Everton in the Premier League
2013-2019: A Series of False Dawns
If it felt by 2013 that David Moyes had taken Everton as far as he could over an 11-year spell as manager, his successor, Roberto Martinez, initally appeared to confirm that notion. The Catalan would come agonisingly close to leading the Toffees into the Champions League and twice fell short of a Wembley cup final before his tenure collapsed.
With Chairman Bill Kenwright finally landing his promised billionaire in the form of Farhad Moshiri in 2016, Everton suddenly found themselves with the financial muscle to compete with the elite in the transfer market but while the Anglo-Iranian businessman talked of grand ambition and spent big, he struggled to find the right formula to take Everton forward on the pitch.
Martinez Burns Bright Then Flames Out
After more than a decade of stability and familiarity under David Moyes, Everton were forced by the Scot's departure in May 2013 to hire a successor charged with taking the club forward and, potentially, in a new direction. While the team had often punched above its weight under Moyes, he had ultimately found the glass ceiling that divided the Blues from the top four and Champions League qualification impossible to break for a second time. It was hoped that the next appointment would be able to take that next step and it was to a candidate deemed more dynamic that Chairman Bill Kenright turned.
Although Porto manager Vitor Pereira and former Schalke 04 boss Ralf Rangnick were interviewed for the managerial vacancy at Goodison Park, it was the enthusiasm, preparedness, vision amd smooth talking of Roberto Martinez – not to mention the fact that his Wigan Athletic side had destroyed Moyes's outfit in the FA Cup quarter final just two months earlier on their way to an unlikely FA Cup triumph over Manchester City in the final – that ultimately won Kenwright over.
An ex-Swansea City, Motherwell and Wigan player, Martinez had overseen a year-on-year deterioration in Wigan's fortunes and had just taken them down to the Championship after four seasons in the Premier League, all of which lay at the root of supporter unease over his appointment as Everton boss. Defined in many minds by perceptions of his managerial style – too idealistic, too nice, too defensively naïve, too prepared to chase cups at the cost of survival – his arrival did not meet universal approval but there was, on the whole, a willingless to give him recent Cup winner a chance.
Martinez's first season in the Goodison hotseat, however, seemed to not only blow all those preconceptions away but it had Evertonians celebrating the "reopening" of the School of Science, the notion of which they felt had been cloistered by Moyes's more pragmatic and staid management. Building on the defensive foundations laid by his predecessor, Martinez acquired some precocious and unpredictable flair from his home country of Spain and Barcelona in the form of winger Gerard Deulofeu on loan, bolstered the midfield by signing James McCarthy and Gareth Barry and topped it off with the capture of exciting young striker Romelu Lukaku who had been deemed surplus to Jose Mourinho's requirements at Chelsea.
The new coach's willingness to instill faith in youth like Finch Farm academy graduate Ross Barkley – the teenager had been likened to Wayne Rooney in terms of potential but Moyes had been reluctant to play him with any regularity – combined with a greater emphasis on passing football were all greeted as positive developments, even if the Martinez era got off to a slow start with three successive draws, two of them goalless affairs against middling sides that featured a great deal of possession but precious little end-product.
That began to change once Lukaku arrived and had made an electric debut away at West Ham where he headed home the winner in a 3-2 thriller, got knocked out cold in the process but recovered to finish the game. Gradually, Everton began to put together an impressive run of form that would include a 1-1 draw at Arsenal (in which Martinez's Blues, in unprecedented fashion, largely passed their more celebrated hosts off the park and pegged them back with a late and celebrated Deulofeu strike), and a first win at Manchester United for 21 years.
By April 2014, Everton had demolished Arsenal 3-0 at Goodison Park as part of a six-match winning streak and were on the brink of securing a highly-coveted place in the top four. They had Champions League qualification in their hands if they could finish the season with a better record than the Gunners but, unfortunately, they stumbled at the crucial moment. A windswept 3-2 home defeat to Crystal Palace handed the initiative in the race for fourth place back to North London and though the Toffees would put the nail in David Moyes's coffin at Manchester United with a comprehensive 2-0 win at Goodison Park, Arsenal won all five of their remaining fixtures and edged Everton into fifth place.
