Radio host Chris Evans admits he came close to buying Everton.

The BBC Radio 2 host, who famously used to hit the town with Gazza, told talkSPORT: "We could have got it for £13.5million. It [Everton] hardly had any debt at the time, this was 1998, '99, maybe 2000.

"We had a media group our remit was to grow the company and we had to try and give the investor's the return that we had promised them.

"One thing we did was looking at buying a newspaper and the other thing we did was look at buying Everton Football Club.

"But the success of the group that we already had overtook the business plan and then the investors said that we didn't need to risk it. So we didn't need to take the risk that we wanted to take in order to grow to a bigger company."