ABSTRACT
The recent history of Everton Football Club has been marked by a series of tumultuous off-field events that have given rise to a fractious relationship between the club hierarchy and organized supporter groups. The attempt in 2008 to move the club out of the City of Liverpool to a nearby town in the neighbouring borough of Knowsley helped crystallize underlying tensions between, on the one hand, the club’s owners and their senior management team and, on the other hand, fans concerned with the limited access to decision-makers and having little or no input regarding the governance of the club. In steadily deteriorating relations, the club hierarchy have – in an effort to marginalize and even silence criticism – threatened to sue supporters’ groups; accused them of unethical and underhand tactics and of actively attempting to ‘sabotage’ the club; and brought to an end a tradition of shareholder annual general meetings stretching back to the last decade of the nineteenth century. Much of this has been played out in the public domain through the local, and at times national, media.
