• ‘We cannot keep our best players if our wages don’t increase’
• Everton unlikely to leave Goodison Park within next five years
David Moyes has told Everton’s board of directors the club risk losing their main players unless they break the wage structure. The manager’s warning follows an admission from the Everton chief executive, Robert Elstone, that the club are unlikely to leave Goodison Park “within the next five years”.
The Goodison futures of influential midfielders Mikel Arteta and Steven Pienaar are both uncertain with the pair yet to accept lucrative contract extensions offered this summer. Pienaar has 12 months remaining on his Everton contract and wants more than the £60,000-a-week offer to stay while Arteta, who is under contract until 2012, would become the club’s highest earner should he accept a proposed £75,000-a-week extension.
Despite Moyes’s appeal, the offers to Arteta and Pienaar represent a marked increase on their existing contracts at Everton. The Spanish midfielder, who has been linked with Manchester City, Arsenal and Barcelona this summer, earns £45,000 a week, and the Everton manager believes improving the terms of existing players is a more pressing issue than new signings this summer.
Moyes, speaking at an Everton shareholders’ forum, said: “We cannot keep our best players if our wages don’t increase. That is the part we have to make sure we keep improving. We have to make sure we keep the players we have got at the moment even if we can’t go out and spend on new talent all the time.”
The chairman Bill Kenwright told shareholders he was “more hopeful we will start the season with the players we ended the season with last year”, albeit with the caveat that: “You can never say that something will definitely happen until it does.”
Kenwright has been unable to transform the club’s finances through investment or a new stadium, with the government rejecting a proposed relocation to Kirkby in conjunction with Tesco last November. At the forum Everton announced plans for a £9m retail development behind Goodison which, subject to planning permission, will be completed within a year. The complex will house a shop, museum, café, corporate hospitality and offices, freeing up space inside the stadium for corporate facilities.
Elstone, Everton’s chief executive, said financial assistance from the club’s commercial partner Sodexo and the retail partner Kitbag ensured the project would be “self-funded”. He said: “There is no net cost to the club. In fact, it is cash-positive from the start.” But Elstone said the scheme was essential to increasing revenue given Everton’s continued struggle to finance a new stadium.
The chief executive added: “If we are being realistic about the situation, to be inside a new stadium within the next five years, it’s very hard to see that happening. That’s why this new development has to have a quick payback and it has. Our discussions with Liverpool city council have been very positive but we need support that has to come from a major retail development. The city council recognise that is hard to deliver. It is a problem we have faced for 10-15 years. It is difficult to see a new stadium in the short and medium term.”Everton’s board faced fierce opposition to its plans to move the club outside the city of Liverpool to Kirkby and Kenwright indicated that controversy would not be repeated. “It [the new retail complex] doesn’t mean the search isn’t going to go on for a new stadium within the Liverpool city boundary,” he said.
EvertonBusinessAndy Hunterguardian.co.uk
