Rights and Media Funding facility repaid in full
- The 777 Partners/A-CAP exposure of around £200m settled for roughly 33p in the pound
- A £350m private placement secured over 30 years, refinancing the stadium against long-dated debt
- The move from Goodison Park, Everton’s home for 133 years, delivered on schedule into a 52,888-seat ground the club owns outright
The stadium alone is projected to add £35m-£40m of matchday income and a further £10m-£15m of commercial uplift annually. It also carries £22m-£24m of depreciation and £30m-£32m of interest. That is the trade every post-Goodison Everton budget has to absorb.
Why walk away now?
The honest answer is arithmetic rather than apathy. Independent analysis of the club’s position published by the respected Everton finance writer Paul Quinn, known as the esk, estimates equity value at £310m-£490m against an enterprise value of £700m-£880m, with net debt of £389.4m. His projection puts the capital required over the next five years to make Everton genuinely competitive at around £444m on top of the purchase price, with cumulative pre-tax losses near £351m.
Everton’s squad cost ratio stood at 93 per cent in 2024-25, well beyond the Premier League’s 85 per cent threshold for non-European clubs and nowhere near the 70 per cent ceiling required to compete in UEFA competition. That gap cannot be closed by trading alone, which is why last summer’s window — roughly £100m of player sales for a net profit of about £25m, a failed £45m move for Monaco’s Folarin Balogun and an abandoned £40m sale of Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest — read as caretaking rather than ambition to many supporters. The fan volunteer group the 1878s stood down in its aftermath.
Friedkin’s wider portfolio matters too. The group owns Roma and AS Cannes and is pursuing an NHL expansion franchise in Houston at an estimated $3.5bn. Multi-club owners ration their equity, and this looks less like distress than a judgement that the cheque Everton needs is bigger than TFG wishes to write alone.
What happens next
Everton supporters have learned to distrust the word “takeover”. Moshiri arrived in 2016 promising trophies and left having spent more than £700m on players without a top-six finish or a cup final; 777 Partners arrived promising rescue and nearly took the club down with them. A Saudi-linked consortium has previously circled. Any new bidder will face the same Premier League owners’ and directors’ test, and the same four-year, half-billion-pound funding commitment.
For now, nothing changes on the pitch. Moyes keeps selecting, Jordan Pickford keeps conceding at a rate of three goals in five games, and the stadium that defined the last decade of Everton’s story stands paid for. The difference is that the next chapter will be written by somebody else — and this time, the club is being sold from a position of strength rather than desperation. For a fanbase conditioned to the opposite, that alone is a novelty.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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