Everton stadium: Inside the £750m Hill Dickinson Stadium on Liverpool’s waterfront
The shape of Everton’s next era
The scale hits you first. A 52,888-seater bowl rising on Liverpool’s River Mersey, cut into an old dock with brick, steel and glass stitched around historic walls. After 130 years at Goodison Park, Everton are building something very different at Bramley-Moore Dock: a waterfront home designed to feel loud, close and modern from day one. It carries a new name too — Hill Dickinson Stadium — after the Liverpool-founded law firm agreed the naming rights.
This is not just another ground with a few extra seats. It’s a re-wiring of how Everton stage football, earn money, and host the city on a matchday. The club calls it an evolution. Fans will judge that soon enough, with completion targeted before the 2025–26 Premier League season and a run of test events pencilled in ahead of the first competitive game.
Why here? Everton tested options at Walton Hall Park and in suburban Kirkby but kept coming back to the docks. The club wanted character and room to grow, not a box on the edge of town. In March 2017, a deal between Liverpool City Council, Everton and Peel Holdings secured the land. The site choice set the tone: keep the dock’s history visible, wrap a modern stadium around it, and open the riverfront to supporters year-round.
Early financing ideas were bold and messy. A 2018 plan had the council borrowing roughly £280 million at low rates to help fund a project then priced around £500 million. The numbers changed, the world changed, and by March 2022 that route was dropped. Everton turned to alternative sources, bringing in JP Morgan and MUFG to structure the main financing. A 2020 naming-rights deal with USM never became the final brand; in the end, Hill Dickinson took the nameplate. The overall cost has grown to around £750 million.
Construction followed a dock-first logic. Crews infilled part of the basin with sand to create a stable floor, reinforced the listed dock walls, and then lifted in huge roof trusses section by section. You can see the industrial DNA in the brickwork and steel, but it’s a football arena at heart: steep stands, tight sightlines, and a bowl shaped to trap noise. The club wanted Goodison’s roar without Goodison’s limits.
The capacity jump matters. Goodison tops out at around 39,000. The new ground adds more than 13,000 seats and a big, single-tier home end designed for atmosphere — roughly 13,000 seats stacked steeply to keep the sound rolling. The rest of the bowl blends two-tier stands with corners filled in for acoustics and TV sightlines. Rail seating is built into selected sections so areas can be licensed for safe standing if regulations allow.
What does a matchday actually look like? Picture a wide fan plaza before kick-off, space for live music and food trucks, and the river as a backdrop on one side. Inside, concourses are broader than Goodison’s tight corridors, with more natural light and faster access to toilets and kiosks. The premium areas are less about velvet ropes and more about variety: informal social spaces, family-friendly zones, and corporate lounges that can work on non-match days. That mix is critical for revenue. Everton need more than 19 home league games to make the numbers sing.
The pitch technology is the stuff you rarely see but always feel. There’s advanced undersoil heating, a hybrid grass surface, and integrated LED lighting to help the grass grow through winter. Floodlights are built into the roof ring, which clears sightlines and helps the bowl feel enclosed. Two big screens sit at opposite ends so you’re never craning for replays.
Transport is the practical test. The dock site doesn’t have a station on its doorstep, so the plan leans on local rail links, shuttle buses, park-and-ride, and segregated walking and cycling routes from the city centre. On-site parking will be limited, focusing on accessibility needs and staff. The club has worked with local authorities and emergency services on crowd flows — the same kind of playbook used by other big urban stadiums — but the proof will be post-match, when 50,000 people want to move at once.
Sustainability is baked in more than it’s shouted about. The design team has used reclaimed materials from the dock where possible, specified lower-carbon concrete mixes, and targeted efficient heating and cooling to cut long-term energy use. The riverfront location brings wind and weather challenges, so the façade and roof overhang are tuned to shelter the bowl while keeping the open, dockside feel. Expect rainwater capture for irrigation and smart building controls to tweak lighting and temperature on the fly.
Heritage was the political flashpoint. The Bramley-Moore Dock walls and hydraulic tower are listed, and Liverpool’s wider waterfront once held UNESCO World Heritage status before it was removed in 2021 amid concerns about large-scale development. Everton’s design response keeps the dock’s geometry legible, reuses historic stone where it can, and frames the old structures as part of the matchday walk. Some supporters see that as a respectful nod. Others wonder if the heritage components risk becoming design handbrakes in future years. The club insists they’re assets, not anchors.
Money always sits under a project like this. Stadiums change a club’s balance sheet. More seats, more hospitality, more non-matchday use — that points to stronger, steadier income. Everton have been frank that they need that uplift to compete. The build has created thousands of construction roles and a ripple of supply-chain work across Merseyside. The club’s projections talk about a big economic boost for the city region during construction and once the gates open. Those are forecasts, not match reports, but the scale is real.
For supporters, the emotional pull is still Goodison Park. It’s England’s first purpose-built football ground and Everton’s home since 1892. The farewell will be heavy. The club’s “Goodison Legacy” plans aim to turn the site into a mix of homes, health and community spaces through Everton in the Community and partners. That legacy pitch matters, both morally and politically. A clean exit from a beloved ground is rare. Doing it with something of value left behind would set a tone for the move.
