There are two ways to read the statement Everton’s owners dropped on Friday morning. The first is as a 170-word, painfully understated announcement that The Friedkin Group are effectively putting the club up for sale — a low-key whimper of an ending to a tenure that promised so much. The second, and I think the more honest way, is as the clearest possible admission that TFG, the Houston-based firm that also owns AS Roma, never really wanted to be here in the first place.
Let me start with the numbers, because that’s where this story actually lives. TFG paid more than £400m for a 99.5% stake in Everton in December 2024, buying the club out from under the financial wreckage of Farhad Moshiri’s final, chaotic years. Now, football finance expert Kieran Maguire tells BBC Sport he expects them to ask for between £750m and £800m for a complete sale, with the club carrying around £468m of debt. That is a flip in every sense of the word. Buy low, sell high — and let someone else carry the emotional weight of Goodison’s last goodbye and the move to Bramley-Moore Dock.
Absentee owners from day one
Here’s the detail that sums up the entire TFG era: chairman Dan Friedkin has never attended a single Everton match. Not one. More startlingly, he has reportedly never even spoken to David Moyes, the manager who walked back through the door in January 2025 with the club’s future written all over his face.
I don’t care which club you support — that is not how you run a football club. Moyes himself said as much, admitting this week that he only found out about the potential sale, in his own words, “this morning,” alongside the wider public. The disconnect between the owners and the people actually running the football operation on Merseyside has been there the whole time, and it finally curdled into the outright toxicity we’re seeing now.
The transfer window that broke it
The relationship between Everton’s fans and TFG didn’t turn toxic gradually. It snapped, violently, over one botched decision after another in a single summer. The catalyst was TFG’s attempt to sell Harrison Armstrong — one of the finest products of Everton’s Academy in years — to Nottingham Forest in a £40m deal.
The move was agreed until the news leaked, and the reaction was immediate and furious. There were loud threats of “a riot” at the following game at Bournemouth. TFG scrambled into damage-limitation mode and blocked the sale of the 19-year-old midfielder, but let’s not dress it up as anything other than what it was: a face-saving PR exercise after a catastrophic decision that alienated the entire fanbase in one afternoon.
And it didn’t stop there. Everton sold Iliman Ndiaye to Manchester City for £65m and sent striker Beto to Fiorentina, then watched a move for Monaco forward Folarin Balogun collapse with no time left to find an alternative. It left Moyes a striker light and staring at just 18 senior outfield players. From that moment, the credits were rolling on TFG’s time at the club.
The Burnley bill that stung
There’s a financial subplot here that I think is genuinely under-appreciated. Maguire points out that TFG were likely “shocked” by having to pay Burnley more than £35m for a breach of financial rules. In 2024, Everton were found to have broken the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules over a three-year period; Burnley argued that breach had directly affected their chances of staying up in the 2021-22 season and sought compensation for the losses tied to their relegation. TFG injected £38m to cover the cost, and Everton have since appealed.
“I suspect they were shocked by having to pay Burnley more than £35m,” Maguire told BBC Sport. “Perhaps they thought English football was going to become as litigious as trying to operate in the United States.”
Why now is the time to sell
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for Evertonians: this is actually a seller’s market. There are only 20 Premier League clubs you can buy, and Maguire spells it out plainly — it can take $5bn or more to buy a sporting franchise in the United States, which makes a well-run, historic English club at £750m-£800m look like a bargain by comparison.
“They can see this as something they can flip — buy low and sell high,” he says. That’s the whole thesis. TFG walked into a mess, stabilised the finances, and are now trying to walk out with a handsome return. What they’ve actually brought Everton, perversely, is a measure of stability that makes the club more attractive to the next buyer. The debts are known, the stadium is built, the worst of Moshiri’s chaos has been swept under the rug — and there’s nothing unpleasant waiting when you lift the carpet.
“You have got an ‘oven ready’ football club coming on to the market,” Maguire added. “If you are an owner who wants to accelerate things at a football club, you have a starting point for that.” And his start point for potential buyers? The States.
Moyes and the fans, left holding the bag again
You can’t write this story without talking about Moyes, because he’s the one who has to keep the football side of it afloat while the ownership circus rolls on. “I’m disappointed that Evertonians have to go through another period of ‘who are our owners?’,” he said at his pre-match press conference before Sunday’s trip to Hull. “I truly believed with new ownership we were in it completely.”
That’s the gut-punch sentence. “I truly believed.” The ambition when he came back was to get Everton challenging for Europe again on a regular basis. Instead he’s found himself publicly auditioning the club to whoever wants to buy it — “If anyone wants to speak to me then I will be the first person to let them know that it is certainly worth buying.”
What next
So where does this leave Everton? In limbo, again, which is the one thing the club’s long-suffering fans know better than anyone. The stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock — a superb 50,000-plus ground that Maguire describes as a genuine asset you won’t have to spend a penny upgrading — makes the club structurally attractive. The fanbase, even after everything, fills it and travels in force. The football, under Moyes, at least has a shape.
The buyers, if and when they come, will almost certainly be American. That’s where the money is, that’s where the scarcity logic lands, and that’s where the due diligence has already been half-done by the Friedkins themselves. The question is whether the next owner brings the one thing TFG never had: actual, genuine commitment.
My honest take
Bold prediction: this drags on. Club sales of this size rarely complete quickly, and the Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ test — proving where the money comes from, not just for the purchase but for running the club — is a high bar. I’d be stunned if there’s a new owner in place before Christmas. But I’m also confident the eventual buyer, whoever they are, is getting a better club than the one TFG inherited. The infrastructure is done. The financial chaos is gone. What’s missing is the one thing money can’t guarantee: a plan that involves actually caring.
Takeaways
- TFG’s 170-word Friday statement put Everton up for sale, ending a 22-month, absentee-owner tenure.
- Asking price expected at £750m-£800m; the club carries around £468m of debt.
- Chairman Dan Friedkin has never attended an Everton match or spoken to David Moyes.
- The Harrison Armstrong sale saga, Iliman Ndiaye’s £65m exit and the collapsed Balogun deal turned fans against TFG.
- Burnley’s £35m-plus PSR compensation bill and the £38m TFG injected to cover it reshaped the ownership calculus.
- Look for American buyers; an ‘oven ready’ club with a 50,000-plus stadium is structurally attractive.