Nevertheless, optimism for the following season was high, particularly once Lukaku was signed on a permanent basis for £28m in July. Barry's loan from Manchester City was also made full-time, and a return to the Europa League offered another dimension to what appeared to be a new dawn for the Blue half of Merseyside. Samuel Eto'o was acquired on a free transfer, promising Bosnia-Herzegovina international Muhamed Besic was picked up for £4m, and Ghanaian winger Christian Atsu came in on loan.
Unfortunately, a pre-season programme that was severely disrupted by the World Cup in Brazil, where Martinez spent the summer as a TV pundit for ESPN, and the likes of Phil Jagielka, Barkley, Tim Howard, Lukaku and Kevin Mirallas all returned to Merseyside on staggered timescales, made for poor preparation for the new season. That was compounded by a knee ligament injury to Barkley on the eve of the campaign, one that would sideline him for eight weeks.
While the season initially seemed to get off to a decent start, the Blues gave up leads in the opening two matches, most gallingly against Arsenal in their first home game where they allowed the Gunners to come back from 2-0 down with late goals. That, combined with a 6-3 home defeat to Chelsea in the following match was an early harbinger of the troubles to come in the league where the wheels would eventually come off almost entirely at Christmas. Four defeats over the Festive programme, during which time Martinez appeared to have no answer to his team's failings, sparked a brief revival in the New Year when it emerged that the players had had heart-to-heart talks with the manager and asked to play a more direct style more suited to Lukaku's abilities.
However, the league season reached a nadir in a 2-0 defeat at Stoke City that had Evertonians seriously questioning Martinez's managerial acumen. Five wins from the remaning 10 games suggested that he might have been able to right the ship after all and there was optimism that, with the deficiencies in the Everton squad now identified – namely a creative "No.10-type" midfielder and a back-up striker – strong summer recruitment could render Martinez's second season an aberration; a bout of second-season syndrome.
Supportive of that notion had been the Blues' overall performance in Europe. Martinez's side topped their group with relative ease, beating a talented and much-fancied Wolfsburg team home and away in the process, before dispensing of Young Boys of Bern in the Round of 32 with an aggregate score of 7-2. In the next round, Everton travelled to Ukraine with a 2-1 lead from the first leg, equalised in the second leg through Lukaku but were eventually drubbed 5-2 on the night by a rampant Dynamo Kiev and dumped out of the competition.
Those two much-needed squad additions failed to materialise in the summer 2015 transfer window, however. Perhaps pinning his hopes on Barkley being able to carry the side as a No.10 or simply unable to land his targets – a promising bid for Andriy Yarmolenko collapsed late in the window after Dynamo Kiev owner Igor Surkis decided not to sell – Martinez only managed to draft in Deulofeu and Aaron Lennon on permanent deals, acquire free agent Tom Cleverley for the midfield and Argentine defender Ramiro Funes Mori at centre half.
Still, the 2015/16 campaign got off to a promising start, with the Toffees in fifth place at the end of September with just one defeat and a stirring come-from-behind victory at West Bromwich Albion pointing towards a potential tilt at the Champions League-qualification places. Unfortunately, that proved to be the high point of the league season; Everton would beat just one of the teams to finish in the top 14 in the Premier League between then and the end of the season and a run of just one victory in 10 games – with a 4-0 humiliation at Anfield the absolute low – would cost Martinez his job.
Potential redemption in the cups was also spurned, with Martinez's men throwing away a two-goal aggregate lead at the Etihad Stadium in the second leg of the Capital One League Cup semi-finals, losing 4-3 on aggregate to Manchester City, and then going down 2-1 to Manchester United at Wembley in the last four on the back of a weak first-half performance in the FA Cup.
Coming three days after that 4-0 horror show against Liverpool, the cup defeat to United was believed to have been the final straw for new majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri who had effectively taken the club over by acquiring a 49.9% stake three months previously. In de facto control, the British-Iranian billionaire immediately began making plans to find Martinez's successor, with the decision made to allow the Catalan to see out the remainder of the season before leaving with his dignity intact at the end of May.
