Roughly 10 minutes into Sunday's clash between Everton and Tottenham, the visiting fans made their views clear on the atmosphere inside the Hill Dickinson Stadium.
"Is this the Emirates?" the Spurs fans chanted, referencing the staidness their north London rivals Arsenal are often accused of harbouring in their ground.
The home supporters had begun the game in fine voice, with Everton nearly taking a third-minute lead through Jack Grealish. But the noise quickly tapered off as Spurs grew into the game, and the hush bordered on silence by the time Micky van de Ven had put the visitors ahead.
A significant portion of the stadium had been empty 10 minutes before kickoff, and fans began streaming back to the concourse even before the 40-minute mark. Van de Ven's second of the evening at the stroke of half time all but sealed the game.
The hosts never looked like mounting a comeback, a fate their supporters seemed to quickly accept. Decibel levels momentarily spiked when Beto and Iliman Ndiaye went close to pulling a goal back but the second-half was largely soundtracked by a bouyant away end. The retreat to the exits had long begun by the time Pape Matar Sarr scored Spurs' third towards the end.
It was Everton's first loss in their new stadium and leaves them 14th in the table after nine games. Yet, there seemed a level of detachment from the result on part of the home fans. The actual football feels secondary in this corner of Liverpool, with the club still revelling in their new surroundings. Still only six games old, club and stadium are firmly in their honeymoon phase.
The pre-match tension and frenzy were conspicuous in their absence. In their place was a sereness, seemingly embodying the waterfront around the stadium. Supporters were spread across the docks -- some gathered around the food trucks in the fan zone, others queued up outside the plush new club store. People strolled across Everton Way, that runs the length of the South Stand, reading the granite stones engraved with names, birthdays and anniversaries of Toffees fans. Adjacent to that is the Everton Fan Wall, an artwork of iconic players mosaiced by supporter images. You couldn't walk a few metres without seeing someone click or pose for a picture.
ESPN's Steve Nicol believes Tottenham play with more pressure at home compared to playing away from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
For Toffees season ticket holder Mike Richards, who hosts The Unholy Trinity Everton Podcast, Hill Dickinson presents a new dawn for the club.
"I think that the new stadium is very much a symbol of where we are now," Richards tells ESPN.
"Stability, which is probably the key word, with the new owners in the Friedkins who came in December."
It's been a long and winding road to get here for Everton. A move away from Goodison Park was first touted at the end of the 1996-97 season, where a vote was held among the fanbase to move away from their home since 1892. Over 80% were in favour. The following 28 years have been characterised by disarray and dashed hopes. Proposed moves to Kings Dock, Kirby and Walton Hall Park all broke down for reasons ranging from issues over finances to government approval. The deal for the move to Bramley Moore Dock was agreed in early 2017 but final approval was obtained only in March 2021.
Financing the stadium, which cost an estimated £800 million ($1067m), played an indirect role in the club breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and suffering an eight-point deduction last season. It cast the spectre of relegation over the club for the second-successive season and the prospect of spending their first year in the new stadium in the Championship. In December last year, the Friedkin Group took over Everton, bringing an end to Farhad Moshiri's unpopular reign at the club. The completion of Hill Dickinson with their Premier League status intact sparked celebration as much as it did relief.
"I think it's something that we deserve as a fan base,' Richards added. "I think we've been through so much grief and so much heartache, anger and fear and everything over the last sort of three or four years. I think it was just deserved for us really. And it is just a fabulous, fabulous stadium and the fact that I don't sit there and miss Goodison park probably tells you what you need to know."
This sentiment of a fresh start is also brought up by Simon Borg, the brand activation lead of architecture design firm Populous. Roughly 18 months ago, Borg's team were commissioned by Everton to build the visual narrative and brand identity of the Hill Dickinson.
Borg understood that it would be near-impossible to replicate Goodison's 132-year history in a new building. So he used the old stadium as inspiration, rather than as a reference point.
"What we did is we started to lean on some of the stories of the docks of where it's located, the stories of football supporters working on the docks leaving at 12 O'clock or 1 O'clock on a Saturday afternoon, going to Goodison to watch Everton play," he told ESPN.
"There was sort of a sense of homecoming about this new location because it was going back to where a lot of the supporters came from back in the day when Everton became most famous."
Aside from consulting with fans and a club historian, Borg's team also dug into Liverpool's historical records, its history of ship building and trade, and the cruises that sailed to America. These stories were built into the tapestry of the stadium.
So for example, the North Stand is focused on ship preparation and curation, with the inclusion of the city's famous Tall Ships Race. Similarly, textured materials like brick have been used to toe into the stadium's maritime location. A lot of the stories on the Fan Wall are directly from fans whose grandparents used to work on the dock.
Populous crafted specific narratives for each of the spaces in the stadium, from the stands to the players tunnel.
Borg was also the brand activation head for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which was opened to supporters in 2019. So he's well placed to answer the question on what clubs should take care of when moving homes.
"A new venue has to have the capacity that you need for financial returns. It has to have the quality of playing surfaces that you need for football. But from a fan and customer experience perspective and a brand perspective, which is the area that we look after, it is understanding the intangible and trying and making them tangible when you move from one to another," he said.
"So I don't think it's one thing, I think it's a number of things, but I think location is a big deal. I think if you move so far away that you've lost that, not umbilical cord, but that thread that links you back to the sense of home. I think especially for English and British Isles football, that idea that the football stadium grew out of a village green, where they were just playing football in the village green and then slowly they built a stadium around it that was really central to the community, still holds true."
- Everton's Goodison goodbye: Revisiting past stadium send-offs
- Everton 0-3 Tottenham: Van de Ven, Spurs set-piece strength hands hosts first home loss
- Guardiola leaves door open for Grealish return to Man City
One of the examples of the intangible being made tangible are the four large Everton crests, on each side of the building. Richards calls it his favourite feature of the new ground.
"One thing that we've got wrong for so long is we didn't know how to advertise and compete with obviously our neighbors across the park as they once were," he said.
"I think we've always sort of played second fiddle in the city to them in recent times. So I think for us to be the first thing that people see when they come in on the cruise ships or things like that, is a massive thing. So those four big crests, to me, are very important. They look classy, the lights look white and I think it says it all, for me. It's putting Everton Football Club on the map and making sure everybody knows that this is our stadium."
The Hill Dickinson is unique to Everton, but there are similarities to Tottenham's stadium. The most pronounced bit is the safe-standing section in the sharply inclined South Stands that have large bars lining their respective concourses. Populous spoke to U2's sound engineers while designing the acoustics of the Spurs stadium and the architect of the Hill Dickinson, Dan Meis, paid similar attention to the stadium's noise holding capacities.
The barrage of boos and whistling that descended down on the referees after Everton had a goal chalked off by VAR on Sunday was a testament to the work done there. It was the loudest the stadium got all evening.
However, it was largely an insipid atmosphere punctuated by groans of frustration. One reason for this is that fans are still getting used to different seats in the stadium and being apart from the people they've sat next to for years. It's a point manager David Moyes alluded to in his programme notes.
The other is that Everton aren't a very good team right now. While the addition of players like Grealish and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall has improved the squad, this is still largely the same set of players that have finished 13th, 15th and 17th in each of the last three seasons.
For now at least, performances feel secondary at the Hill Dickinson.
"We very much are getting to know each other," Richards said of Everton's new home.
"It's still one of those things where the stadium's trying to understand the fans and we are trying to understand the stadium."