Everton's Growing Pains
Everton have a history of immense depth, but it has not always had deep pockets. Now that it has come into money, the concept of what success means in this new era is a quickly-shifting one. Sanaa Qureshi reflects upon the often confusing but always hopeful journey of loving her club.
Hope is a funny thing. It’s the only currency sporting fandoms really deal in. Sometimes it’s buoyed by history, or circumstance, or sometimes wealth; but ultimately each new game, each new season, is an exercise in anticipation. So when you no longer know what you’re looking at in the team you’ve loved all your life, it’s not that hope dissipates, it just becomes driven by habit instead of intention. My experience of Everton fandom - lots of away days and two trips to Goodison Park at the bookends of a decade - is not exhaustive, nor is it extensive. The tradition is not familial or geographical, it is something that has been built by accumulation. And so, my hopes for Everton are mediated by the period of time I’ve lived through beside this club - that they might finally beat Liverpool to win a Merseyside derby, that they might have a fun cup run or that, simply, they are no longer overwhelmed by the enlarged potential of money and honestly reconcile that they are a new-money club trying to work out if their old values still have a place in their future.
This season, Carlo Ancelotti joined an Everton team who were fifteenth in the Premier League, briefly skirting around the relegation zone, and took them to twelfth - their lowest league finish since 2004. Any improvements during the seven months of his tenure have been small and imperfectly formed. Each visible advancement - be it a result or a performance - was marked by something turgid and underwhelming, with inconsistency adding to Ancelotti’s growing task. Whilst the emergence of both Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Mason Holgate as first-team regulars under the Italian indicates the potential direction of travel, it remains to be seen exactly how the club will be rebuilt. Everton’s centre remains soft, at times painfully so, and the wage bill embarrassing and unwieldy - the clearest evidence that there are years to recover from, not just one poor season.
In 2010, I visited Goodison Park for the first time to see the team I had long-loved from afar face Manchester City. The David Moyes era was rumbling on: Goodison was then a fortress and, for a brief moment, Everton were a team that could ostensibly say they had Man City’s number. Marouane Fellaini dominated the middle of the park and I did not know a single song to sing.
Until that point my fandom had been almost entirely singular. I followed Everton without the buffer of other suffering, or joyful, fans. The only other fan I knew was my cousin: both he and his fandom were more experienced and sensible. Nevertheless, I supported Everton resolutely and emotionally, first as a child, then a teenager and young woman, enabling this team whose home was a hundred miles from my own to consume my identity. Despite never participating in the collective fandom that continues to define what’s regarded as the authentic experience, I was committed. I came of age during a time when it was easy to understand who Everton were and why they could be loved in this way - being their fan didn’t just tell people about my cousin bestowing them on me early in my life, it also told them all the reasons I continued to bestow Everton on myself.
The team that took on Man City were emblematic of a team built to withstand better, more expensively assembled teams for ninety minutes. Everton were easily identifiable as organised, plucky underdogs, bolstered by (mostly) consistent home form and roaring support. The club lacked financial power at a time when wealth was beginning to pour into the teams around them, so Moyes’ approach to both player recruitment and development was a welcome salve in the face of the needless excess that has come to define the recent history of modern football. And so for a while, it was not hard to work out who they were and, emphatically, who they were not. Everton’s early dominance over a newly wealthy Man City team would be characteristic of this and so it was a particularly fitting way to start the decade.
The summer before my first trip to Goodison, I walked home from a local pub a little teary-eyed after Everton had lost an FA Cup final to Chelsea. Wearing the home kit from that year - that I had received as a gift - the royal blue attracted attention as I made my way home through Mile End. A car stopped and the passengers commiserated with me, telling me they were fond of Everton and that they were sure there would be other chances. I had no useful response, so I nodded, half-smiled, and wished I had brought a jacket. In many ways, this felt like the moment that David Moyes’ tenure at Everton peaked. Having eliminated both Liverpool and Man United only to fall at the final hurdle, they finished that season 5th in the Premier League, securing a fourth consecutive Europa League qualification, with a small but capable squad who suggested there was more to come.
“Any improvements during the first seven months of Ancelotti’s tenure have been small and imperfectly formed.”
Despite the obvious plaudits of this relatively successful period, the real high point of Moyes’ career at Everton came almost five years later, after he had departed for Manchester United, where he would also soon depart from. According to match reports that I remember better than the game itself, Everton attacked incisively, reducing Arsenal’s defence to a “squabbling mess”. They thrashed the Gunners 3-0 at the tail-end of a season where the difference between their Champions League qualification and Everton’s Europa League one was just one solitary point. The half life of David Moyes - a backline of Baines, Coleman, Distin and Stones that conceded 39 goals in Martinez’ first season (and kept 15 clean sheets) - found a manager willing to take risks with the settled foundation. When footballing success is viewed only through what is won instead of what can otherwise be gained, it’s harder to think of Everton being on the precipice of success at this point, but that’s what it felt like. Now established as one of the more consistent clubs outside of the top six - as opposed to regulars in a relegation battle- what Everton needed next was to evolve, with regards to ambition and playing style. That first season with Martinez felt like they had arrived. It also revealed the speed at which 11 years of building could be undone.
