Dan Friedkin knows the importance of history's watershed moments and Everton takeover must be one

Dan Friedkin, who has agreed a deal to complete an Everton takeover, piloted a Spitfire in the film Dunkirk (inset)
-Credit: (Image: Reach Publishing Services Limited)


As the man who won a Taurus Award for Best Speciality Stunt after piloting a Spitfire in the film Dunkirk, Everton’s prospective new owner Dan Friedkin recognises the importance of a watershed moment in history and the American going on to buy the Blues could prove just that.

Loyal but long suffering Evertonians have been put through the wringer under Farhad Moshiri but in late May 1940, this country was at its lowest ebb in the Second World War with the British Expeditionary Force surrounded in the north west corner of France by the advancing hordes of the Wehrmacht.

But thanks to a massive evacuation effort from back home, including the fabled ‘little ships’ (a varied assortment of speedboats, Thames vessels, car ferries and pleasure craft), over 338,000 Allied soldiers – including the grandfather of this correspondent, so if it had failed, you wouldn’t be reading this now – were saved to ensure they lived to fight another day.

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When Christopher Nolan produced his 2017 big screen blockbuster charting that amazing story, Friedkin, who is the chairman and the founder of the Air Force Heritage Flight Foundation, and one of fewer than a dozen civilian pilots in the USA who are qualified and allowed to fly in demonstrations with Air Force pilots, acted as an aerial unit co-ordinator, Spitfire pilot and helicopter camera pilot. Excelling at such tasks requires attention to detail, an astuteness for handling risk and, of course, a cool head under pressure.

It goes without saying that such a skill set would be a welcome addition to Goodison Park’s corridors of power after the on and off-the-field chaos of Moshiri’s eight-year tenure. As Michael Ball has said in his ECHO column: “Only Everton could get done for financial breaches with a billionaire accountant in charge”, while this week, when discussing the Friedkin deal, former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan went even further when he told Moshiri’s old pal Jim White that he felt dealing with the Monaco-based businessman: “is like nailing a jelly to the wall,” and described his tenure as a “clown college.”

Those orders at Dunkirk to get all those trapped men off the beaches in Operation Dynamo as it was codenamed, came from Winston Churchill. Britain’s wartime Prime Minister was, along with Dixie Dean, one of the two childhood idols of the world’s most renowned sports artist Paul Trevillion, who the ECHO interviewed earlier this year.

It’s often said that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but Trevillion did with both and given that his pen and ink drawing of Churchill – the only known portrait of him he personally signed and endorsed – is to be auctioned by Hansons on November 20 at The RAF Club, Piccadilly, London, with part of the proceeds to be donated to selected charities, it will be intriguing to see if the Everton deal for WW2 buff Friedkin – who is also chair of Project Recover, which uses modern technology to repatriate soldiers missing in action in the Pacific Ocean – gets signed off first.

At 90, Trevillion is old enough to recall when Everton were a bastion of excellence when it came to attacking play, having watched both Dean AND Tommy Lawton in the same forward line in the first game he ever attended at Tottenham Hotspur in 1937. A couple of years later, when official football stopped because of the war, a Blues team spearheaded by the latter who had been the First Division’s leading goalscorer for back-to-back seasons, were crowned champions for the fifth time.

Back then, talisman Lawton quipped that Everton were so good that the following season they would have won “the League, the Cup and the Boat Race,” had fate not intervened through the biggest conflict in human history. Just a few years earlier, Steve Bloomer had dubbed the Blues as being “The School of Science,” remarking: “They always manage to serve up football of the highest scientific order.”

Realistically, who is going to say that about the current side in 2024?

Unfortunately, in a similar vein to Everton’s proud motto Nil Satis Nisi Optimum (Latin for Nothing but the best is good enough), such lofty ideals seem almost absurd right now as the Blues struggle to live up expectations of their glorious past.

However, a beacon of hope – the only tangible positive among the anarchy of the Moshiri years – the club’s new stadium, has now risen by the banks of the Mersey to offer the prospect of a brighter future, and the potential of such an exciting venture, with Everton relocating from Goodison to their 52,888 capacity home by the waterfront at the end of this season, was surely pivotal in Friedkin, whose plans to do the same at Roma are yet to produce a spade in the ground, coming back in to seal a deal after previously withdrawing from takeover talks back in July.

Under Moshiri, the Blues have been reduced to a sorry shell of their former selves. Many of those who were once frustrated that David Moyes couldn’t win a trophy, now look back on the Scot’s reign as some kind of golden era compared to the current strife, never mind the genuine glory days of Howard Kendall’s first spell.

Last season, manager Sean Dyche who often had to act as the club’s de facto spokesman, praised his squad’s mental resilience for not “going under” throughout the unprecedented levels of pressure caused by a brace of sporting sanctions. However, as his team search for a first Premier League win of Goodison’s final campaign against Crystal Palace on Saturday having picked up a maiden point at Leicester City a week ago, the hope must be that the takeover can remove a crushing weight off the shoulders of everyone connected to Everton as they look to break free from their shackles of football purgatory.

Following the announcement of the deal, one of the game’s good guys, journalist Henry Winter produced a typically eloquent essay on why Everton are worth buying, which was generally well received by Blues apart from his sting in the tail in the last line when he mentioned the prospect of “dropping into the Championship” – as that would be the equivalent of ‘Hell” at such a pivotal moment in the club’s existence. Despite the disappointing start, this squad and its manager are still much better than that, so now is the time to start showing it.

American Evertonian Nick Palmer (a.k.a. ‘Astro’), from Macon, Georgia, who has become a popular figure online with his high-energy videos commenting on the Blues summed it up when Friedkin first came on the scene as he told the ECHO: “When you talk about somebody who flies older aircraft, you’re talking about a certain breed of person who understands the value of history, knows how to protect it but isn’t scared to use it. I believe he is the perfect choice at this point for Everton.”