Chris Evans nearly bought Everton FC
BROADCASTER Chris Evans today told talkSPORT he nearly bought Everton Football Club.
Speaking as a studio guest of Alan Brazil and Ronnie Irani on the Alan Brazil Sports Breakfast, Evans described how he almost became the chairman of the Premier League club.
"We had a media group - our remit was to grow the company and we had to try and give the investors the return that we had promised them," said Evans. "One thing we did was looking at buying a newspaper and the other thing we did was look at buying Everton Football Club.
"We could have got it for £13.5 million. It hardly had any debt at the time, this was 1998, ’99, maybe 2000. But the success of the group that we already had overtook the business plan and then the investors said that we didn’t need to risk it. So we didn’t need to take the risk that we wanted to take in order to grow to a bigger company."
Brazil then told Evans that he’d had a lucky escape, as it’s one thing to own a club. But then you need to spend millions of pounds on players.
"That’s the problem," said Evans. "Terry Venables once said to me ‘you can’t have the power and the glory.’ That’s the problem with the chairman and the manager; you’ve got to have one or the other. You can’t have both. Lots of chairmen are successful businessman. But no-one knows their name and that’s why they buy a football club. But they don’t get the fame. They just get the grief."
