Sport nationThe time has come for Farhad Moshiri to formally end 777 Partners’ Everton takeover dream. The attempt by 777 Partners to take control of Everton looks destined to fail, and Moshiri must avoid any temptation to keep it on life support. Despite contractual obligations, 777 Partners’ empire has suffered blow after blow, and it’s time for Moshiri to look elsewhere.
The technicalities of the share purchase agreement deadline on May 31 provide Moshiri with an opportunity to formally move on. He must learn from the past and not sacrifice due diligence to fall at the feet of a suitor who is willing to offer money upfront, as 777 Partners have done since September.
From the outside, 777 Partners look incapable of meeting the Premier League conditions that were laid out as the pathway to regulatory approval. The group is mired in turmoil, facing $600m fraud allegations, owning an airline in voluntary administration, and holding a portfolio of football clubs fighting to escape its clutches.
Standard Liege, a club under a third transfer ban, has seen staff repeatedly paid late, and protesters prevented the team from reaching its home stadium. Control of Vasco de Gama has been suspended by a judge after a hearing in Rio de Janeiro. 777 Partners have slammed the case, branding it a “legal aberration”.
There is plenty to suggest there is no realistic proposition of 777 Partners getting hold of Everton. But the future of the club is still in Moshiri’s hands. For all the trouble 777 Partners is enduring, it will take months, perhaps years, to untangle its commitments. A patchwork of backers and interests will be fighting to salvage what they can, and this month we have already seen that money can be found to keep a deal dead in spirit alive by technicalities.
Whatever happens next, 777 Partners will continue to hold some influence at Everton. They will not be the primary voice in Moshiri’s ear, but the near-£200m they have pumped into the club already buys them a seat at the table. That could still be dangerous.
Perhaps the biggest flaw of Moshiri’s reign has not been his intentions for Everton but the extent to which he surrounded himself with people who provided questionable advice that he attached too much weight to. That is a troubling backdrop against which the search for answers over the ownership of Everton will take place.
For all the group’s issues, 777 Partners found another tranche of money just weeks ago to keep their ambitions alive. It cannot be forgotten that Moshiri has maintained the view they are the best fit for Everton despite months of worrying developments, the existence of red flags even when a deal was first agreed, and the revelations uncovered by journalists.
Even with all that, it looks like it is 777 Partners who will be masters of their own downfall, not a moment of enlightenment from Moshiri. For his part, Moshiri is understood to remain positive about the state of Everton, to the point where he is struggling to comprehend what he views as negativity over the plight of the club.
His belief is that with Premier League survival secured and the waterfront stadium nearing completion, he is overseeing a club with assets that outweigh the hundreds of millions of pounds in debt that remain even if he were to forfeit the shareholder loans he has provided. He is operating, in his view, from a position of strength.
However accurate or not the truth is, his personal belief cannot afford him to be complacent with 777 Partners. Moshiri must be proactive and remove them from the takeover picture because time does matter to Everton, and he cannot waste more on a plan that is doomed to fail.
The entity that is 777 Partners will likely flail for some time, and Everton’s fortunes cannot be subject to that chaos. He must take his search for an escape route, one that launched more than two years ago, elsewhere. That cannot be to anyone, however.
The landscape is different from September – the club has secured top-flight survival, will soon welcome its Premier League merit payment, and is weeks away from both the opening of a transfer window in which it has genuinely appealing assets and a new tranche of TV money.
That 777 Partners were willing to hand over millions of pounds in cash, month after month, to help fund the operation of the club even while waiting for approval was clearly tempting to Moshiri. He has maintained the view they were the best fit for the club, dismissing interest from other parties in recent months partly because of contractual requirements but also because he believed they were unable to prove they had the necessary funding – or commit to the completion of the stadium, which he views as a necessity of any deal.
While his first step must be to take advantage of the opportunity to move on from 777 Partners, his next cannot be to simply accept the first bid that will provide funds up front. Everton is too important to too many people, to too wide an area, and for too many reasons beyond football, for due diligence to be sacrificed for convenience.
Sport nation
