For Andrei Kanchelskis Jr, it was always Everton. As a child he watched his father play for Manchester United, Rangers and Fiorentina too, but it was Goodison where he felt most at home. He watched the team play in the early years of the David Moyes era and something clicked – not the results, but the feel of the place. It got under his skin.
He spoke to Evertonians and heard tales of how fondly they remembered his Dad and an enduring love was established. But it is being tested: “The internal mess, it seems, has set in too deep.”
Farhad Moshiri arrived at Everton in 2016 with a fortune and a dream and neither was a secret. Chairman Bill Kenwright spoke of an immediate “Champions League vision”. Robert Martinez, Everton’s manager at the time, conceded that his job had got harder because expectations had suddenly shifted. On Sunday, as Everton slipped to a fifth defeat in six, played with a front two of Alex Iwobi and Salomon Rondon and were derided by their own supporters after the whistle, part of that dream must have died. If there’s still any left.
The numbers of doom: 15 points off the top four in 2016-17 in Moshiri’s first full season, then 26, 27, 27 and, last season, eight. Success – only eight points! Everton had moved heaven and earth and risked financial sense to get slightly closer to something that still sat uncomfortably out of reach. They didn’t even fly close to the sun before the wax started to melt. From aiming for a trophy, Everton have been plunged back into atrophy.
At the root of Everton’s breaking vision sits a basic, broken sum: there are, at a rough tally, 12 Premier League clubs (each of the so-called “Big Six”, Aston Villa, West Ham, Newcastle, Everton, Leicester City, Wolves) whose owners have either publicly stated or privately harbour Champions League ambitions. It isn’t enough to have money and it isn’t enough to have ambition, not when you have become a waiter for the clubs that sit at the top table rather than a diner at it.
Everton surely had a defined transfer policy once; do they have one now? They acted a bit like a hungry shopper in a higher-end supermarket who gets the bags home and realises that they can’t actually make one coherent meal out of their purchases. Between June 2017 and August 2019, Everton spent around £380m on transfer fees alone. Not all of them failed (Richarlison, Lucas Digne and Jordan Pickford are honourable exceptions), but the general pattern was a little miserable. They have any advantages that Moshiri’s wealth provided.
“Everton are like a vintage sports car,” season ticket holder Matthew Stuart tells i. “A beautiful thing to have, but it needs maintenance and expensive new parts. When something goes wrong and we spend money to fix it, something else goes wrong elsewhere that needs money spent too. We’ve overspent on average players. The players that have worked for us are almost indispensable, but if they are injured then our bench choices are significantly worse.”
Transfer market wastage can quickly become self-fulfilling. The investment puts greater pressure on the manager to improve performance without making their job easier. When the club then makes a change in search of improvement, the new manager brings with him a list of transfer targets that the club, desperate for this to be the one that works out, cedes to. If that cycle is only ever warded off by a sensible structure above the manager, that has been liable to overhaul too. Steve Walsh was Moshiri’s first director of football; he left for Marcel Brands to come in. Both have been the subject of supporter ire given the lurching, reactive, scattergun transfer policy.
During Moshiri’s tenure, he has employed Martinez, Ronald Koeman, Sam Allardyce, Marco Silva, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafael Benitez. Rather than one ethos pervading through the squad, it becomes a tatty patchwork quilt. Everton’s substitutes on Sunday were signed by four different managers. Of the 80 longest-serving first-team players in the Premier League, Seamus Coleman is Everton’s only representative. And for what? Everton have taken between 47 and 61 points in each of their last seven seasons. At best they are treading water.
And this season, they are sinking a little below the surface. The limitations of Financial Fair Play rules disallows wanton spending to continue unchecked. Everton have lost a combined £251.7m over the last two fully accounted financial years. This summer, they spent just £2m on new players. Benitez is the latest manager to learn that life at Goodison can drag you down.
Benitez always felt an awkward fit once you viewed his appointment in wider focus. He has his history at Liverpool but he is also a manager whose football is often proudly functional. If that made sense this season at Everton given the limited resources, Benitez has been hampered by injuries to key players (Yerry Mina, Abdoulaye Doucoure, Dominic Calvert-Lewin) but has been unable to make Everton defensively sound. And if Everton aren’t going to go down and aren’t going to finish in the top six, many supporters reason that they might as well try to have a little fun. To them, this feels like the worst of both worlds.
But there is something deeper here than simply an underperforming team waiting for FFP concerns to subside so that they can spend again. Everton really is a grand old club. There is something about Goodison – the wooden seats, the proximity of fans to the pitch, the door at the side of the press room that conjoins you with a mass of supporters on your way to your seat, the friendliness of every single member of staff – that presents an anachronistic view of how football used to be. It got under Kanchelskis’ skin and it gets under yours, even on fleeting visits.
That connection used to be reinforced by the progress of academy graduates into the first team, a seam that extended from Tony Hibbert to Wayne Rooney to Leon Osman to Jack Rodwell to Ross Barkley. Now that connection risks being lost. It’s one thing for your team to play badly, but another entirely to watch highly-paid signings underperform while the likes of Ellis Simms and Lewis Dobbin stay on the bench.
“This local narrative plays into what Everton is as a club,” Kanchelskis Jr tells i. “If you were to put an identity of what it means to be at Everton, rather than the definition of first-team identity, then you would say that it involved local players and staff being dotted around to show the pride of the Liverpool community.”
Moshiri cannot be blamed for wanting to take Everton upwards and away from Goodison to a new stadium that allows for greater matchday revenue; that makes economic sense. But amid the excitement over the move comes a deeper-lying, quasi-existential misgiving. Even while the team is underperforming, the managers keep changing and the money was being spent illogically, there is something inherently, intangibly Everton to rely upon. But what happens when Goodison goes? What are Everton left with then other than a desperation to be bigger and better and a hazardous, hidden path to get there?
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3roXnw2
Post a Comment