Today’s meeting between Everton and Bolton Wanderers is, in the grand scheme of things, a gentle pre-season friendly — nobody’s season hinges on it, and by Monday most of it will be forgotten.
But the fixture itself has a longer history than that billing suggests, so with a quiet afternoon and a rivalry stretching back 139 years, we thought it was worth a dig through the archive purely for the fun of it.
The two clubs have played each other 153 times since October 1887, when they met three times in a single FA Cup tie inside a month — first-round replays were a different beast back then.
The record
Everton lead comfortably: 75 wins to Bolton’s 41, with 37 draws in between. The rivalry peaked through two distinct eras — heavily in the late 1880s and 1890s as founding members of the Football League, then again through a long top-flight stretch from the 1990s into the early 2010s, before Bolton’s decline through the divisions pulled the fixture apart.
Their last competitive meeting came in the FA Cup fourth round in January 2013, an away win for Everton.
The goal everyone remembers
If one moment defines this fixture for a modern Everton audience, it’s not an obvious one.
On 4 January 2012, Everton keeper Tim Howard scored directly from inside his own half at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium, the ball bouncing over his opposite number and into the net — one of the most replayed goals in the club’s Premier League history, however forgettable the eventual 2-1 defeat that followed.
There’s an even heavier one worth remembering too.
Everton’s 4-0 home defeat to Bolton in December 2005 remains one of the more chastening results of David Moyes’ first spell in charge, a reminder that this fixture wasn’t always the one-sided affair the overall record suggests.
Go back further and the numbers get stranger still. A 5-3 Everton win in March 1915 and a 5-1 Boxing Day romp at Burnden Park in 1957 both sit in the record books as reminders of how differently the game was played, and scored, a century ago.
Where the two clubs stand now
That history feels a long way from today’s meeting, which pits a Premier League side navigating an injury list against a Bolton team freshly promoted to the Championship under Steven Schumacher, an Everton academy product himself.
Nobody’s expecting fireworks this afternoon. But it’s a fixture with more behind it than most pre-season friendlies.
