“My friend Ronald Koeman destroyed me the first time I came here,” said Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola after last month's win at Goodison Park against Everton.
“It was 4-0 with Lukaku scoring and I remember it perfectly. It’s almost one decade [ago] but I love to come here... Clubs grow and the new stadium will be magnificent for the revenues, for the fans to be more comfortable, but it will be missed and it has been an honour to come here. I was like a little boy today watching the screens and the old goals from players like Gary Lineker. I see these and say ‘Wow, this is English football’."
On Sunday, against Southampton, the 39,414-capacity venue which has staged more top-flight football matches than anywhere else in England, hosts its final Everton men’s fixture. David Moyes’ team will move to a new 53,000 seater stadium in August on the banks of the Mersey at Bramley-Moore Dock.
Guardiola was speaking in the press room under Goodison Park’s main stand. It’s a little cramped, a bit like the press box above with its blue wooden seats and obstructing poles. It’s a little tired too - though the hospitality of staff made it friendly.
When the three-tier main stand was built in 1970 it was the biggest in Britain. So tall that the floodlight pylons were taken down and the lights mounted along the roof. With escalators carrying fans to the upper tiers, it was groundbreaking, the centre point of one of the finest football grounds and it replaced a significant stand from famed Scottish architect and engineer, Archibald Leitch.
Two of his stands are still present at Goodison, with their famous criss-cross steelwork balconies.
Goodison is England’s Wrigley Field, a historic sports venue sitting on an irregular block two miles from the city centre, but it’s no architectural marvel.
Its beauty comes from being there for so long; a 1900 map of the area is almost unchanged from now. Dozens of dense, terraced streets pack tightly around St Luke’s church and the football ground on Goodison Road.
It was regarded as the finest football ground in England when it opened in 1892 and became the first and only club venue to stage an FA Cup final in 1894, a game attended by 69,000. By 1905, Goodison’s 50,000 capacity was double the size of nearby Anfield.
Goodison was England’s first major football ground, described as "magnificently large, for it rivals the greater American baseball pitches" said one 1892 report. But there are no ivy-covered walls at Goodison. The hemmed in exterior is clad instead with pictures of heroes of yore against a backdrop of Mersey blue.
Goodison was among the best until relatively recently. In the 1980s, only it and Old Trafford offered both standing and seating facilities on all four sides of the stadium while Goodison was the only ground to have double decker stands on all four sides.
But what was once the biggest and one of the best has faded as rival stadiums were expanded or rebuilt. In 2000, the capacity of Goodison was 40,100 (down from a peak 78,299 in 1948) and Anfield 42,000. In 2025, Goodison went below 40,000, Anfield is 62,000.
While Liverpool bought up the houses which surrounded Anfield, Everton looked to move to a new stadium rather than do the same – though in 1937 they did buy up houses on Gwaldys Street to build a new expanded stand.
This century, Everton looked at building a new home at King’s Dock by the Mersey in the city and in Kirkby on the outskirts of it, plus a potential groundshare with Liverpool in Stanley Park. But they all came to little until Bramley-Moore, which has cost around £750 million.
Everton’s motto nil satis, nisi optimum – ‘only the best is good enough’ – no longer applies to Goodison as it once might. The football ground – for it is a ground, rather than a stadium – missed out to neighbouring Anfield across Stanley Park when it came to hosting games at Euro ’96.
Before that, Goodison was chosen as the city’s venue during the 1966 World Cup finals. Long before, Everton FC played their first eight years as tenants at Anfield before an argument over rent led to them going it alone and finding a new home on land described as a "howling desert".
That was in 1892 and a new team comprised entirely of Scots was formed to play at Anfield: Liverpool FC.
But time moves on. Two hundred years ago, Everton was a pleasant hilltop village favoured by the local gentry for its toffee shops before it was absorbed into Liverpool’s boundaries in 1835. To this day, the club’s nickname is The Toffees.
When a football club moves home, it’s not just the fixtures and fittings that are left behind. So do the discreet plaques by the side of the pitch bearing the names of the fans whose ashes have been scattered on the pitch or by the side of it.
Or the 2001 statue of Bill ‘Dixie’ Dean, one of the most prolific goalscorers in football history and the man who scored 60 league goals in one season. Dean once lived in a terraced house nearby and died at Goodison during a Merseyside derby in 1980.
Though some things can be preserved and moved – the team, the fans, the Z Cars theme tune played before every game – the soul of a football club can’t just be transferred overnight. Like the matchday habits of visiting favoured public houses or fish and chip shops, seeing familiar faces or the memorabilia stalls inside St Luke’s church that are part of the culture.
Fans have invested decades of emotion and routine into their ‘Everton’ and it’s hard to break that moving to a home that is still unfamiliar. Everton’s women team will stay at Goodison, but how do fans feel about the final days of a place they love so much?
