With Everton seemingly in crisis again and the season in a tailspin, is the past of another Premier League club going to be the future for the Blues?
The club I’m thinking of is Newcastle United and I fear that Everton are beginning to increasingly resemble the Tyneside club’s struggles, at least before their dramatic and controversial takeover this season.
Prior to that change in ownership, the Magpies had been a byword in the game for underachievement with a very unpopular owner who seemed less and less interested in the club and failed to invest in a team that bounced up and down from the Premier League to the Championship and back again.
As I’ve said before Toffees’ owner Farhad Moshiri hasn’t in the past been that sort of owner. He certainly wasn’t reluctant to spend anyway.
If anything you might argue he was perhaps too ready to splash the cash in a scattergun manner under a succession of managers who all spent freely and brought in a huge number of players over the past five years.
In fact, a few years ago the model the Blues’ seemed to be trying to follow was something like Tottenham Hotspur.
The north London club had managed to put together a competitive team on the pitch, which reached a Champions League final, and were in the process of building a brand new stadium.
Spurs have not had a smooth road recently. However, they have finally got that ground built and it’s one of the most impressive in Europe.
After perhaps mistakenly sacking Mauricio Pottechino and then having two managers who didn’t work out, they might be back on track on the pitch too.
First Jose Mourinho arrived (before inevitably that went wrong) and then Nuno Espirito Santo, heavily tipped for a while to be Everton’s next manager in the summer.
Now they have got Antonio Conte in and you would think with a coach of his calibre, they have a chance to break into the top four again and win something.
Meanwhile, Everton have gone backwards. Yes they’ve got the new stadium agreed and have started work on it, but on the pitch it’s been a hugely frustrating few years and things seem to be going on an inexerable slow, downward curve.
I always had a nagging feeling that there was a turning point in the summer of 2019 when things could have gone either way for Everton, towards where Spurs are possibly heading, or more ominously to Newcastle’s recent past.
The 2018-19 season had finished well with Everton seemingly having found a team and a balance that was working well, albeit with improvements certainly still needed.
Marco Silva’s first campaign had been difficult early on as he struggled to find his feet and get his ideas across to the squad he had largely inherited from Ronald Koeman and Sam Allardyce.
But, whether though intention, luck or desperation he seemed to have finally got it right in the final third of the season.
The Blues’ had a solid defence with Michael Keane and Kurt Zouma having established a good partnership at centre-back while Lucas Digne was arguably the best full-back in the league.
In midfield Idrissa Gueye and Andre Gomes were a highly effective and complimentary pair and in attack Richarlison, who Silva brought from his previous club Watford, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin were showing their potential. Gylfi Sigurdsson and Bernard were even playing well.
Everton finished eighth and seemed finally to be on an upward curve after several hugely frustrating seasons. Then came the summer transfer window and of course it all went wrong.
First of all Gueye left for PSG, which had been on the cards all season. Then on-loan Zouma eventually returned to Chelsea and having banked all on persuading him to stay he wasn’t replaced. Nor did the club sign a new right-back as an alternative to the ageing Seamus Coleman, something they still haven’t done!
And, then to top it off Gueye’s replacement Jean-Philippe Gbamin, who was key to Silva’s 4-2-3-1 system, got injured a few weeks into the new season and basically has hardly been seen since.
The team never rediscovered that form in the latter third of the previous season and before Christmas 2019 Silva was gone.
Probably it was just another illusion and Silva wasn’t up to it, but maybe if those mistakes and misfortunes hadn’t happened could the future have been different?
Carlo Ancelotti then came in but in truth he didn’t really change the downward momentum. Ultimately Everton finished twelfth at the end of his one and only full season last term before he decided he wasn’t as committed to the Everton project as he’d been telling us, and left.
The past two campaigns have actually eerily mirrored each other and seen the Toffees’ begin well under a brand new manager and then once injuries derail that momentum things very quickly unravel and the season is effectively over just a few months in.
Now, I’m not sure if or how the club can be turned around. Years of profligate spending have left the squad bloated with too many average players and yet one that’s incredibly still short of the quality and depth of individual in several key positions, like right-back.
Rafa Benitez has inherited this mess and now has almost no money either as it’s all been spent by his predecessors and the club are ever mindful of breaking the FFP rules.
Furthermore, there are still significant doubts about whether he is the right man or if the game has passed him by. And, as we all know he’s got little goodwill from supporters to draw upon in tough times.
There are also increasing signs that the Toffees’ owner is no longer as committed as he once was, especially since Ancelotti left.
The Italian coach was always his number one choice for the job. With him gone, perhaps Moshiri has lost his lustre for the project he has embarked on.
Like Newcastle’s past owner, he is rarely seen at the club nowadays and seems content to let it be run almost on autopilot by people who are in my view, simply not up to the job.
Of course, the similarities continue further as Benitez was charged by Mike Ashley with defying gravity on Tyneside without money for so long, until he tired of it and left at the end of the 2018-19 campaign.
Might Benitez also decide he’s had enough at Everton and walk away, particularly if the fans turn on him soon?
The strategy of the board if it can be called that, seems to be hold on for the new stadium and hope everything is all right by then.
Or possibly that’s when Moshiri would look to sell the club with it’s shiny new asset? I’d rather he sold up now if he no longer has the desire to make this team successful on the pitch but that seems unlikely.
That wait, see and hope approach won’t be enough to keep supporters happy and of course relegation this season or in the next few years would surely put the tin hat on a new ground and this whole approach.
However, I can’t see much alternative at the moment to this slow, steady, almost inevitable decline if things keep going the way they have done recently.
I know it’s very pessimistic, but it’s possible the team might only pick up three or four points between now and the end of the year, particuarly if players like Abdoulaye Doucoure and Calvert-Lewin are still out. And, given this club’s terrible injury jinx who would bet against that?
What can be done? The only obvious solution is bring in a new manager and try and give him some money to spend in January in the hope that will stabalise the ship, but Everton have done that so often recently and in the end it has just created further instability and uncertainty each time.
Of course, it can work in the short-term but without an inspired choice, a significant amount of money and a lot of luck it’s not likely to turn things around long-term. Does anyone have faith that the people in charge at Goodison Park can achieve this?
So, will the Toffees’ finally fall through that trap door as the Magpies’ did so often recently and, if so, can this club actually recover from that outcome? Alternatively, might it actually be necessary to force a fundamental change in direction?
There is though another North East football club that represents an even starker warning for Everton. That’s Newcastle’s neighbours and bitter rivals Sunderland. Their catastrophic fall from grace is an example that even long-established club’s with a big fan base and a modern, expensive stadium can fall on serious hard times.