Horrible defeats at the coronation of new champions Leicester City and then at Sunderland in the final 10 days of the campaign forced Moshiri to act earlier than perhaps intended, however. With supporter protests planned for the final match of the season against Norwich City, the Board sacked Martinez with immediate effect on 12th May.
While the Martinez era began with so much optimism and positivity and yielded a record points tally in his first season, a mostly inspiring run to the knockout phase of the Europa League in his second and two ultimately disappointing semi-final appearances in the domestic cups in his third year, history will ultimately not look too kindly on the former Swansea and Wigan manager.
He oversaw the first Everton team to go out of the League and FA Cups at the first hurdle in the same season and was responsible for the lowest total of points earned at home in the club's entire history based on three points for a win. He twice lost at Anfield 4-0 and managed to win away against the five traditional Premier League power clubs – United, City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool – just once in 14 attempts. Worst of all, though, he took a squad that was regularly finishing in the top seven, improved it by adding flair and a reliable 20-goals-a-season striker in Lukaku and still managed to finish in the bottom half of the league two seasons running.
Ultimately, his refusal to depart from a rigid view of how his teams should play, inability to fix glaring problems, manage matches from winning positions, or prevent himself from losing the faith and respect of his players proved to be Martinez's downfall and he was never able to see through his vision for Everton.
From "Hollywood Manager" to Goodison Misfit
Having assumed the helm at Everton with a degree of fanfare in February 2016, Farhad Moshiri was keen to back up his promises of a new dawn at Everton by bringing in a high-profile manager capable of realising his dreams. Jose Mourinho had recently been appointed as boss at Manchester United, Liverpool had the rambunctuous Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola was in place at Manchester City and Moshiri was on the look-out for a "Hollywood manager" of his own to replace Roberto Martinez and complete a northwest managerial quartet that would put the Toffees on the footballing map.
He turned to Ronald Koeman, the Barcelona playing legend who had learned his trade under Johann Cruyff, scored the winning goal for the Blaugrana in a European Cup Final and who was doing a sterling job at Southampton where he had built on the work done by Mauricio Pochettino and steered the unfashionable Saints to a seventh-place finish in his second season in charge. Initially reluctant to abandon his work in progress on the south coast, the Dutchman was eventually sold on a three-year project at Everton.
Working under new Director of Football, Steve Walsh, who had himself been tempted away from Leicester City where he had helped build the squad that shocked the football world the previous season by winning the Premier League title against 5,000:1 odds, Koeman hoped to have Everton in the Champions League within three years. He and Walsh were handed a sizeable war chest to try and get that project underway.
Enigmatic winger Yannick Bolasie was signed from Crystal Palace for a fee that could rise to £28m, experienced old hand Ashley Williams came in from Swansea City to cover the loss of John Stones to Manchester City in a £47.5m deal, and Idrissa Gueye was picked up for a bargain £7.1m from Aston Villa. Teenager Dominic Calvert-Lewin was also acquired for £1.5m from Sheffield United and while he was initially regarded as one of the future who would spend a year or two in the Under-23s set-up with David Unsworth, the young Yorkshireman would find himself in the first-team sooner than anyone realised.
Koeman's initial impact was just what Moshiri and long-suffering Everton fans had been hoping for. Though the Blues were held to a 1-1 draw by Tottenham Hotpsur at Goodison Park in his first match in charge, the team would win their next five games in all competitions and were second in the Premier League in mid-September. The run didn't last, however; interrupting the momentum by making wholesale changes for a League Cup tie against Norwich City that Everton lost 2-0 at home, Koeman saw his charges win just one game in 11 during a torrid autumn spell that provided the early warning signs of a tenure that would eventually end in tatters a year further down the line.
