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Women's Soccer Goodison Park is awake again and someone is talking about urinals. Actually, a lot of people are talking about urinals. Specifically, what Everton plan to do about the urinals in the historic stadium’s women’s dressing rooms. Which is fair enough, really. Google boasts an array of urinal removal tales. But none regarding the excavation of urinals in a stadium built a year before the zipper was invented, nor how expensive that removal will cost. (UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves was told last year that the removal of an antique urinal in Downing Street would cost £8, 000/$10, 841. Covering it with a potted plant was recommended instead. ) Advertisement New Everton Women chief executive Hannah Forshaw, who was appointed in May but officially began her role two weeks ago, is aware of this. She has spent plenty of her summer talking about piping and possibilities. And Forshaw knows it’s not really urinals people are talking about, or whether the outer facade of the Goodison Road stand is now too hot pink. It’s about what those old latrines and gently feminine colour gradients represent. Because Everton are venturing into uncharted territory, wrestling with the question of how you retrofit a foundationally sound but patently designed-for-dudes stadium into a fit-for-purpose women’s stadium with toe-room for the future, all while still preserving a beloved history. That is, in a nutshell, the essence of Everton’s new Goodison Park era. Everton commenced the epoch on Sunday with a 2-0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in the Women’s Super League (WSL). And while the result was not the poet’s cut, there is a sense of poetry to it. Forshaw is not pretending to have a comprehensive answer to the question above. In the same way Everton remain a complicated work in progress on the pitch — still learning to gel nine new signings in a squad that boasted the lowest budget in the WSL last season — the Goodison project remains a work in progress, a symbol of an exciting but ultimately unknown future. “We’ve been very intentional to not do everything, ” Forshaw told The Athletic 72 hours before Sunday’s match, a statement that became all the more evident when, during a tour of the newly branded tunnel, a worker emerged to glue down an unfinished panel. “I first saw the plans the ownership group had worked up back in June, ” Forshaw added. “They’re incredible. But we thought, actually, rather than us assume what our fans are going to want and how they’re going to use the stadium, let’s speak to them. ” Advertisement Patience is understandable. Until January, Goodison was headed for demolition under former owner Farhad Moshiri. But Everton’s new owners, The Friedkin Group (TFG), opted to pivot; the American-based owners told Everton Women head coach Brian Sorensen in January that “you simply can’t play” at the 2, 200-capacity Walton Hall Park. Five months later, Goodison Park, vacated by the men’s team following their move to Hill Dickinson, was inherited by the women’s team. If the decision to move was a bold whirlwind, the subsequent months have occurred at a milder pace. That is not to say there hasn’t been a transformation: Everton’s ownership have invested heavily in the women’s squad, breaking their club-record transfer record for England midfielder Ruby Mace while signing eight others in the process. The images of Goodison Road gods of Graeme Sharp, Dixie Dean, Alex Young and Dave Hickinson are gone, replaced by slick, pink-tinged branding boasting “A History We Own”, “A Future We Are Making”, “A New Era”. The same branding is splayed across Goodison’s Bullens Road stand and various upper tiers, as well as in the players’ tunnel. Two lounges have been renamed, one after legendary player and manager Mo Marley and the other in honour of the team’s original moniker, Leasowe Pacific, the latter the setting of a bottomless brunch hospitality option. There are plans to include the women’s team’s history in the club timeline that currently wraps around the stadium, while experimental activations are already in place, including pre-match face painters, a mobile gaming van, balloon artists, a disc jockey and cheaper refreshments. Alcohol can be consumed in the stands, while access in and out of the stadium is kept open throughout the match. Everton have budgeted £1million for redevelopments since May. Advertisement But amid the newness is also evidence of the difficult rate of change: bare patches of empty seats amid rows of blue linoleum, the Goodison Road Stand stripped to near naked concrete courtesy of the roughly 20, 000 Everton fans who took up the club’s offer of purchasing their seat at the end of last season. The number of women’s toilets and cubicles still desperately needs increasing. There is also a desire for more baby changing facilities. And it is a not-lost irony that in the specific director’s box where Forshaw speaks to The Athletic, the west wall is still dominated by a monochromatic image of Jordan Pickford as this was the Everton keeper’s box.   Forshaw and Everton are engaging with various fan groups on next steps and ideas, from maintaining certain paintings of men’s team legends to potentially expanding seat sizes so children can sit with their parents during matches. The latter speaks to how the Goodison Project transcends this blue corner of Liverpool. It was telling how Goodison Park’s first match was so eagerly anticipated by stakeholders across the game, why critics and cynics were all too eager to jump at the sight of empty seats, to share prophecies of inevitable financial ruin and dismiss affordable ticket pricing as a failed experiment as opposed to incremental steps to sustainable growth. If Goodison is a symbol of Everton Women, it is also a symbol of women’s football more broadly, a proof of concept of the game’s potential for a team that has not had the backing and investment of its peers in recent years but is now ready to compete. How alive is this thing? How financially viable? Who exactly is the audience? And do they all want the same thing? As an attendance of 6, 473 was announced over the stadium intercoms, the answers to those questions felt, if not yet answerable, more positive than negative, a shade Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. The attendance represented nearly six times Everton’s average attendance (1, 100) last season at Walton Hall Park, which was the third-lowest in the WSL behind West Ham United and relegated Crystal Palace. A first match at a new stadium will always attract bigger audiences, and Everton are not silly enough to think that 6, 000 tickets sold between £6-£12 (hospitality packages are sold for £70) will sustainably finance the use of a stadium fit for 39, 572 spectators. “We’re not going to make a financial return from a match day, ” Forshaw said plainly. Also, that’s not the point. Advertisement Forshaw considers Goodison a “major point of differentiation”, not only for audience attraction and player recruitment but for prospective investors. News regarding incoming capital into the women’s team — most likely from the U. S. — is expected by the end of the month. Yet, a school of thought has emerged declaring that women’s football needs to have its life sorted out by now, or it has somehow flunked the assignment. That is even more true with Goodison, a move which imparts a degree of legitimacy to Everton’s women’s football project but also scrutiny, greater expectations from advocates and detractors alike to get this thing right, and quickly. Forshaw and Everton are seeing the present as not incomplete but open. “We want this to be the home of women’s football in Liverpool for the next 133 years, ” she said. “So we have to make sure we’re getting it right from the get-go. The women’s game can be everything the men’s game can’t, because it’s not so financially mature, it’s not a commercially mature model with multi-millions of pounds at stake. The men’s game should be jealous of what we’re able to do. ” And perhaps that is the takeaway from Goodison Park for the rest of the game. That women’s football is still a work in progress. That the exponential growth in recent years can sometimes belie the half-century of bans and another half-century of systemic underfunding that came before. And that ambition and patience do not have to be mutually exclusive. (Top photo: Everton Women) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Megan Feringa is The Athletic's UK-based women's football writer. Prior to joining The Athletic in 2024, Megan worked for The Daily Mirror

with a focus on women’s football, the Premier League and general sport. She is a graduate of Auburn University and Cardiff University. Follow her on X: @megan_feringa Follow Megan on Twitter @megan_feringa