Source: Daily_Mail
I nearly bought Everton for £13.5m, reveals radio host Chris Evans
Chris Evans has revealed that he almost bought Everton in the late Nineties.
The BBC Radio 2 host, who famously used to hit the town with Gazza, told talkSPORT: 'We could have got it for £13.5million.
It [Everton] hardly had any debt at the time, this was 1998, '99, maybe 2000.
'We had a media group our remit was to grow the company and we had totry and give the investor's the return that we had promised them.
'One thing we did was looking at buying a newspaper and the other thing we did was look at buying Everton Football Club.
'But the success of the group that we already had overtook thebusiness plan and then the investors said that we didn't need to riskit. So we didn't need to take the risk that we wanted to take in order to grow to a bigger company.'
Radio show host Alan Brazil then told Evans, who was head of the Ginger Media Group in the Nineties, 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.'
