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Evertonians have long since prided themselves not only on our club’s rich history, but also on its values. Everton are affectionately known to many as ‘The People’s Club’, owing to our family values, prioritising community and accessibility while looking out for our loyal working-class fanbase. Staying true to values such as these, which form the identity of our beloved club, feels especially important at a time when football seems to be departing further and further from the sport we all fell in love with. We don’t, after all, have a footballing identity to cling to; our only trademark of note is dysfunction. We’ve become a metaphor for bad fortune and comical fuckery; a meme. Barely a day goes by where we don’t give fans at least one reason to mutter “Everton, that.” We all want more for this once great club. As we head into our second season at our beautiful new stadium, still in the early stages of a new regime under the Friedkin Group, there is at least hope that this period of transition could provide the reset we need to compete for trophies and European football once more. But in modern football, what happens on the balance sheet matters almost as much as what happens on the pitch. And I wonder if there might be a trade-off between the values we cherish and the ambitions we want the club to realise: can Everton simultaneously be The People’s Club and a successful club? Unfortunately, we need to talk about money The 26/27 season starts in less than a week. We’re probably 3/4 signings short of being anything more than a mediocre prospect (again), and we’re at the stage where, even if we do make the signings, they won’t be fit in time to feature in our opening games (again). It’s evident that we need a right back, a winger, and a striker – of this there can be little debate. But where does the money come from? The reality of modern football is that what a club can do on the pitch is increasingly shaped by what it can generate off it. Deloitte publishes its Annual Review of Football Finance, which breaks down revenues in Europe’s top leagues, as well as the composition of those revenues. Its latest publication, covering figures for the 2024-25 season, showed the average revenue for a Premier League club to be £340m. Everton generated a club-record £197m in 2024/25, but remained below the Premier League average. In 2024/25, Premier League clubs generated £6.8 billion in revenue. Broadcasting remains the biggest piece of the pie, accounting for around half of the total, but clubs have relatively little control over it. Matchday income accounts for another 15%. That leaves commercial revenue – sponsorships, partnerships, merchandise and the various other ways football clubs have found to separate people from their money. It accounted for around 35% of Premier League revenue and, crucially, is where clubs have far greater control over their own fortunes. How well you market the club, which partnerships you strike, what you sell and what you charge are decisions largely within your own control. As shown below, Everton are far more reliant on broadcasting income than the average Premier League club, with commercial and matchday revenues making up a much smaller share of our total. There is clearly room for improvement: the more effectively we supplement broadcast income with revenues of our own, the more competitive we can become financially. Herein lies the trade-off I alluded to in the beginning: I’m sure we all want to see our club perform better across all departments, but what if that comes at the cost of ever-increasing costs of supporting them? If we look at our club as a business, then we are the target market. As such, if we’re to increase revenues, that may mean maximising income from supporters. Though a sensible approach to business, absent the emotion and sentiment involved in football, such exploitation would stand in strict contradiction with our status of being ‘The People’s Club’. Are we still the People’s Club? Should we prioritise remaining the People’s Club over striving for success? Are the two mutually exclusive in today’s game? Through the lens of shirt prices, I attempt to begin to answer these questions. The shirt off your back Football shirts are, of course, only one part of the commercial puzzle, but they do represent one of the clearest points at which a club’s commercial ambitions collide directly with the wallets of its supporters – particularly those with kids, or those who simply share my lifelong love for football kits. That makes shirt prices a useful test of the tension at the heart of this discussion. Has The People’s Club historically protected its supporters from the rising cost of football, or have Everton’s prices increased just as quickly as everything else? To find out, I’ve looked at how the price of an Everton shirt has changed over recent years, how that compares with inflation, and where Everton now sit alongside the rest of the Premier League. As the chart below shows, the last two seasons’ home shirts are the most expensive we’ve ever sold. Some of that is inevitable: general costs have risen considerably over the same period. However, what is interesting is that in recent years particularly, the prices we’ve charged for kits have risen much faster than what could be explained by inflation. Indicated by the red shaded regions in the chart above, we’ve been charging increasingly more over and above already-increasing costs of living in recent years (not to mention offering ‘pro’ versions of all kits, which currently retail at £115). I’ll let readers decide whether this is savvy commercial practice