Goodison Park

Everton played at Anfield from 1884 until 1892, turning professional there, joining the Football League as founder members and winning the 1890-91 championship. Their chairman John Houlding owned most of the ground, and rent rose from £100 in 1889 to £370 a year demanded by the end, amid many other quarrels. Houlding's plan to float the club as a limited company and buy out the land was defeated by the board member George Mahon in September 1891 and again in January 1892; heckled that he could not find another site, Mahon answered, "I have one in my pocket", producing an option on Mere Green field in Walton. Everton left, and Houlding formed his own club, Liverpool, to occupy the empty stadium.

The Walton firm Kelly Brothers built two uncovered stands and a covered one for £1,640, and Dr James Baxter of the Everton committee lent £1,000 free of interest. Lord Kinnaird and Frederick Wall of the Football Association opened Goodison Park on 24 August 1892, when 12,000 people watched athletics, music and fireworks rather than football. It was England's first purpose-built football ground.

Everton beat Bolton Wanderers 4-2 in an exhibition match on 2 September 1892, and the first league game a day later ended 2-2 with Nottingham Forest. In 1894 Goodison became the first Football League ground to stage an FA Cup Final, Notts County beating Bolton before 37,000. Baxter lent a further £5,000 to redeem the mortgage early after a general meeting on 22 March 1895 heard the club could buy the ground outright, more cheaply than Anfield had cost three years earlier and with a quarter more capacity.

Archibald Leitch designed the Goodison Road Stand of 1909, which the Liverpool Echo's Ernest Edwards wrote "suggests the side of Mauretania at once", and the two-tier Bullens Road Stand of 1926, whose balcony trusses survive at only Goodison Park, Ibrox and Fratton Park of the seventeen created. A third Leitch stand made the ground two-tiered throughout in 1938.

In 1940 a bomb landed in Gwladys Street, seriously injuring residents and destroying the new stand's glass and part of its outer wall; the War Damage Commission met the £5,000 repair bill. Everton lit the ground on 9 October 1957, when 58,771 watched a match against Liverpool under four pylons 185 feet high, then the tallest in the country. English football's first undersoil heating followed in 1958; it proved more effective than expected, the drainage could not carry off the meltwater, and the pitch was relaid in 1960.

Some 53,000 are estimated to have watched Dick, Kerr's Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 on 27 December 1920; shortly afterwards the Football Association banned women's football from official pitches, a ban not lifted until 1970. In 1949 Goodison saw England's first defeat on English soil by a country outside the Home Nations, against the Republic of Ireland. Five matches of the 1966 World Cup were played there, including a semi-final - the only one staged at an English club ground - and Eusebio, who scored six of his nine tournament goals at Goodison, later called it "the best stadium in my life". In 1973 the Irish Football Association moved Northern Ireland's Home Championship matches against Wales and England to Goodison because of the civil unrest in Belfast.

The Taylor Report of 1990, written after the Hillsborough disaster, required top-flight grounds to be all-seated; Gwladys Street admitted standing spectators for the last time against Luton Town in May 1991. The Park End was demolished in 1994 and replaced by a single-tier cantilever stand, opened that September with a £1.3 million Football Trust grant.

Everton pursued a replacement ground for nearly three decades, from the arena at the King's Dock abandoned in April 2003 to a Tesco-backed scheme at Kirkby rejected by the Secretary of State in November 2009, and finally Bramley-Moore Dock. In September 2024 Historic England issued a Certificate of Immunity from Listing, guaranteeing the stadium would not be statutorily listed within five years, but after that year's takeover the new owners said it would be "preserved for community use" rather than redeveloped. On 13 May 2025 Everton, who own and operate the ground, confirmed it would house the women's team from the 2025-26 WSL season, making it the largest dedicated women's football stadium in the UK. Five days later the men's team played their last match there, beating Southampton 2-0; Everton Women lost their first, 2-0 to Tottenham, on 14 September 2025.