'World record crowd' turned up at Everton to watch 'the richest man who ever played for England'

Perhaps understandably given the current fractious relationship with the game’s authorities in this country, Evertonians’ enthusiasm for England teams seems to have waned but that wasn’t the case when Goodison Park staged its first international.

On the back of Everton being hit with an immediate 10-point deduction by an independent commission last Friday – the heaviest such penalty in the 135-year history of the English top flight – a paltry 7,890 spectators took in England Under-21s’ 3-0 victory over their Northern Ireland counterparts on Tuesday in what could be the final international at Goodison before its expected closure at the end of next season. The Blues of course are building a new 52,888 capacity stadium on the Mersey waterfront at Bramley-Moore Dock, and it was borrowing towards the development of their future home that was one of two key areas of dispute identified in the judgement of the case which found them to have breached Premier League financial rules.

In essence, Everton have been handed the most severe punishment ever handed out at the elite level of the game in this country for overreaching on construction of a new stadium – that has already been chosen as a venue for the 2028 European Championships – and have been plunged to joint bottom of the table. In contrast, Manchester City who are yet to be judged on their own 115 alleged breaches of profitability and sustainability rules over a nine-year period and are looking to become the first team in English history to be crowned champions on four successive occasions this season, already had their stadium built in the shape of the former Commonwealth Games showpiece that became the Etihad when the petrodollar-fuelled Abu Dhabi United Group