How Liverpool and Everton almost built conjoined stadiums 15 years ago

Anfield Index

·31 de março de 2025

How Liverpool and Everton almost built conjoined stadiums 15 years ago

Liverpool, Everton and the Conjoined Stadium Dream That Never Left the Drawing Board

Shared vision that nearly changed football on Merseyside

Football is, at heart, an exercise in romance and rivalry. Cities like Liverpool are carved by it—etched in scarlet and royal blue, divided not just by allegiances but by memory, trauma, and triumph. That two clubs could ever share a ground here was once unthinkable. Yet in the fragile summer of 2010, with both Liverpool and Everton teetering financially, a bold and improbable dream almost flickered into life.

As The Athletic reports, architect Joachim Zadow and consortium leader Andy Heron put forward an ambitious blueprint for a shared football complex—twin stadiums, conjoined at Stanley Park, where the gravitational pull of history meets the harsh truth of economic necessity. It was part fantasy, part feasibility study, and wholly reflective of its moment.

Vídeos OneFootball

“It felt like both clubs were trembling,” Zadow recalls. “They were at a funny stage of their histories… If the clubs embraced it, then we’d have probably come forward — but it never reached that stage.”

Blueprint for survival in a city at war with itself

The story of the “Siamese stadium” is less about architecture and more about desperation. Everton’s Kirkby move had collapsed after public opposition. Liverpool were locked in boardroom warfare, financially fragile and adrift from Europe’s elite. Matchday revenue was dwarfed by Manchester United’s Old Trafford.

The stadium issue—long Anfield’s elephant in the boardroom—became existential. So when Zadow and Heron proposed a dual-site model, it wasn’t just radical. It was a potential lifeline.

Photo Liverpool Echo

One stadium for each club. One central hub, ten storeys high, housing hotels, changing rooms, museums and commercial facilities. A design to unite but not merge. A clever symmetry of independence and efficiency. Liverpool’s would seat 60,000, Everton’s 50,000, complete with retractable roof and multi-purpose capability.

Photo Liverpool Echo

“It seemed logical: Everton here, Liverpool there,” said Zadow. “Fans get into the habit of going to the same place. This would have kept both clubs close to their roots.”

Reactions of rejection, ridicule and regret

Heron and Zadow, a roofing contractor and a semi-retired architect with Saudi hotel credits, pitched their concept with hope. But Liverpool, in flux after the chaos of the Hicks and Gillett era, never formally engaged. Everton, despite initial interest, dismissed the proposal as “unworkable, unaffordable and undeliverable.”

The Liverpool Echo gave the plan its tabloid tag: “Siamese Stadium.” Forums called it “ugly,” and ridicule followed. Online commenters mocked the renderings. But Heron was undeterred.

“In my mind, it was a colossal thing,” Heron said. “Not just a pipe dream.”

There were layers to its rejection. Tradition. Tribalism. Timing. One Liverpool insider admitted that, amid boardroom instability and imminent takeover talks with Fenway Sports Group, there was no appetite to engage.

“I sent [the proposal] to Tom Werner by recorded delivery. It was signed for but we never heard back,” Heron said.

What might have been, and what never will be

Now, more than a decade on, the timing makes for wistful hindsight. Liverpool stayed at Anfield, expanding the Main Stand and Anfield Road End. Everton, after years of wrangling, are preparing for life at Bramley-Moore Dock.

Zadow still believes the logic was sound. It was an idea ahead of its time—and also of its time.

“I relished being a part of something that had never been attempted before but I thought it was a winner.”

Shared stadiums are not unheard of—San Siro houses Milan and Inter; Stadio Olimpico serves Roma and Lazio. But on Merseyside, where identity and place are knotted into the fabric of every chant and badge, the thought of Liverpool and Everton inhabiting adjoining shells proved too radical to imagine.

Still, one wonders what Liverpool and Everton could have looked like had they gone down this route. Would the shared model have brought sustainable finance? Would derbies played metres apart have forged a new civic cooperation—or would they have deepened the divisions?

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not that it failed, but that it was never truly tested.

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Our club’s soul lives at Anfield, not just physically but spiritually. It’s where legends were forged, where banners wave, where songs rise from the Kop like a liturgy. Sharing—even across two technically separate grounds—feels like diluting that identity.

But on the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore the sense of missed opportunity. Financially, it might have made sense. In 2010, Liverpool were bleeding money, our owners feuding, and the Champions League a memory rather than a target. This proposal, odd as it sounded, offered some stability when we needed it most.

And perhaps there’s a deeper sadness too: the idea that, for all our tribalism, we couldn’t even entertain the concept of cooperation. Not even temporarily. Not even pragmatically.

It would have been bold. It would have been historic. But maybe, just maybe, it was a step too far—for a city that lives and breathes football, but rarely breathes together.