As Martinez, time and transfers eroded the defensive solidity Moyes had painstakingly constructed, the other part of Everton’s identity dissipated with the arrival of Farhad Moshiri’s money. In 2016 Martinez was sacked and Everton became the kind of club that could afford to pay out a terminated contract. Moshiri is now on his fifth manager (plus three spells by caretaker coaches) after shelling out approximately £450million to move the club around mid-table and occasionally flirt with relegation. With Leighton Baines recently announcing his retirement from football, the markers of Everton’s past are inching further away from the current club. Baines had remained loyal to the club when it seemed absurd to stick around, playing alongside the famously cheap Seamus Coleman and young talent from the U23s. But, it has become clear that this new era of abundance has brought with it a deep ambivalence about who Everton can now profess to be.
In November 2019, Everton faced Norwich - who were bottom at the time and pointless on the road - in what was my second trip to Goodison. What I saw that day was abject: there was nothing to cheer for, and not so much the failure of a system, as an absence of one. At full time, home fans joined in with the away fans singing optimistically that Marco Silva would be getting sacked the following morning. Sheepish and angry, I added my voice to the chorus, despite knowing Silva’s departure would not fix the malaise that had settled in since Everton had entered this new cash-rich era.
As noble as it might be to occupy a space relatively antithetical to the excesses of capitalism, it was never going to be sustainable for Everton. Whilst other Premier League clubs became wealthier, their own carefully nurtured and scouted squad came under threat by the money they didn’t have. Everton began clamouring for investment, acutely aware that it would be the quickest way to stay afloat, but perhaps less cognisant (intentionally) of the fact that their problems would end up being more expensive and less forgivable. As one of the oldest and most successful English football clubs, long-term financial backing should have enabled Everton to return to this destiny, or at least elevate them from the position David Moyes had left them in. Instead, it either caused or coincided with one of the strangest periods of Everton’s recent history. They moved through a small circus of managers who loudly reminded fans of the heights Everton could reach but often without clarity on how they should, or even what kind of team they need to become, with the painful exception of Sam Allardyce. His appointment signalled both Everton’s lowest nadir and the most honest appointment the club had made. Financial investment inevitably expands the size of whatever you believe you’re building - anything is possible if there is enough money to throw directly at it, but the simple and achievable objective of not getting relegated is, so far, the only possibility Everton have assuredly reckoned with.
When Duncan Ferguson took temporary charge for four games earlier in the 2019/20 season, it became clear how deep and uncertain the mire had become. All Ferguson had to do was care - openly, loudly, at times embarrassingly, yet it felt like Everton had finally stumbled upon direction, an identity. Jokes were made about passion, which were enormously corny and wrongheaded in a sport that requires immense technical, physical and mental strength just to succeed. Football clubs might be businesses, vanity projects and vehicles for cultural and political power, but fans have persisted in caring, at times unreasonably and irrationally. And what that fandom occasionally demands is the simple facade that money pretends to care as much as fans do.
Ferguson spent 10 years at Everton as a player, and has been part of the coaching set-up since the days of Moyes, progressing from youth to first team in 2014. When he led them out against Chelsea following the sacking of Silva, an identity shifted into focus, if only temporarily. Ferguson was the living embodiment of the club’s past and a style of football that prioritised the active and occasional foolish demonstration of passion. Nothing during his reign was built to last - but it was easy to understand why the cradling of ball-boys and fist pumping the crowd made it feel like something had returned to Goodison for the first time in a while. If financial investment allows the playing field to be levelled, it became clear with Ferguson’s short stint, that it would require a cohesive identity as both a team and a business to exceed this.
Ferguson proudly made way for Carlo Ancelotti, a manager who has won extensively as a player and as a coach Whilst an undeniable coup, Ancelotti’s arrival has laid bare how urgently an overhaul is required. Performances before and after the pandemic-forced break have been listless, devoid of direction and devoid of self. A manager of Ancelotti’s stature, backed by Moshiri, can undoubtedly attract players of a calibre previously inaccessible. With a midfield badly in need of repair and restoration whilst the club continues to work through a lengthy transition, the coming season will be defined by who is brought in and critically, whose departures confirm the kind of player Everton will no longer persist with.
While the club have pushed forward on plans to develop a new 52,000 stadium on Liverpool’s waterfront, the club have not lost sight of the importance of investing in and supporting local communities, with Everton in the Community consistently demonstrating how the value of a football club can transcend narrow definitions of footballing success. If this is the basis on which the club wants to be understood, it is absolutely worthwhile and eminently manageable. But what would it mean for their ambitions on the pitch? All recent Everton managers (except for Allardyce) have openly expressed their often outsized desires for the club - for a trophy, for Champions League qualification, to challenge the top four consistently in an attempt to satisfy fan demands for growth. Those managers also planned as though the line between huge investment and success is straight. In Ancelotti, the potential appears more seriously than it has before - to rebuild, and to succeed in pushing Everton forward and equally, to realise how deep this crisis can become. It’s not yet clear what this era of Everton’s history will be defined by.