How Everton's new stadium is primed to launch them into the future: The cash machine for new ownership, a million-pound pub, what will be left behind at Goodison Park and the club's plans for the hallowed turf

The light illuminating the sign hanging above the door of the Winslow Hotel on Goodison Road is on the blink. Flicker, flicker, flicker. Just like Everton’s famous old home that stands 10 yards across the way, it’s almost done. Going, going, soon to be gone. There are only seven Premier League games left at Goodison Park and just one Merseyside derby. On Wednesday Liverpool’s two great clubs – the only two in England to have shared the same parliamentary constituency – will meet on Everton’s turf for the very last time.

‘It’s like playing on a stage,’ says former Liverpool defender Mark Lawrenson. ‘You can’t escape the sense of theatre at Goodison. It’s some place. ‘That new Gladiator movie? They could have filmed it at Goodison. Maybe they would have fed us to the lions.’. It is progress and a very clear need to catch up that is leading Everton away from Walton and down the hill to the water to their new home, a 53,000-capacity masterpiece at Bramley-Moore Dock. Of the six ever-present Premier League clubs, Everton are the least successful and that must change.

Goodison Park with the new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium in the distance on the river. Everton will wave goodbye to Goodison this summer after 133 years at the grand old ground. Liverpool had once planned to move into Stanley Park, which separates the city's two clubs. Goodison will not migrate from the memory easily, though. It can’t. It is one of the world’s oldest purpose-built football stadiums. Built after Everton moved from a plot of land that was to become Liverpool’s Anfield home in 1892, it predates the original Wembley by 30 years. It has staged more top flight games than any other stadium. In 1894 it hosted an FA Cup final and, in 1966, a World Cup semi-final.

Everton have long since been held back by the antiquity of their home. They first talked of moving in 1997. But they have revelled in it too. On a marvellous stadium tour recently, two Southampton fans from Chicago and a pair of Blues from New Jersey were among a dozen or so voyeurs standing in the rudimentary visiting dressing room that hardly has enough space on its austere wooden benches for 20 opposition players.

Heated by a solitary exposed pipe running across the ceiling, it has only six showers, no sound-proofing and no toilet roll. Today Liverpool – like everybody else - will be required to bring their own. It is, the club say, for hygiene reasons. When Liverpool manager Arne Slot addresses his players, they won’t all be able to see him. It’s the way the room is designed, in an L shape. Deliberate? Maybe.

‘It’s not quite on the scale of the one at Crewe Alexandra that basically only holds six of you at a time,’ laughs Lawrenson. ‘But I played in the 1980s and it felt old fashioned back then. ‘You would dive off the coach on Goodison Road, through the players’ door with all the abuse ringing in your ears and then get to the dressing room to realise it was no kind of refuge at all. You could hear the crowd on the concourse above you more than you could the fella sitting next to you.

‘But we were always convinced the Everton lads in the room next door could hear every single thing we were saying. Our attitude was always the same. Get on the pitch, get it done and get the hell out of there. It was not an experience to be relished!’. Goodison Park has a rich history of grand beauty as well as quirks. Everton have long been held back by the antiquity of their old home, but have revelled in it too.

Standing on the touchline at an empty Goodison is to appreciate its grand beauty as well as its quirks. In the directors’ box of the Main Stand is a seat marked ‘chairman’, left empty now in memory of the late Bill Kenwright. Next to it is another vacant seat, reserved on match day for manager David Moyes just in case he is invited to sit there by the referee. Across the way the ornate lattice work of architect Archibald Leitch has adorned the Bullens Road stand for 97 years and will be mimicked at the new stadium.

Only one stand – at the Park End – boasts unobstructed views of the pitch, meanwhile. One of its corners was filled in eight years ago. Some say it was so that occupants of the Gwladys Street at the other end no longer had to look at Liverpool’s home across Stanley Park through the gap. This proximity to Anfield is one of the many things that makes Goodison so marvellously special. Had Liverpool, as was planned, built their own new stadium on the park 17 years ago, the city’s two football clubs would have been separated by just a single main road.

Now Everton’s impending move to the banks of the Mersey will not only shape their own future but fundamentally change the footballing landscape of a whole city. It takes only half an hour to walk from Goodison Park to Everton’s new home but it’s only when you turn right off Westminster Road by the Phoenix Hotel – with a brown tourist sign pointing to Anfield in the opposite direction – that you realise just how Liverpool perches right on the edge of the land.