A turning point seemed to have been reached with a stirring 2-1 home win over Arsenal in mid-December and despite stumbling in the Merseyside derby the following week, the Blues would go on to record six successive victories at Goodison, including a memorable 4-0 drubbing of Guardiola's Manchester City in January in which a young Tom Davies announced himself as Everton's next great Blue hope. It was enough to put them within touching distance of fifth place heading into the final month of the campaign but it masked problems on the road that eventually bled into all their displays after that.
A sequence to close out the season that yielded just one more victory reeked of a collective giving up or satisfaction with “our lot” rather than a push to at least grab sixth place off Manchester United and avoid the Europa League qualifying rounds in pre-season that Koeman would ultimately offer up as an excuse for poor performances. Statistical red flags like the fact that no Everton player other than Romelu Lukaku scored more than five goals in 2016/17 lay under the surface while the advancing years of key players like Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka, Ashley Williams and Gareth Barry pointed to some significant rebuilding work being required if Koeman was to be successful in that self-described three-year “project”.
Still, a seventh-place finish represented progress on the 13th-placed berth that Everton occupied when Martinez was axed and with the prospect of significant investment in the team to come in the summer, there were high hopes among supporters that, with his feet now under the table and Walsh also settled into his role, Koeman would be able to oversee a genuine tilt at the top four in 2017/18.
“Significant investment” ended up being an under-statement. By the time Everton kicked off their Europa League qualifier against MFK Ruzomberok at the end of July, the club had splashed out what stood to eventually total £85m in transfer fees. In came Dutch international and Ajax captain, Davy Klaassen, for £24m; Jordan Pickford and Michael Keane arrived for an expected total of £30m apiece and Sandro Ramirez was signed for just £5.2m from Malaga in Spain. Exciting young Nigerian striker Henry Onyekuru arrived for £8m and was loaned out to Anderlecht while Wayne Rooney made his much anticipated – albeit questionably sentimental – return to Goodison from Manchester United for around £10m.
With a solid foundation of youth and a heavy dose of veteran experience, the feeling was that the Blues had the right blend with which to be serious contenders if they could just add some cover on the left side of defence, some pace and width to one of the flanks and sign a viable replacement for Lukaku who had departed for United in July for a club record £95m fee.
Crucially, while a protracted effort to prise Gylfi Sigurdsson away from Swansea for a massively inflated £45m churned on through August (how many cheaper players could have been bought to plug gaps instead with that money?), none of those positions were filled. The lack of a target man and goalscorer, the one player needed to justify the expense of the Icelandic set-piece specialist, was held up as the biggest factor behind Everton’s poor form over the ensuing season and the main reason why pundits in the general media had argued that Koeman should have stayed.
But Everton’s problems ran much, much deeper. Indeed, the striker argument, while valid, was something of a red herring where Koeman’s failed tenure was concerned. There was no doubt that having a physical focal point up front would have helped Everton in 2017/18 — after all, Calvert-Lewin had offered all of those traits at times when played in his natural role — but the team’s frustrating inability to sustain a simple passing game, the lack of genuine wing play, over-lapping full-backs, balance or flair in the side meant that they just weren’t creating enough chances.
The abundance of players capable of calling the No.10 role their own didn't help. All of Klaassen, Rooney, Sigurdsson and even promising young Croatian Nikola Vlasic could lay claim to the position but in the end none of them proved capable of holding the team together. Players chopped, changed and played out of position did little to foster any consistency and there were plenty of fans pointing out that these were issues even while Lukaku was in the side, particularly away from home where Everton won just four times in 23 attempts under Koeman.
The Toffees ground their way through the Europa League qualifiers in less-than-promising fashion, beating Ruzomberok 1-0 in both legs of the third round and edging Hajduk Split 3-1 on aggregate with the help of Sigurdsson's first goal for the club, an astounding 40-plus-yard effort in Croatia that secured a 1-1 draw on the night. However, though the Premier League campaign began promsingly with victory over Stoke City and a hugely creditable draw at Manchester City it eventually derailed in spectacular fashion.