or a heartless exploitation of supporters. Anyway, how do our current prices compare with the rest of the league? The chart below plots the retail price for an adult replica home shirt along with the junior version for every current Premier League club for the new season. Source: Clubs’ official stores As you can see, we charge above average for both versions, and only Spurs charge more for a junior shirt across the entire division. Again, this is open to interpretation; is this a good or a bad thing? Either way, it isn’t a very people-centred approach. Once again, football shirts are just one component; these rising prices are being charged against a backdrop of just about everything else becoming more expensive, too. How much would it really cost the club to make shirts cheaper? So what would protecting supporters actually cost? To even begin answering that, we need to know roughly how much Everton make from merchandise – and how much of that might come specifically from kits. Everton’s accounts don’t tell us exactly how much of their £47.2m commercial income comes from merchandise. They split it into £24.3m of ‘sponsorship, advertising and merchandising revenue’ and £22.9m of ‘other commercial revenue’, so we at least know where kit sales should sit. Handily, Crystal Palace’s accounts are more revealing: £11m of their £39m commercial income in 2024/25 – 28.2% – came from merchandising and retail. Given Palace generated almost exactly the same overall revenue as Everton that season, they’re a useful, albeit imperfect, benchmark. Applying that share to Everton gives an estimated merchandising and retail revenue of £13.3m. We still don’t know how much comes from kits specifically, so I’ll make a deliberately simple assumption that it’s half: around £6.7m. One final adjustment is needed. The accounts cover 2024/25, when an adult shirt cost £75 rather than today’s £80. Holding sales volumes constant and adjusting for that price rise gives us an illustrative current kit-revenue estimate of around £7.1m. With that established, we can test two versions of The People’s Club. First, what if Everton had simply allowed the £50 shirt sold in 2014/15 to rise with inflation? It would cost £71.32 today. Second, what if Everton went all the way back to charging £50? The table below shows what each would mean for our estimated kit revenues – and, crucially, how many additional shirts Everton would need to sell to make up for the lower price. | | Current | Inflation-linked price | Return to 2014/15 price | | Shirt price | £80 | £71.32 | £50 | | Reduction from current price | — | 10.90% | 37.50% | | Estimated kit revenue if sales unchanged | £7.1m | £6.3m | £4.4m | | Estimated revenue foregone (no additional sales) | — | £0.8m | £2.7m | | Increase in sales needed to break even | — | 12.20% | 60.00% | | Shirts needed for every 100 currently sold | 100 | 112 | 160 | The difference is striking. Returning to £50 would be a genuine financial commitment: sales would need to rise 60% to maintain revenue. But bringing the shirt back in line with inflation looks far less dramatic. Even if not a single additional shirt were sold, our estimated revenue hit is less than £1m; if sales rose by around 12%, it disappears altogether. There are plenty of caveats. We don’t know Everton’s actual kit revenues; we don’t know exactly how the club’s retail arrangements affect how much of an £80 shirt ultimately reaches the club, and, most importantly, we don’t know how many extra shirts supporters would buy if they were cheaper. In fact, Everton outsource their retail operations, meaning the relationship between shop prices and the revenue appearing in the club’s accounts is more complicated than simply multiplying shirts sold by their retail price. These simplified back-of-the-envelope calculations aren’t intended to prove that the club should lower its prices; but rather just to make the point that doing so probably wouldn’t be catastrophic. So I wouldn’t claim from this that reducing prices would definitely cost £770,000, or that sales definitely would increase by 12%. The more useful finding is the break-even point. It tells us how strongly supporters would need to respond before affordability and commercial performance stopped being a trade-off at all. And that brings us back to the question at the start. Being The People’s Club and being commercially ambitious need not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Charging £50 again would undoubtedly be a bold statement of the former. But simply keeping shirt prices in line with inflation? On these numbers, that looks like a rather less expensive principle to uphold. The Friedkins: a new era? Of course, all of this works on the assumption that we actually want to make shirts more affordable. Perhaps that is increasingly the wrong way to look at it. Under new ownership, there are signs that the club is entering a different era – one in which commercial growth is being pursued more aggressively. Higher ticket prices, greater emphasis on hospitality and premium experiences at the new stadium, and a more ambitious approach to partnerships and sponsorships all point towards a club increasingly conscious of the need to maximise its earning potential. After years of commercial underperformance, there is a perfectly reasonable argument that this is exactly what we should be doing. But if we’re going to be ruthless, we at least need to be good at it. That, for me, is where the frustration lies. I can accept the argument that modern football demands Everton become a more commercially-minded operation. What is harder to accept is asking supporters to pay increasingly premium prices