“So much of the season was occupied by what looked like the genuine possibility of relegation and most of the football under Sean Dyche was grindingly miserable,” explains Mark O’Brien, who has written several books on Everton.
“So, for a long time the whole prospect of this being the final season at Goodison was pushed to the back of everyone’s mind. It's only been since the upturn under (new manager) David Moyes, and easing away from the bottom of the table, that there’s been the headspace for people to start to really take it on board.
“There was also the dreaded final derby game (against Liverpool) to navigate. And what a night that ended up as. In many ways, it would have been most fitting if we could have just done a mic drop and exited the building the moment James Tarkowski smashed home that injury-time equaliser”.
The new stadium has been greeted with enthusiasm by most Evertonians.
“It’s been the one ray of light for a lot of people for quite some time,” explains O’Brien. “Everything about it seems to have been handled spot on and in what is, to be honest, a quite un-Everton fashion. I think some of our supporters wish they could get season tickets to follow (the builders) Laing O’Rourke instead. It does look tremendous though and the location on the banks of the river is just ridiculously iconic”.
It does indeed look tremendous. It has smooth lines next to the water, steep stands and is far from the identikit new stadia that were thrown up in a too similar fashion over the past decades.
It’s big too, with 13,000 more seats than Goodison (and scope for 10,000 more) and far more revenue-rich executive facilities.
It won’t have the sheer wall of Goodison’s main stand, where multi-million pound footballers are dropped off outside terraced houses dwarfed by the what was once the biggest stand in Britain, where Guardiola spoke barely 20 metres from where working Liverpudlians live, the football club at the heart of the working class community which helped make it what it was.
Trump v Khan
2016: Feud begins after Khan criticised Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban to US
2017: Trump criticises Khan’s ‘no reason to be alarmed’ response to London Bridge terror attacks
2019: Trump calls Khan a “stone cold loser” before first state visit
2019: Trump tweets about “Khan’s Londonistan”, calling him “a national disgrace”
2022: Khan’s office attributes rise in Islamophobic abuse against the major to hostility stoked during Trump’s presidency
July 2025 During a golfing trip to Scotland, Trump calls Khan “a nasty person”
Sept 2025 Trump blames Khan for London’s “stabbings and the dirt and the filth”.
Dec 2025 Trump suggests migrants got Khan elected, calls him a “horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor”
White hydrogen: Naturally occurring hydrogen
Chromite: Hard, metallic mineral containing iron oxide and chromium oxide
Ultramafic rocks: Dark-coloured rocks rich in magnesium or iron with very low silica content
Ophiolite: A section of the earth’s crust, which is oceanic in nature that has since been uplifted and exposed on land
Olivine: A commonly occurring magnesium iron silicate mineral that derives its name for its olive-green yellow-green colour
Expo details
Expo 2020 Dubai will be the first World Expo to be held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia
The world fair will run for six months from October 20, 2020 to April 10, 2021.
It is expected to attract 25 million visits
Some 70 per cent visitors are projected to come from outside the UAE, the largest proportion of international visitors in the 167-year history of World Expos.
More than 30,000 volunteers are required for Expo 2020
The site covers a total of 4.38 sqkm, including a 2 sqkm gated area
It is located adjacent to Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai South
Desert Warrior
Starring: Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Rating: 3/5
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shantanu Maheshwari, Jimmy Shergill, Saiee Manjrekar
Director: Neeraj Pandey
Rating: 2.5/5
UK’s AI plan
- AI ambassadors such as MIT economist Simon Johnson, Monzo cofounder Tom Blomfield and Google DeepMind’s Raia Hadsell
- £10bn AI growth zone in South Wales to create 5,000 jobs
- £100m of government support for startups building AI hardware products
- £250m to train new AI models
FFP EXPLAINED
What is Financial Fair Play?
Introduced in 2011 by Uefa, European football’s governing body, it demands that clubs live within their means. Chiefly, spend within their income and not make substantial losses.
What the rules dictate?
The second phase of its implementation limits losses to €30 million (Dh136m) over three seasons. Extra expenditure is permitted for investment in sustainable areas (youth academies, stadium development, etc). Money provided by owners is not viewed as income. Revenue from “related parties” to those owners is assessed by Uefa's “financial control body” to be sure it is a fair value, or in line with market prices.
What are the penalties?
There are a number of punishments, including fines, a loss of prize money or having to reduce squad size for European competition – as happened to PSG in 2014. There is even the threat of a competition ban, which could in theory lead to PSG’s suspension from the Uefa Champions League.
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
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If you go
Flying
Despite the extreme distance, flying to Fairbanks is relatively simple, requiring just one transfer in Seattle, which can be reached directly from Dubai with Emirates for Dh6,800 return.
