Everton’s £800 Million Gamble on the Mersey
The Hill Dickinson Stadium is open. The debt is refinanced. The naming rights are signed. After two decades of false starts and financial near-collapse, Everton finally have their new home. Now comes the harder question: does the business actually work?
There is a photograph taken at Bramley-Moore Dock in the summer of 2021 that tells you everything about the scale of what Everton attempted. It shows the former commercial dock, a vast rectangular basin of brown water sitting on Liverpool’s northern waterfront, being pumped full of sand dredged from the Irish Sea. Not to build something over it. To fill it. Entirely. At enormous cost, before a single steel beam had gone up.
It was the kind of extravagant, irreversible act that signals genuine commitment. There was no going back after that. Everton had literally filled in their foundations.
Four years later, that foundation has become a 52,888-seat arena: the eighth-largest football stadium in England, hosting Premier League football, UEFA Euro 2028, and a growing portfolio of non-football events. The club, after years of financial chaos, has finally secured stable long-term debt. The new stadium has a name: Hill Dickinson Stadium. And the revenue model that underpins it all is either the salvation of Everton as a competitive football club, or the most expensive gamble in Merseyside history. Probably both.
The Deal: What Was Announced, and What Are the Headline Numbers?
The headline figure is staggering: the total capitalised cost of the Hill Dickinson Stadium project has reached approximately £750–£800 million, making it one of the most expensive stadium projects in British football history. For context, Tottenham Hotspur’s ground, widely considered the benchmark for modern Premier League stadium development, cost around £1 billion when it opened in 2019. Everton’s arena, built on a reclaimed dock on Liverpool’s waterfront, has cost roughly three-quarters of that for a stadium with a comparable capacity.
The financing story is as important as the construction story. Everton did not pay for this with money they had. The club entered a complex, multi-layered debt structure that nearly collapsed entirely when the relationship between former majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri and his business partner Alisher Usmanov unravelled following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Usmanov had originally paid £30 million for the first option to name the new stadium; the USM Stadium, it was set to be called. Those plans evaporated overnight when Usmanov was sanctioned by the British government. Moshiri, who had pledged to self-fund the project, suddenly found himself without his most significant financial backer at precisely the moment when inflation was driving construction costs higher and interest rates were rising sharply.
The decisive intervention came in December 2024, when The Friedkin Group, a Texas-based investment consortium that also owns Serie A club AS Roma, completed their acquisition of 98.8% of Everton. One of their first significant acts was arranging a £350 million financing package with JP Morgan to refinance the stadium debt, replacing costly loans taken out under Moshiri. The offering was reportedly oversubscribed multiple times.
Then, in May 2025, came the naming rights deal. Hill Dickinson, an international commercial law firm, agreed a long-term partnership understood to be worth approximately £10 million a year. The fans, predictably, hated the name. The finance team, just as predictably, did not care.
The Context: Who Are the Parties, and What Is the Commercial Logic?
To understand why Everton built this stadium, you have to understand what Goodison Park was costing them. Opened in 1892 and one of English football’s most storied grounds, Goodison was by the 2020s a commercial millstone. Everton’s ticketing income had gone backwards since 2013, with the club sitting 14th in the Premier League matchday income table despite being one of the division’s best-supported clubs.
A ground with limited hospitality infrastructure, poor sightlines in some sections, and no capacity to grow beyond around 39,000 was generating perhaps £15–17 million per season in matchday revenue. The new stadium is projected to generate something approaching £50 million per annum: more than triple the income from the same number of home games. That gap is the fundamental commercial logic of the entire project.
39,414 capacity · Limited hospitality
52,888 capacity · Premium hospitality tiers
But the logic goes further than matchday income. The Hill Dickinson Stadium was designed from the outset as a multi-use venue. It features Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ cashless technology throughout its concourses, has a 13,000-seat stand modelled on Borussia Dortmund’s famous Yellow Wall, and is a scheduled host venue for UEFA Euro 2028. It has already hosted the 2025 Rugby League Ashes: a reminder that the stadium’s revenue model does not live or die by Premier League membership alone.
The naming rights deal itself reveals a great deal about how the Friedkins are thinking about the club’s commercial identity. Hill Dickinson is not a global consumer brand. It is not a betting company, a cryptocurrency platform, or an airline. It is a Liverpool-founded law firm with 215 years of history, more than 400 staff based locally, and genuine international reach across 12 offices including Hong Kong and Singapore.
“Every pound of the naming rights fee is new money that did not previously exist in Everton’s P&L; and in the context of the Premier League’s PSR rules, pure incremental revenue is uniquely powerful.”
The Ground Work · AnalysisThere is also a specific, underappreciated reason why the Hill Dickinson deal makes commercial sense beyond the obvious. The naming rights deal represents pure incremental revenue compared to Goodison Park, which had no naming rights partner at all. In the context of the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules, which cap how much clubs can lose over a rolling three-year period, pure incremental revenue is uniquely powerful. It does not require selling players. It does not require cutting costs. It simply expands the space within which Everton can operate.
