Rebirth of the Blues — Part I

As with anything in life, change is a constant — and, in terms of personnel, there has been no shortage of that at Everton in recent years — but seldom does a football club get the opportunity to undergo an almost complete reset. Yet that is the potential open to the Blues this year as the Friedkin era dawns and the Club prepares to move into their brand new digs on the banks of the Mersey in August.

Not only do Everton have new owners, of a kind Everton they haven’t ever experienced, and the historic departure from our cherished home of 133 years for Bramley-Moore Dock ahead of them, they also have a new (albeit very familiar) face in the dugout in the form of David Moyes back as manager after a 12-year absence.

As the summer transfer window approaches, there will be an unprecedented number of players out of contract at Everton at the end of the season and, it now appears, either a new sporting director or a new structure to oversee what could be a significant revamp of the squad.

According to well-placed reports this week, Kevin Thelwell, Everton’s Director of Football of three years, will not be staying at the Football Club beyond this summer. Amid all that change, a fundamental shift in the Blues’ footballing foundations is afoot, although it’s not entirely clear what that will look like.

In Part I of a series on the big reset Everton are currently undergoing, a look at the job that Thelwell did and what lies ahead for whoever or whatever replaces him.

While there was no official indication of The Friedkin Group’s plans vis-à-vis the director of football position, given that Kevin Thelwell’s contract was up this summer, the silence from the new owners on this issue has spoken volumes since their takeover was completed in late December.

The prevailing wisdom was that TFG were waiting to appoint a new Chief Executive Officer to permanently replace Denise Barrett-Baxendale following Colin Chong’s laudable tenure in an interim role before the future of the incumbent Director of Football was decided. That hire could soon be confirmed, amid robust speculation that Leeds United’s CEO, Angus Kinnear, has been lined up and it could be that he, in concert with executive chair, Marc Watts, and Dan Friedkin will convene to decide on what shape the direction of football takes at the Club.

In the meantime, it has emerged, however, that Thelwell won’t be part of that discussion as his terms won’t be renewed at season’s end. One assumes that that will come as disappointing news for the former Wolves and New York Red Bulls man. Having had to work within such frustratingly tight confines since coming on board as Marcel Brands’s successor a little over three years ago, Thelwell, would surely have been champing at the bit to lead Everton into a new era and the new stadium, finally having a budget worthy of the name for squad building.

Thelwell joined the Blues as they were in the early throes of what would become a three-and-a-half-year struggle against the financial straitjacket of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). James Rodriguez’s crippling wages had been jettisoned the previous September, Lucas Digne’s controversial sale to Aston Villa in January 2022 was offset by the acquisitions of Nathan Patterson and Vitalii Mykolenko, while Donny van de Beek and Dele Alli arrived within just a couple of days of Frank Lampard’s own appointment as manager for nothing.

While he hoped, no doubt, to eventually begin a rebuilding process at Everton, the PSR albatross around the club’s neck ensured that Thelwell’s job eventually came to be centred around trying to raise as much cash as possible from player sales while trying to thread an almost impossible needle of bringing in enough reinforcements to keep the Blues competitive enough to stave off relegation with next to no money.

Prior to the first charges from the Premier League, there appeared to be some latitude. In another universe, one where Manchester United’s criminal waste of £85m on Antony didn’t prompt Ajax to shut up shop to prevent the loss of another star player, Mohammed Kudus signs for Everton in the summer of 2022.

More recently, of course, under different circumstances, Wilfried Gnonto, Jaden Philogene or Yankuba Minteh become Everton players but in none of those instances was Thelwell in the driver’s seat. A pitiful budget meant that he could never tempt Leeds to part with their Italian winger with next to nothing down while the move for Minteh was entirely dependent on Dominic Calvert-Lewin agreeing a deal to move to Newcastle United.

There was a serious approach for Malian striker El Bilal Touré and a deadline-day attempt to land Ernest Nuamah last summer but as PSR sanctions and the threat of further censure bit hard, Thelwell was forced to leverage the loan market and hammer out bargain moves with clubs willing to either accept fees on the drip or, in the case of Udinese with Beto, a delayed down payment in return for what many felt was an inflated overall transfer fee.