Inside the bowl, the practical wins are obvious. Every seat is designed with better sightlines than Goodison’s obstructed views. Concessions are built for digital payments and speed. Toilets are double what fans might be used to. The staircases and vomitories (those short tunnels from concourse to seats) are wider. That reduces bottlenecks and keeps people in their seats rather than queuing at half-time.
Expect a different sound, too. With steep stands and closed corners, the acoustics should pin the noise down on the pitch. The single-tier end gives home fans a focal point, the way Dortmund or Spurs use theirs. It won’t mimic Goodison’s Bullens Road stand, but the intent is the same: give energy somewhere to gather and flow.
From a design standpoint, the project threads familiar names. The early concept came from US architect Dan Meis; technical delivery has involved UK specialists and a major contractor with big-stadium experience. As with any long build, roles shifted over time, but the throughline has stayed: keep it intense, keep it intimate, keep the dock’s story visible. That’s why the brick base looks like a modern echo of the warehouses that once lined the Mersey.
There’s a civic side to this move that’s easy to overlook. The stadium pulls footfall north along the waterfront, past the city centre’s usual cultural mile. On non-match days, the club wants the site to host events, tours, conferences and community programmes. If it works, the ground becomes a seven-day asset rather than a fortnightly blockbuster. If it doesn’t, it risks being a big, closed shell for most of the year. The operating plan looks built to avoid that trap.
Timelines are tight. The club has circled 2025 as a make-or-break year, with fit-out, testing and licensing all running on parallel tracks. Safety certificates require real test events — think reduced-capacity openings, then scaling up. The pitch will need time to settle after installation. Broadcasting infrastructure, catering kit, turnstiles, cashless systems, security — everything has to talk to everything else before the first league game.
Questions remain, as they always do with big builds. Will the transport plan hold up in bad weather? How will ticketing and pricing balance atmosphere, family access, and revenue? Can safe standing be switched on without delays if the rules allow? Are the heritage features a backdrop or a brake? These are live issues, not footnotes.
What’s clear is the change in everyday scale. For players, this means larger changing areas, better medical and recovery facilities, and a pitch engineered for consistency. For media and broadcasters, it’s studios and positions that meet current Premier League and UEFA standards. For supporters, it’s fewer pillars in your way and less shuffling sideways in a cramped concourse. That’s not romance, but it’s what modern grounds deliver when they’re done right.
Back to the river for a second. The setting is the ace up the sleeve. On a still night, the lights will bounce off the Mersey and the steel of the roof. On a stormy afternoon, the bowl is designed to cocoon fans from the worst of the weather while letting the place breathe. The club wanted a “Waterfront Cathedral of football,” and while that phrase is grand, the idea lands: big, simple forms doing the heavy lifting, with the history left visible at the edges.
The financial journey has taken turns, but the structure is now clear enough for the finish. The council-backed loan receded; private financing took over; naming rights evolved; costs rose as materials and labour did the same across the industry. The building still moved. Most stadiums of this size face that arc — a plan, a shock, a rethink, then a sprint to the line.
When the turnstiles click for the first competitive match, the comparison will be unavoidable. Goodison is tight, quirky, occasionally obstructed, and utterly alive. The new place is bigger, cleaner, more efficient, and built for modern football. The club is betting that supporters will swap romance for a new kind of intimidation — and that the rise in revenue will feed the team on the pitch.
So what is Everton actually getting for £750 million? A stadium with room to breathe, a design that nods to the docks without cosplaying them, and a platform to grow commercial income. A harder commute for some, traded for more comfort once you arrive. A home end that should be a wall of sound. And a waterfront stage set up to host more than just football, even if football remains the point.
For now, the finishing list is long and the calendar is short. Seats in, roof sealed, systems tested, certificates earned. If it all lands, the Hill Dickinson Stadium will open as a statement of intent — less about shiny surfaces, more about building a long-term spine for the club. A new soundtrack will take over on the Mersey. And the blue half of the city will find out what a 21st-century Everton stadium really feels like.
The money, the move, the legacy
Funding this build has been a relay, not a sprint. The 2018 council loan idea made waves because it was unusual; it also became unrealistic as costs rose and public scrutiny sharpened. By 2022, the financial baton had passed to major banks. Naming rights shifted along the way, landing with Hill Dickinson — a tidy circle, given the firm’s Liverpool roots and the stadium’s riverfront identity.
On the move itself, Everton will manage a complex season changeover. Inventory will flip, staff will retrain, systems will be dual-run for a spell, and Goodison will host its last fixtures amid the biggest goodbye the club has ever staged. The legacy blueprint for Goodison — housing, healthcare, and community facilities — is there to make the exit feel like a handover rather than a demolition. If delivered well, it softens the grief and raises the civic value of the move.
Beyond football, the stadium is poised to be a new anchor for the north docks. Daytime visitors for tours, evening crowds for events, weekend games for the core. That mix spreads the economic impact and takes pressure off the city centre, if the transport plan keeps up. Stadiums don’t fix a team by themselves. But they do reset what’s possible around it. That’s the promise now taking shape on the Mersey’s edge.