On Saturday afternoon Goodison Park witnessed a kind of full house of football fury. There was the pre-match plane circling over the stadium trailing a banner begging chairman Bill Kenwright to go. There were angry messages printed on bedsheets. There was a once-beloved former player, who left the club only one week ago, who was greeted with a confused mixture of applause and abuse before setting up the winner for the opposing team. There was the hail of missiles that rained down on the celebrating opponents. There was the grim-faced club legend, thrust into an interim management role, powerless to prevent the indignity piling up around him. There were the howls that greeted the final whistle: "Sack the board, sack the board", "Bill Kenwright, get out of our club", "Kenwright & Co, it's time to go..."
Afterwards outside the ground, there was a confrontation between angry fans and Kenwright, the 76-year-old chairman whose stagey, twinkly-eyed bonhomie has become of the most infuriating elements of Everton’s ongoing struggle. “Do you know how difficult it is?” Kenwright asked the fans, but for some reason sympathy did not gush forth. “We’ve had good times!” he reminded them. “Good times!? You’ve had good times!” the fans screamed back.
The worst thing that ever happened to Everton was to be taken over in 2016 by a rich investor with the promise that they could spend their way back to the top
How did Kenwright end up presiding over this empire of rage? The long-term problem at Everton is that no English club has to deal with a wider gap between expectation and reality. Everton fans know that with nine league titles they are still England's fourth-most-successful club, still ahead of the nouveau riche petro-superpowers, Manchester City and Chelsea. But many others in the game seem crassly unaware of this exceptional history, and sadly for Everton one of the people least heedful of it also happens to own the club.
The worst thing that ever happened to Everton was to be taken over in 2016 by a rich investor with the promise that they could spend their way back to the top. Majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri has certainly stumped up plenty of money. He has injected an estimated £450 million since 2016, meaning Everton have benefited from more owner financing than any other English club in that period, considerably ahead of Saturday's upwardly mobile opponents, Aston Villa. Just last week, in an apparent attempt to defuse the steadily increasing anger among supporters, Moshiri confirmed he had converted another £100 million of debt to equity to improve the club's balance sheet.
More than half a billion pounds has been spent on new signings, but surveying their transfer business it is astonishing to see how little impact this spending has had. How have they failed to make it stick? One reason is that even with Moshiri's largesse, Everton did not yet have the standing to compete for the best players with the established powers. In their eagerness to make up ground they ended up overpaying for second-raters. Davy Klaasen, Alex Iwobi, Moise Keane, Jean-Phillippe Gbamin, Theo Walcott and Cenk Tosun all arrived for fees of around £20 million, and all failed hopelessly. Everton's best signing under the Moshiri regime is probably Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who cost less than £2 million from Sheffield United. He was just the sort of signing they could have made before Moshiri came.
The failure to attract genuinely top-tier talent was compounded by the inability to settle on a long-term direction in terms of club philosophy and playing style. Everton keep lurching in different directions. Moshiri’s basic approach is to throw money at established names, but he never seems to have settled on an overarching vision of what kind of club he wants Everton to be.
Moshiri's hires seem guided by the crudest heuristics: do they have name recognition? Have they done okay in their most recent job? Do they seem plausible?
Steve Walsh was poached from Leicester to become the new director of football in 2016, after he was widely hailed as a genius for signing N'Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez. Legend has it that Walsh wanted to sign Andy Robertson, Harry Maguire and Erling Haaland for a combined £25 million, but instead he somehow ended up spending nearly 10 times that amount on the likes of Yannick Bolasie, Morgan Schneiderlin, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Michael Keane, and so on.
After two years Walsh made way for the Dutchman Marcel Brands, whose strategy of signing big-club cast-offs like Yerry Mina, Andre Gomes, Digne, Allan and James Rodriguez soon left Everton with a bunch of ... big-club cast-offs, all of whom were wrestling - with varying degrees of success - to overcome the personal disappointment of feeling they had come down in the world.
That feeling also seemed to afflict some of the managers Moshiri appointed, some of whom seemed to think themselves too good for the job. Ronald Koeman and Sam Allardyce have feuded with Everton since leaving, Carlo Ancelotti jumped ship at the first opportunity. Again, Moshiri's hires seem guided by the crudest heuristics: do they have name recognition? Have they done okay in their most recent job? Do they seem plausible? Questions such as whether the coach understands and can connect with Everton's culture and self-image are apparently never considered. Only that blindness can explain the crazy decision to hire Rafael Benitez, whose reign was always and obviously foredoomed. Everton is difficult enough to succeed at for any coach, let alone one who spent six years at Liverpool and disparagingly referred to Everton as a "small club".
Benitez proved unbeatable in internal warfare, winning political battles against the director of football, the head of recruitment, the director of medical services and the head of scouting in addition to the popular left-back Lucas Digne, all of whom he saw off the premises. Unfortunately, he proved unable to translate that prowess to the pitch.
The shortlist for his replacement supposedly includes Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, and Fabio Cannavaro - a typically random Moshiri pick-n-mix. Whoever does get appointed will most likely get chewed up by the Everton chaos which is beyond the power of a coach to tame. But surely the best of these options is Rooney. If Moshiri is finally prepared to admit that he couldn't identify a top coach if one came up to him and poked him in the eye, he could at least try hiring somebody who understands what Everton is.
