The football imbecile at work claimed that you couldn’t compare Littlewoods' investment with Ours, as they didn’t spend millions like we did.
There was no telling him.
Twas ever thus!
A few years back I tried to get a fix on the Littlewoods effect on both Liverpool and Everton from the late 50s onwards. Try this on the work imbecile, see if it registers, not least the fact that we are 65 years on from that Littlewoods effect!
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"It is really difficult to find financial statements on record for English clubs prior to 1974.
I’ve never been able to find any annual statement of accounts for the late 50s. But using the published accounts for 1974 (when the Football League archives begin on record), Everton turned over approximately £1M and Liverpool (FA Cup winners that year) turned over £1.4M in that year's trading. I used the Bank of England’s inflation adjustment thingy to get an approximate value as at 1959 for those turnover values.
The turnovers of both clubs in 1974, as with every club in football, came largely from gate receipts, programme sales, club shops and transfer profits and losses. Until recent years, even the biggest of our clubs weren’t actually that big in terms of ackers generated etc. A standard Tesco store, say, would’ve been much, much bigger than any top class football club.
So, here’s the point. When John Moores, his family and the ciphers he placed into both clubs began investing into Everton and Liverpool, the money provided
(a) a £50k cash injection into Everton along with an open-ended personal guarantor offer from Moores to underwrite the club’s future transfer activity and
(b) a huge, continuing injection into Liverpool’s transfer funds, enabling the purchases of Ian St John, Ron Yeats, Peter Thompson, Geoff Strong etc)
thus pushing a mid-table outfit that was Everton shortly after regaining First Division status and a struggling Second Division outfit that was Liverpool, both towards the upper echelon of the Football League.
This investment underpinned the team building undertaken by newly installed Harry Catterick (from Sheffield Wednesday) at Everton and Bill Shankly (from Huddersfield) at Liverpool.
And even with my 'fag-packet calculation', the sums of money injected into both clubs were at the very least a boost of 25% per year to their respective turnovers in 1959, when both clubs were struggling financially and on the pitch
I’d argue it was more like a 40% initial boost, if you could get hold of the actual company turnover figure for both clubs - imagine that level of boost for any club nowadays, given the money awash in the modern Premier League!
Within a couple of years, both clubs would win the First Division league championship and the FA Cup for the first time in ages (or even ever, as in Liverpool’s cup win in 1965.
It's all relative. To dine at the top table of football has always required huge sums of money, whatever the era. Both Merseyside giants got a massive helping hand from the Moores family and Littlewoods, however you calculate it.
And it wasn’t for nothing that Everton took over Sunderland’s 1950s mantle of being known as ‘The Bank Of England Club’.."
