Bad luck and timing may have scuppered Chermiti’s Everton dream but the next potential young star is out there

A little over two years ago, Youssef Chermiti arrived at Everton as a hot, young striking prospect from his native Portugal ready to make his name in the England. Yesterday, he left Merseyside for Glasgow hoping to kickstart his stalled career with Rangers in the Scottish Premiership having made just one Premier League start and failed to score a single competitive goal for the Toffees.

Everton’s modern history is littered with signings that could only ultimately be regarded as failures. From Rodrigo, Sandro Ramirez and Henry Onyekuru to Nikola Vlasič, Ademola Lookman and Moise Kean, the Blues have either taken punts on players out of financial necessity or taken calculated gambles on potential stars, only to see the moves not work out for various reasons.

That, as they say, is football and it’s purely a function of dealing with human beings, many of them either young, from foreign countries, or both. It certainly shouldn’t dissuade the club from taking chances on players with potentially high ceilings but it can serve to sharpen the recruitment tools at its disposal to eliminate, to the degree it can, as much risk as possible.

One look at the excellent scouting and recruitment that the likes of Brentford, Bournemouth and, in particular, Brighton & Hove Albion have had in recent years illustrates the huge upside in getting even one or two speculative signings right. For Everton, the intent might have been centred more around improving the club’s quality on the pitch, with the associated improvement in its standing as a result, rather than pure profit but the base goal is the same for any club outside the very richest: find emerging talent, nurture it and reap the rewards.

YouTube highlight reels are notoriously misleading, cherry picking as they do the best moments from a player’s career to date, but they do illustrate what that player is capable of when he’s on the top of his game. Chermiti was no different and it was easy to see how his form in one of Europe’s more fertile breeding grounds for talent, the Primeira Liga, attracted then-Everton director of football, Kevin Thelwell to him.

Skilful, mobile, powerful and with an eye for goal, he appeared to have all the raw attributes that could be honed at Finch Farm to turn him into a top player. Still only 21, he may yet turn into the player that Thelwell envisaged but he was the victim of bad luck and awful circumstances at Everton.

For a start, he joined a club struggling to be competitive in the Premier League having escaped relegation by the skin of their teeth the previous May and which would be hit by two separate points deductions during his first season in England.

It meant that Sean Dyche, already as unadventurous as any manager the Toffees have had, was swimming against the tide for most of the campaign and under pressure to play his best and most experienced players. Hardly the conditions for a development signing to flourish in new surroundings.

Then, with the former boss having guided Everton to safety despite that censure by the Premier League and seemingly in a position to try and push the club along in 2024/25 with a more settled side and brighter prospects, Chermiti suffered a serious injury that derailed his second season at the club.

The standout performer in pre-season, the young striker was reportedly on the verge of joining Watford on loan in order to gain valuable first-team minutes when he tore the tendon in one of his toes and was sidelined for months. Then just when he was looking to get back to fitness in late January, he sustained a hamstring injury that would keep him out of action for another eight weeks.

By the time he was ready to play again, Dyche was gone, replaced by David Moyes, and though he made four appearances off the bench and showed flashes of his potential in one of them, an 11-minute cameo against West Ham at Goodison Park in mid-March this year, he was still struggling to make inroads into the first team.

All the while, there were rumblings from Halewood that Moyes was unhappy with his application in training and suspicions that the new manager didn’t fancy him persisted into pre-season where he will surely have been disappointed by a lack of minutes — just 40 across the three games in the United States and a mere 10 in the curtain-raiser against AS Roma.

It was no surprise, then, that he was in the shop window this month before the transfer window closed and that he was ultimately sold, taking his place in the long line of players who promised so much but couldn’t make the grade at Everton.

Again, though, recruiting players is famously hit-and-miss; a 75% success rate is deemed acceptable in the modern game, with that figure likely lower for teenagers, which Chermiti was when he was plucked from Sporting CP for an ambitious £12m fee.

Crucially, though, like most of those young players mentioned earlier, their youth means that there is scope to get most or all of your money back and, in some cases, like Lookman, Vlasič and Kean, make a profit on your initial outlay. Where Chermiti is concerned, if appearance-related add-ons are triggered, Everton will recoup almost all of the fee they paid two years ago, with more possible thanks to a significant sell-on clause inserted into the deal with Rangers.

In the end, no harm, no foul. And, again, the experience should in no way preclude the club from taking calculated gambles on young, rough diamonds in the future. Indeed, had injury not scuppered a potential move to Arsenal or the combination of the chaos at Goodison under Farhad Moshiri and the striker’s own ambitions not led to him running down his contract, Dominic Calvert-Lewin might well have ended up being Everton’s lottery ticket. Even so, he played an important role in keeping the club in the top flight so more than repaid the £1.5m he cost nine years ago.

Youssef Chermiti didn’t end up being the jewel Thelwell envisaged for Everton but he may yet prove valuable to Rangers. Evertonians will wish him well and wait to see what the new recruitment setup at Finch Farm, two members of which start work this month, can unearth by way of the next potential young superstar waiting to be discovered.