By George Overhill

18th Sep, 2023 | 12:40pm

Everton takeover news: Simon Jordan moots 777 Partners plan to 'flip' stadium at 'basket case' club

Simon Jordan has suggested that 777 Partner’s plan at “basket case” Everton is to wait for the stadium development to be finished and “flip it”.

Speaking live on talkSPORT (18 September) the former Crystal Palace chairman said the prospective buyer’s of the Toffees will likely need some sort of success at the club in order to make money, but suggested it “feels like” their idea of that would be just to stay in the Premier League and sell on again once the dock-side development is complete.

He claimed if 777 put “very little” of their own money in and then “somebody comes along who fancies it a little bit more” once the club’s new home is ready “because the climate’s changed” then they can quickly “flip it” and move on.

Jordan said (10.11am): “If they don’t have real money they won’t complete a deal. They won’t get past certain obstacles in terms of the funding requirements of the football club.

“But the motivation at the centre of it is primarily their own and with that you’d like to think they’d drag the football club with them, because if their motivations are their own they need some level of success attached to it, which means Everton need to be moderately successful.

“That success could simply be for them retaining Premier League status, waiting for the stadium to complete and flipping it, which is what this feels like.”

Fast buck

What Jordan has suggested may or may not be what 777 Partners have in mind, but it is a feasible outlook in the circumstances.

It would hardly represent the sort of sustainable long-term plan that Everton seem desperately in need of, but given the number of voices questioning the firm’s impact at Goodison it could in theory be worse.

Based on a start to the season that has the Toffees occupying the relegation zone already it is starting to look like success for any owner would first have to constitute staying in the top flight.

Getting the stadium build finished isn’t going to be cheap, especially since the possibility for current Everton creditors to recall their loans if 777 takeover has been mooted [Daily Mail, 17 September].

But if they can raise the cash to cover it and convince the authorities that they can do the deal then perhaps there would be more scope for the future buyers to be the ones the club actually needs.

There doesn’t seem to be a huge selection of options right now, despite an Asian offer being considered “real and credible” in recent weeks, so maybe owners who want to stay for the longer term and sustainably get the club back on track would be more interested in a year if the club stay up and have a brand new stadium to play in.

The key point is that it is easier said than done to stay up, and what might happen with if Everton go down, whether Farhad Moshiri or 777 are in charge, would be far more painful, and after two escapes late in the day the club will be tempting fate to need a third.

In other Everton news, another Toffees shareholder has hit out at the “disaster” under Moshiri as he hailed Bill Kenwright as the “greatest Evertonian”.