All it took was six words and an emoji from US tech billionaire Michael Dell to douse dreams of the world’s fourth-richest man buying Everton.

Over the past few days, it had emerged that Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell was looking at an Everton takeover to seize control of the club. The US tech leader has a £100bn+ empire, making him a fantasy owner for Everton fans, considering the impact he may have had.

Dell has links to football, even if these are weak connections, through the investment firm MSD Partners, which he set up. But despite the links, he was never really going to complete a buyout for the club.

Here is why.

Put simply, the primary reason Dell was never going to buy the club after The Friedkin Group put Everton up for sale is because of the core investment philosophy that his firm, BDT & MSD Partners, has. They are lenders opposed to custodians in the footballing world.

MSD – which stands for Michael S. Dell – is a major player in English football and in the past has provided loans to clubs including Burnley, Southampton, Sunderland, and Nottingham Forest, with a model built around private credit.

They provide high-interest loans to clubs in need, to fund transfer windows, infrastructure, and more. So in effect, MSD buying a club outright would be like Barclays buying houses, instead of underwriting mortgages.

Everton could be better off without Dell, despite his wealth

Putting aside how out of character this would be, if Dell did want a shot at running a club, he would end up trapped by regulatory walls preventing him from doing so smoothly.

This is due to the fact that MSD holds debt positions across multiple clubs up and down the footballing pyramid, and efforts to take over Everton would trigger conflict-of-interest reviews under Premier League and EFL rules.

Another point to make is that the days of clubs being allowed to get taken over and then spend their way to the top are over, meaning Dell’s arrival wouldn’t actually be all that special, considering the hoops the club would need to jump through with PSR.

Everton’s pathway to stability over the past few years has repeatedly been hijacked, but this season on the pitch is showing that they aren’t far off challenging at the top. Everton needs stable, professional, and invested owners who care, not US-based billionaires who react to news on X with emojis.

Dell was never going to buy Everton; his model has always been built on lucrative private credit as opposed to club stewardship, and the existing MSD involvement in English football would make any attempt a minefield of legal trouble. With this fantasy takeover put to bed, focus can return to what Everton really needs, fully committed ownership who are capable of delivering stability over the long term.