while continuing to leave relatively basic commercial opportunities on the table. If the trade-off for becoming a serious, competitive football club is that some of the old People’s Club sentimentality has to give, then the least we should expect in return is a club that properly controls the controllables. And when it comes to merchandise, we still don’t. Castore’s first season as our kit supplier was marked by extended shortages, while many fans have been left disappointed by the quality of some products. This season, when the club launched its home kit, the press release made reference to the availability of “long sleeve versions in both Pro and Replica, with a limited stock of sponsor-free shirts, both in Pro and non-textured replica kits”. Yet it was around two weeks before any long-sleeved shirts actually appeared on the website, while the promised sponsor-free versions are still nowhere to be seen. More broadly, we still seem strangely reluctant to recognise that summer is probably quite a good time to sell football shirts. Kids want the new kit to take on holiday or to wear while kicking a ball around with their mates during the school holidays, yet Everton routinely leaves supporters waiting well into the summer before the full range becomes available. As I write this, we are less than a week away from the start of the Premier League season and still haven’t even released our third kit. These might seem like petty complaints in the grand scheme of things; none of them will make or break Everton Football Club – and don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather my next notification told me we’d signed a right-back than that we’d released our third kit. But they are exactly the sort of small, entirely controllable details that become harder to excuse if the club is going to ask supporters to pay premium prices. If £80 shirts are part of the price of Everton becoming a better-run football club, then we should at least be ruthless enough to make sure people can actually buy them. Perhaps more importantly, though, I’m not convinced the choice facing Everton is quite as simple as The People’s Club or a successful club. There are examples elsewhere in the Premier League suggesting the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I’ve written admiringly about Brentford before, and unfortunately I’m going to have to do it again. While Everton now charge £80 for a home shirt, Brentford have deliberately taken a different approach. They have regularly kept kits for two seasons to reduce the cost to supporters and, after a one-year interruption, have returned to a two-year home-kit cycle for 2026/27 and 2027/28 while also freezing shirt prices. This isn’t accidental: Brentford explicitly describe the policy as part of their commitment to affordability and sustainability. What makes that particularly interesting is that Brentford haven’t exactly been punished for their sentimentality. They have established themselves as a Premier League club while consistently punching above their weight, both on the pitch and in the way they operate off it. Most tellingly, their own chief executive has previously acknowledged the balancing act: Brentford deliberately keep football affordable for supporters while seeking to generate greater revenues elsewhere, particularly through commercial partnerships and broadcasting. That feels relevant to Everton. The admittedly rough calculations above suggest that even under the pessimistic assumption that not a single additional shirt would be sold, bringing prices back in line with inflation would cost less than £1m in annual revenue. If sales rose by around 12%, even that estimated loss disappears. Even the £2.7m hit from the more drastic drop in price isn’t earth-shattering. Against a club turning over almost £200m, and one that we have already established has considerable room to improve its commercial performance elsewhere, that doesn’t feel catastrophic. Better sponsorship deals, partnerships, retail operations and use of the new stadium offer opportunities to grow revenues without necessarily extracting every possible pound from the same supporters. I can’t prove that those gains would offset cheaper shirts pound-for-pound, but Brentford at least demonstrate the broader principle: commercial ambition and looking after supporters do not have to be opposites. So, are we still The People’s Club? Should remaining so take priority over squeezing every possible pound from the Everton brand? And would doing that prevent us from becoming successful again? I don’t pretend to have definitive answers to any of those questions. Different Evertonians will draw the line in different places. What I do think is that Everton need to decide what sort of club they want to be – and then commit to it. If the Friedkins’ Everton is going to be unapologetically more commercially aggressive, fine. Maximise the sponsorships, get the products on the shelves, sort the supply issues and, if Castore can’t deliver what the club needs when the current agreement expires, find somebody who can. But equally, if The People’s Club is going to remain more than a nice slogan from a different era, perhaps there are some areas where we decide not to extract every last pound from supporters. The numbers suggest we might be able to afford that choice. Other clubs suggest it can be made without abandoning ambition, but by shifting the focus towards more lucrative revenue streams that don’t come directly out of supporters’ pockets. Maybe Everton don’t actually have to choose between being The People’s Club and being a serious football club. We might just need to become much better at both.