In 2004-05, the most profitable club in the Premier League was unfashionable Everton.
How did Merseyside’s second club outperform more illustrious rivals such as Arsenal and Manchester United, let alone Chelsea, which ran up a £140 million pre-tax loss on the way to lifting the Premier League title?
Four words: they sold Wayne Rooney, the teenage prodigy who had made Europe sit up and take notice at Euro 2004.
This simple fact reminds us of how long the careers of Rooney and David Moyes, the man picked to succeed the mighty Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, the club which bought Rooney, have been intertwined.
On 14 March 2002, Moyes joined Everton; five weeks later, Rooney joined the first-team bench as an unused substitute against Southampton.
When I went to Liverpool to meet new loan signings Joseph Yobo and Juliano Rodrigo before the start of the 2002-03 season, much of the talk was actually about the then precocious 16-year-old talent, with comparisons already being drawn with Kenny Dalglish.
And indeed, having debuted against Tottenham Hotspur, Rooney helped Everton to a creditable seventh-place finish in Moyes’s first full season in charge – a big improvement on 15th the year before.
However, the wheels came off the following year – a reminder that United is not the only club to have prospered after showing patience to a promising manager.
Rooney’s second and final season in Toffeeman blue ended with the club back in 17th place – just one spot above relegation.
Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, it can be argued that Rooney’s main legacy at Goodison was not any exploit on the pitch, but to provide Moyes with the funds to build a squad that bounced back to come fourth in 2004-05, and delivered top-eight finishes in seven of the next eight seasons.
While Moyes’s Everton squads have outperformed consistently on the field, however, financially it has been more of a struggle.
Since that high watermark of 2004-05, the club has run up cumulative pre-tax losses of more than £40 million, in spite of generating well over £50 million in profits from selling players.
While in 2004-05, the funds garnered from player disposals (£23.4 million) made it all the way through to the bottom-line, producing a pre-tax profit of £23.5 million, recent years have brought pre-tax losses – of £3.1 million, £5.4 million and £9.1 million respectively – in spite of a total of more than £40 million in profits from player sales.
Such figures suggest Everton have been running hard to stand still in the Moyes era.
Unless a deep-pocketed investor now hoves into view, it is hard not to conclude that his successor will find it exceptionally difficult to keep the sequence of top-eight finishes going, although money from the new Premier League TV deals may help by augmenting Everton’s spending power relative to non-English transfer market rivals.
What does this Everton record tell us about Moyes’s aptitude to take on the monster job he has just been handed?
Well, if he contrives to continue making every penny count to the extent that he has done on Merseyside, and if he can handle a pressure-gauge that will be ratcheted up several notches from anything he has been used to, then he should excel.
But one should not underestimate how different the two jobs are; this is not just a matter of moving up from corner-store to hypermarket, or from provincial theatre to Las Vegas.
One early task will be to win the respect of a dressing-room full of millionaire megastars.
The questions over that man Rooney’s future may provide Moyes with a chance to make his mark – and the extent to which he prospered without him at Everton might encourage him to think that he could do so again.
But, for all the ease with which they have cantered to yet another title in what has turned out to be Sir Alex’s final campaign, this has been a funny old season for United.
While some players, Michael Carrick, Rio Ferdinand, Robin van Persie, have enjoyed stand-out seasons, several others, including Rooney himself, have seemed out of sorts.
A degree of rebuilding will be necessary whether or not the famous red Number 10 shirt has a new occupant come August and, frankly, the squad which Moyes is inheriting does not look so rich it would not be enhanced by a fully motivated Rooney.
In his 11 years at Everton, Moyes and his colleagues built up an impressive record for acquiring players that met the club’s requirements on acceptable terms.
There seems little reason why this should not continue at United, with its deeper pockets.
On the selling side, though, it seems likely that the new United manager will be required more often to reach his own judgement on the correct time to offload a player rather than having his hand forced, as for example with Joleon Lescott, a defender whom Everton chairman Bill Kenwright said “David and I fought desperately hard to keep”.
This should be a positive, but may take some getting used to.
Regarding tactics, Moyes may find himself under pressure to espouse a more proactive approach now he is taking the reins at a club with much greater means and unimpeachable attacking traditions.
At Everton, he has become known for working with great diligence to find ways of countering the opposition’s strongest suits.
“The system I favour is winning,” he said during my 2002 visit.
At United, as Sir Bobby Charlton said last week, “I think David will be able to express himself”.
For me, one of the chief uncertainties regarding Moyes at Old Trafford is the extent to which he proves able to make this evolution – and what it will entail.
The other big questionmark is, of course, Europe.
I think it fair to say that, just as Everton has overperformed in the Premier League under Moyes, so it has underperformed in cup competitions, with the exception of 2009, when the team reached the FA Cup final.
This may well reflect the sheer extent of the effort required for a club whose 2011-12 turnover of £80.5 million was well below the figure United recently revealed for just its third quarter to maintain such consistency in its league performance.
Nonetheless, Moyes’ lengthy Everton tenure included relatively little European action
What is more, what action there was included a 5-1 hammering by Dinamo Bucharest and heavy reverses in Portugal at the hands of both Benfica (0-5) and Sporting Lisbon (0-3).
In 2007-08, the club did string together an impressive sequence, beating six UEFA Cup opponents, including Metalist Kharkiv, Zenit St Petersburg and AZ Alkmaar, before suffering elimination on penalties by Fiorentina.
At United, of course, strong Champions League challenges have become almost obligatory, though even Sir Alex found this a tough competition to win.
If I were a United fan, this would be my main reservation about the new man.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938