Touring
Gondwana Ecotours’ seven-day Polar Bear Adventure starts in Fairbanks in central Alaska before visiting Kaktovik and Utqiarvik on the North Slope. Polar bear viewing is highly likely in Kaktovik, with up to five two-hour boat tours included. Prices start from Dh11,500 per person, with all local flights, meals and accommodation included; gondwanaecotours.com
Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
Torque: 678Nm at 7,250rpm
Price: From Dh1,700,000
Available: Now
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
Thank You for Banking with Us
Director: Laila Abbas
Starring: Yasmine Al Massri, Clara Khoury, Kamel El Basha, Ashraf Barhoum
Rating: 4/5
The specs: 2018 Kia Picanto
Price: From Dh39,500
Engine: 1.2L inline four-cylinder
Transmission: Four-speed auto
Power: 86hp @ 6,000rpm
Torque: 122Nm @ 4,000rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 6.0L / 100km
Hili 2: Unesco World Heritage site
The site is part of the Hili archaeological park in Al Ain. Excavations there have proved the existence of the earliest known agricultural communities in modern-day UAE. Some date to the Bronze Age but Hili 2 is an Iron Age site. The Iron Age witnessed the development of the falaj, a network of channels that funnelled water from natural springs in the area. Wells allowed settlements to be established, but falaj meant they could grow and thrive. Unesco, the UN's cultural body, awarded Al Ain's sites - including Hili 2 - world heritage status in 2011. Now the most recent dig at the site has revealed even more about the skilled people that lived and worked there.
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Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
Specs
Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
Range: Up to 610km
Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
Price: From Dh439,000
Available: Now
Marathon results
Men:
1. Titus Ekiru(KEN) 2:06:13
2. Alphonce Simbu(TAN) 2:07:50
3. Reuben Kipyego(KEN) 2:08:25
4. Abel Kirui(KEN) 2:08:46
5. Felix Kemutai(KEN) 2:10:48
Women:
1. Judith Korir(KEN) 2:22:30
2. Eunice Chumba(BHR) 2:26:01
3. Immaculate Chemutai(UGA) 2:28:30
4. Abebech Bekele(ETH) 2:29:43
5. Aleksandra Morozova(RUS) 2:33:01
Five expert hiking tips
Always check the weather forecast before setting off
Make sure you have plenty of water
Set off early to avoid sudden weather changes in the afternoon
Wear appropriate clothing and footwear
Take your litter home with you
Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
- Join parent networks
- Look beyond school fees
- Keep an open mind
The%20specs
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Who's who in Yemen conflict
Houthis: Iran-backed rebels who occupy Sanaa and run unrecognised government
Yemeni government: Exiled government in Aden led by eight-member Presidential Leadership Council
Southern Transitional Council: Faction in Yemeni government that seeks autonomy for the south
Habrish 'rebels': Tribal-backed forces feuding with STC over control of oil in government territory
Company Profile
Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
What vitamins do we know are beneficial for living in the UAE
Vitamin D: Highly relevant in the UAE due to limited sun exposure; supports bone health, immunity and mood.
Vitamin B12: Important for nerve health and energy production, especially for vegetarians, vegans and individuals with absorption issues.
Iron: Useful only when deficiency or anaemia is confirmed; helps reduce fatigue and support immunity.
Omega-3 (EPA/DHA): Supports heart health and reduces inflammation, especially for those who consume little fish.
more from Janine di Giovanni
PROFILE OF HALAN
Started: November 2017
Founders: Mounir Nakhla, Ahmed Mohsen and Mohamed Aboulnaga
Based: Cairo, Egypt
Sector: transport and logistics
Size: 150 employees
Investment: approximately $8 million
Investors include: Singapore’s Battery Road Digital Holdings, Egypt’s Algebra Ventures, Uber co-founder and former CTO Oscar Salazar
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
The specs: 2019 Subaru Forester
Price, base: Dh105,900 (Premium); Dh115,900 (Sport)
Engine: 2.5-litre four-cylinder
Transmission: Continuously variable transmission
Power: 182hp @ 5,800rpm
Torque: 239Nm @ 4,400rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 8.1L / 100km (estimated)
How to watch Ireland v Pakistan in UAE
When: The one-off Test starts on Friday, May 11
What time: Each day’s play is scheduled to start at 2pm UAE time.
TV: The match will be broadcast on OSN Sports Cricket HD. Subscribers to the channel can also stream the action live on OSN Play.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Dubai Rugby Sevens
November 30, December 1-2
International Vets
Christina Noble Children’s Foundation fixtures
Thursday, November 30:
10.20am, Pitch 3, v 100 World Legends Project
1.20pm, Pitch 4, v Malta Marauders
Friday, December 1:
9am, Pitch 4, v SBA Pirates