Four straight defeats in all competitions dropped the club into the bottom three by mid-September and got the Europa League group stage campaign off to the worst possible start and though hope was sparked by back-to-back home wins against Sunderland in the League Cup and Bournemouth in the Premier League – with Oumar Niasse, the player Koeman had shunned and sent to the Under-23s upon joining the club, scoring three times in those two matches – another run of five fixtures without a win ultimately prompted Moshiri to act and sack the Dutchman with the Toffees back in the relegation zone and the fans having lost all faith in the manager's abilities.
Koeman always carried an aloof air about him during his time at Goodison Park and, unlike his predecessor, never seemed to truly grasp the soul of the club. Alan Ball opined that you’re never the same after Everton has got under your skin but the Blues didn’t ever seem to penetrate Koeman’s exterior. Having seen how little Martinez’s more passionate but softer managerial style had translated into tangible progress, though, many supporters were only too happy to see a manager with an icier, more business-like demeanour come in and make the tough decisions to which the Catalan seemed more averse.
That kind of approach was something that many felt was long overdue at Goodison but over time it appeared to have overly negative effects on morale. Rumours of discontent at Finch Farm among first-team players emerged during that rough spell between September and December during Koeman’s only full season in charge of Everton and reports of his arrogance and penchant for disappearing from the training ground at four o’clock jarred with the more attentive habits of Martinez. As long as the results were good, however, these complaints would largely have fallen on deaf ears. When they weren’t, it was easy to see a lack of faith in the manager’s methods and a concurrent collapse in confidence manifesting in the team’s on-field displays.
From Unpalatable Insurance Policy to the “Next Big Thing”
Although Farhad Moshiri had made concrete moves to try and modernise the footballing set-up at Everton by appointing Steve Walsh as the Club's first ever Director of Football, his moves following the dismissal of Ronald Koeman betrayed a lack of succession planning that would become a hallmark of his increasingly chaotic reign at Goodison Park, one that was made official when he became the majority shareholder outright in 2018. Under-21s coach David Unsworth was handed the responsibility for first-team affairs on an imterim basis while Moshiri mulled over a replacement for the departed Dutchman, a search that dragged on for a month.
The promising young Watford manager, Marco Silva, had been the first choice candidate but the Blues' hierarcht found their counterparts at Vicarage Road in stubborn mood when it came to their head coach. Silva had impressed during a six-month stint at Hull City where he had led a valiant, but ultimately fruitless, charge to avoid relegation back to the Championship and moved to Watford in May 2017. The Portuguese, who had first made his name in his home country with Estoril, had steered the unfashionable Hertfordshire club into the top six in the early weeks of the 2017/18 season and had convinced Moshiri that he might be the next Jose Mourinho.
Watford refused to entertain letting Silva go and with Unsworth having struggled to produce the results that might have persuaded him to keep him in the caretaker role for the remainder of the season, Moshiri made the highly controversial decision to appoint renowned "fire-fighter" Sam Allardyce as manager instead. For Evertonians brought up on traditions of the "School of Science" and the brilliance of the mid-1980s sides, this was a bitter pill to swallow but the Blues' billionaire new benefactor was the one calling the shots. The hope was that "Big Sam" would only be in post until the end of the season whereupon Mohsiri could put his ambitious Everton project back on the rails once Premier League safety had been assured.
Having only managed to win one match before it was clear he was going to be replaced, ironically enough against Silva's Watford, Unsworth's parting gift was a 4-0 drubbing of West Ham at Goodison Park with Allardyce smirking in the directors' box as he prepared to take over. That lifted Everton to 13th in the table; a win over Huddersfield four days later vaulted the Club up to 10th, leaving conflicted Evertonians wondering what the urgency had been in hiring someone as objectionable as disgraced former England head coach Allardyce.
The Dudleyite would end the season with the Toffees sitting in eighth spot, despite having overseen some overtly defensive fare, racked up the worst attacking metrics in the division and spent £41m (not to mention a fortune in wages) on Theo Walcott and Cenk Tosun along the way. In many ways, Allardyce had done exactly what he was renowned for — kept a team up by taking things very much back to basics — but it made Blues fans yearn for something altogether more exciting to get behind.
