The January transfer window is shut and Everton only added one player right at the death as Josh King jonied the Toffees on deadine day from Bournemouth.
But although there’s no more moves allowed apart from free agents until the summer, thoughts have already turned to who might join Everton in the summer.
One player who was massively linked to the Toffees was the Real Madrid and Spain star Isco. He has fallen out of favour at the Santiago Bernabeu and looked very likely to leave for pastures new.
It wasn’t clear what sort of deal might enable him to move on, but of course Everton didn’t make a move for him in January and he’s still a Real Madrid player.
Now reports claim that he was and will again, be available this summer for around £20 million. So should the Blues go back for him when the season finishes?
As we’ve said before Isco is undoutedly a hugely talented footballer with some qualties that the Toffees could certainly do with more of.
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Signing him would give Carlo Ancelotti another top class attacking player who can operate deep or in a more advanced posiiton behind the other forwards or out wide occasionally as well.
Despite the success of James Rodriguez, Everton do still have a creative deficit when he and Lucas Digne are absent. Thay have become very reliant on him and the Frenchman.
Although Rodriguez is one of the leading playmakers in the Premier League, he is injury-prone as we’ve seen already this season.
He has also struggled to impose himself in those matches away from home where the Blues tend to be under more pressure and don’t have as much possession.
The Colombian thrives when his team is on the front foot, he gets lots of the ball and he can then help to dictate the pace and tempo of the game.
Rodriguez also doesn’t generally put in a lot of tracking back or helping out defensively. Of course he wasn’t signed to do that, but occasionally it’s all hands to the pump to secure a win as we saw on Wednesday night.
Sometimes this means he is perhaps not best-suited to playing in those kinds of matches where the Toffees are likely to concede a lot of possession.
To succeed in modern football you need a strong squad of twenty plus real quality players and so Isco might be a more suitable type of player for those games, while still offering real creativity.
So perhaps adding Isco would further strengthen the quality and depth of the Toffees creative options and give Ancelotti another genuinly outstanding alternative to add to his essentially defensive central midfield corps.