When Farhad Moshiri came to Goodison Park, it was to a club under a cloud of poor performance and a fan base unhappy with their managerial situation and unhappy with the way the club was being run. As has been the way in the last five years, when the players stop performing, the focus turned to Bill Kenwright and his failures at the helm of Everton.

This time when things were going wrong however, a new investor was announced, an investor that Kenwright and Everton had been desperately in need of for so long. At the start, his appointment was seen with cautious optimism. This wasn’t a takeover that the likes that Man City or Chelsea had seen, but it looked as those days of being financial minnows in the Premier League era were finally behind us.

In the following few months, the product on the pitch worsened to a point where Moshiri had to make a call he probably wished he didn’t have to make, and one which probably took some convincing to Bill Kenwright. The manager was sacked mercifully before the last home match of the season, which gave Everton fans hope that their new investor was prepared to be ruthless when needs be.

At this stage, it looks like Moshiri will be the man to lead us forward, especially with rumour of further investment down the line. A new investor to bring in a new manager with his new players to play in a new stadium, it looks like the sleeping giant that is Everton Football Club is finally starting to wake up.

What about the man who brought him to Goodison Park however, the still chairman Bill Kenwright? Kenwright has been vilified in the past for his failures and rightly so in many respects, I have written scathing words about Everton’s failed stadium moves, agonising wait for investment and lack of financial spending power. Whilst those failures are valid, his successes shouldn’t be discarded either. It is sometimes too easily dismissed how we could have ended up like a Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest or Leeds United. All of those are huge clubs, seemingly trapped below the glamour of the Premier League. All of those clubs have drowned under too many years of failure whilst Kenwright has kept Everton’s head above the water, just.

The King’s Dock stadium plan left a bitter taste to those who now have to look at the Echo Arena and wonder what could have been if Everton’s stadium had taken its place instead, the Kirkby stadium plan and vote was a fiasco and Walton Hall Park never really got off the ground. The future looks a lot brighter however with the drive to find a new stadium never more greater with our new financial backing.

I think the future will look at Kenwright a lot more kindly than the present. If all goes well then he may be seen as the man who stabilised the club and eventually led it to new investment and a new stadium. The years of stagnation and frustration in between those years may have been the price to pay for ensuring we found the right man to move the football club forward.

The new era of Farhad Moshiri is building pace and starting to really excite Evertonians and give belief that we are now back amongst the big hitters in the league, and a club to be feared. For so long the fans were desperate to see some ambition from the board, to have an expectation that Eveton wouldn’t settle for being one of the league’s also-rans. In Moshiri it appears the club now has that ambition, and the money to back it up.

If Everton fans were cautiously optimistic at Moshiri’s investment, then they are now cautiously ecstatic. It appears the club are back on the brink of challenging once again. A once glorious club that had lost its way and lost its ambition, has now got its swagger back and will soon be walking tall once again. A lot of discussion has been made recently in regards to how big a club Everton are, with Evertonians giving polite reminders about our great history. What is clear though is that with new investment, a top class manager, a huge transfer budget and a new stadium on the horizon, we’re about to get a whole lot bigger.