Moshiri's answer was two-fold: to replace the sacked Steve Walsh with highly-regarded Dutchman, Marcel Brands, as director of football and go back to Marco Silva with an offer to become Everton's new manager now that he was out of work. Seemingly destabilised by the approach from the Blues seven months previously, Watford's form under the then-40-year-old had collapsed and he was dismissed by the Pozzo family in January 2018. A free agent at the end of the season, he held talks with Moshiri and was unveiled as the new man at the Goodison helm at the end of May.
Brands arrived with the intention of trimming the bloated 38-man squad he had inherited of surplus players and wages before he and Silva could make the targeted signings they believed would improve the team for the following season while also bringing down the average age of the team.
Wayne Rooney and Ramiro Funes Mori were sold, goalkeeper Joel Robles was released, and misfit £24m acquisition Davy Klaassen was offloaded to Werder Bremen for half the fee Everton had paid for him 12 months earlier. The marquee acquisition of that summer, meanwhile, would be that of Richarlison who arrived in July on a five-year contract and in a £35m deal — a big price tag but one deemed worthwhile for a player with enormous potential. The move reunited the Brazilian with Marco Silva who had signed him from Fluminese for a little over £11m the year before.
The signing of Richarlison was followed by that of Lucas Digne and Colombian defender Yerry Mina from Barcelona, midfielder Bernard on a free transfer from Shakhtar Donetsk, and André Gomes and Kurt Zouma on loan, all of which gave the Everton side a more youthful and much more exciting feel.
Silva oversaw a largely positive start to life as the Blues' manager, losing just three of his opening 13 matches in the Premier League between the opening day and late November but a more difficult patch would see them slip from sixth place to 11th after a meeting with Tottenham Hotspur two days before Christmas in 2018 that ended in a 6-2 thrashing by the Londoners at Goodison Park. The team's response was to go to Burnley and hammer Sean Dyche's Clarets 5-1 and though a run of six defeats from the next eight league games, including an ugly 3-2 defeat to Millwall in the FA Cup, sounded the alarm bells, by the time the 2018/19 season was over, Silva appeared to have got to grips again with the job at hand. Everton finished the campaign losing just two of their final 11 matches and had beaten all three of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United along the way.
Unfortunately, it was not the launchpad it should have been for the following season. Although Andre Gomes's loan move from Barcelona was made permanent, Alex Iwobi was picked up from Arsenal and raw, young talents in the form of Jean-Philippe Gbamin and Moise Kean were added to the squad for a combined £48m, it was to be the failure to either sign Zouma from Chelsea on a permanent basis (in truth, it was always going to be a tall order given the Londoners' shortage of cover in that area of the pitch at the time) or land a suitable replacement to strengthen the back line that was cited as a big issue for Silva in his ill-fated second season in charge.
Another was the Portuguese's apparent stubborn streak as it pertained to his preferred formation and as the Blues' patchy early-season form that kept them mired in the bottom half and then gave way to three successive defeats, including a second home loss to a newly-promoted side in the form of Norwich City, the over-whelming feeling was that Silva was out of his depth. When the bottom appeared to fall out completely at Anfield in early December 2019, Moshiri felt that the time to act had come, although he would later blame the decison on fan sentiment. After losing 5-2 to Liverpool, a result that left Everton in the relegation zone, Silva was sacked just 18 months into a tenure that had harboured so much hope.
There was fear among the fans at that point and it was evident in the emotionally-charged home against Chelsea that followed, where Duncan Ferguson arguably cemented a status of Goodison legend that was, perhaps, open to debate when predicated in his playing career alone. Stepping into the role of interim manager, the Scot inspired Everton to a 3-1 home win over Chelsea and celebrated each goal as though he had scored them himself. A hard-fought draw at Old Trafford and a rather subdued goalless draw at home to Arsenal bookended a disappointing home defeat to Leicester in the last eight of the League Cup but in the later game, none other than Carlo Ancelotti was in the stands as he prepared to take the reins following a substantial coup by the Club's owner.