All the while, he and Everton have had to sell their best players — Richarlison, Anthony Gordon, Amadou Onana, Moise Kean and Alex Iwobi fetched around £175m in transfer fees between June 2022 and this past summer — and been beset by injuries to those players they were either able to sign or keep around. This season, in particular, has seen two of Thelwell’s better acquisitions, Dwight McNeil and Iliman Ndiaye, sidelined with knee problems while Armando Broja, signed with one injury, was ruled out with another just when he was getting back to full fitness and starting to demonstrate what he could do in Everton blue.

Those ridiculously restrictive conditions have, of course, heightened the need for Thelwell and his head of recruitment, Dan Purdy, to be spot on with those players they were able to land. If there is a general rule of thumb in football that successful recruitment gets three of every four incoming transfers right, Thelwell’s track record has been hammered from some quarters while modestly applauded in others, more so the latter recently as the passage of time has been kinder in terms of the perception of his work.

The £20m acquisition of McNeil raised eyebrows from those who overlooked the value for money that £5m a season for an experienced 21-year-old might — and now does — represent; Beto was written off as a £21m flop as he struggled to adapt to life in England before being left to sink or swim these past few weeks as the Toffees’ only fit striker; at £17m, Jake O’Brien’s signing was questioned until he was finally given his head by Moyes; and Jesper Lindstrøm, Jack Harrison and Orel Mangala have also had their doubters while all three have played their part in ensuring that the Club has remained clear of the drop zone this season despite the downward trajectory of Sean Dyche’s managerial tenure.

There have been other successes, like James Garner, now able to continue working towards fulfilling his potential after three months out with a back injury, the free-transfer acquisition of James Tarkowski and the recapture of Idrissa Gueye but in terms of outright failures, Neal Maupay takes the biscuit from the Thelwell era while Arnaut Danjuma might have been as much a casualty of Dyche as a general Premier League dud.

In terms of recruitment alone, then, it seemed that at a time when so much else was changing at Everton, perhaps Thelwell as Director of Football wasn’t the most urgent position to be addressed. Had he been asked to keep hold of the reins and head up the plans for the upcoming window, it’s unlikely that many Evertonians would have had misgivings.

Again, though, what is not clear is the thinking at TFG, what their plans are for the role and whether the wider-encompassing presence of Moyes forced a re-think over how best to structure recruitmenr and the overall direction of sporting operations at Everton going forward. With Bill Kenwright as his deal-maker, Moyes enjoyed free reign where player selection and transfer targets were concerned during his first 11-plus years at the Club and it’s possible he sees a similar role for himself this time around.

The game has changed, however, and with clubs focusing more on more on establishing a playing style and culture right the way through the Academy to the first team, the task of directing football across the organisation is as big as it’s ever been. Indeed, from Steve Walsh (who was, effectively, a chief scout with a bigger title) to Marcel Brands (well-suited to the DoF role but never allowed by Farhad Moshiri to operate as such), it could be argued that Everton have yet to properly implement the sporting director/director of football model.

Whether they now will remains to be seen in the coming weeks. Was Kevin Thelwell simply not seen as either the right personality fit? Will TFG have pin-pointed a top-class appointment to build on what has put in place? Or will David Moyes have convinced them that he can fulfil that role for the time being, perhaps in preparation to move upstairs at the end of his current contract to take the DoF title and responsibilities beyond that?

Whichever route they decide on taking and whoever oversees that side of the Club, a significant overhaul on the playing staff could be on the cards this summer if the majority of out-of-contract personnel leave.

Thelwell, meanwhile, is unlikely to be short of suitors based on the work he has done with the Toffees over the past three years, which was steady at worst and admirable in many ways. It may be too soon to judge the quality of the job he did and neither he nor Blues fans will get to see what he could have done with the kind of war chest that his successor will have. In that sense, he may regret not getting the chance to stay on, but for Everton, there won’t be time to dwell on the past. The club is rushing headlong towards a new future, whatever that will look like.


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