The passage of the late-evening media embargo yesterday brought the news that Nuno Espirito Santo will, barring any late snags, shortly be named the next Everton manager. With the likes of Andy Hunter, Dominic King (alongside Paul Joyce, two of the club's trusted journalistic mediums) and Fabrizio Romano tweeting that the final negotiations with the 47-year-old are set for this weekend, it bears all the hallmarks of an effectively done deal.
To put it charitably, the reaction from fans online, at least, has been decidedly mixed; more bluntly, there's been a massive sense of underwhelm at the prospect of Nuno succeeding Carlo Ancelotti as the flag-bearer of Evertonian hopes and dreams. What many felt was an opportunity for a significant reset, to inject something more energetic and different into the club, looks likely to end with the fairly familiar scenario of a coach with, at best, modest achievements to date, becoming the Blues' new boss.
On every outlet the fans have to voice their opinions, there has been tangible frustration over the past week or so at what was ultimately a failed season under Ancelotti, followed by a betrayal by the Italian whom many accuse of making a quick exit once the scale of the Everton job was fully revealed to him. More than that, though, there's been an agonised yearning for a renaissance of Everton's identity — the one briefly revived by Duncan Ferguson in December 2019 before being suffocated again by a year of lifeless, empty stadiums and a brand of football to match.
At first glance, it's hard to envisage Espirito Santo, the largely reserved Portuguese who oversaw at Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2020-21 a season of worse results and even more turgid fare than Ancelotti served up at Everton, being the man to bring back the spirit of 1980s Blues or that of 2013-14 Everton under Roberto Martinez. After all, by most metrics, Wolves were one of the most passive, least threatening, and least entertaining sides in the Premier League last season — they made both the lowest amount of sprints, had the lowest sprint distance in the division, ranked towards the bottom for opposition presses, and have exhibited a disconcerting aversion to scoring goals in the first half of matches, failing to score before half-time in 85 of their 114 games since returning to the top flight three seasons ago — and had the rather ignominious distinction of being one of only three teams to be beaten by the Toffees home and away this past season.
Nuno's final season at Molineux and his inability to alter its dour course is hard to overlook when trying to assess his suitability to the Everton job and, in stark contrast to his would-be predecessor, his managerial record is hugely underwhelming, with just the EFL Championship next to his name from nine years as a head coach in his own right. “Hollywood manager” he ain't and in a Premier League boasting Pep Guardiola, Jà¼rgen Klopp and now Champions League-winner, Thomas Tuchel, it's an appointment that doesn't get the pulse racing in the way that many Blues hoped.
In that sense, Farhad Moshiri and Marcel Brands have been the victims of the timing of Ancelotti's departure. The list of candidates either immediately available, eminently “get-able”, or attractive enough to hire, was very small, with Christophe Galtier, the man who just led Lille to a remarkable Ligue 1 title, arguably the pick of them. And even though much of the motion of the football world will pause for Euro 2020 and the Copa America, pre-season is less than four weeks away; with transfers to plot and negotiate and plans to be made, there's never an opportunity to let the grass grow under one's feet.
It's hard not to feel like Everton are settling for a manager who, were it not for insurmountable disagreements over the size of Nuno's backroom staff, might already be at Crystal Palace but dig a little deeper and there is enough to suggest that he could yet succeed at Goodison. If he does, it wouldn't be the first time he has taken on and met supporter expectations by determinedly applying his methods and ethos to a club.
As Tim Spiers recently wrote at The Athletic, when Espirito Santo was hired by Wolves, there were concerns that his style of football would jar with his new club's traditions: “In Wolverhampton, they're bred on direct, fast football and wingers sending over cross after cross … Nuno wanted a slower, methodical approach with a foundation built on rigid organisation and trying to control games without the ball as much as with it. He was also acutely aware of the need to get fans onside. A Molineux that's with you can add 10 points to your season. If they're against you, players go hiding.”
A football club is not only about who is on the pitch. It needs a lot more to be able to win, and win, and win over so many years. Everybody is necessary in these big moments, and at Porto the feeling from the fans was good. The Estádio do Dragão was always full; the people were always supporting the team, and that was important for everybody.
Nuno Espirito Santo
Those are some worrying parallels with Everton in recent years and the “toxic” atmosphere that can be generated when disgruntled Evertonians don't like what they're seeing on the pitch, particularly from a manager who is as persistently slow to make changes in a game as Nuno is said to be. Of course, Nuno won the Wolves faithful over with results that started with promotion to the Premier League from the Championship at the first attempt and then successive 7th-place finishes in the top flight — both times finishing above the Toffees, of course, with accompanying qualification for the Europa League.
It's worth remembering how impressed people were by Wolves in 2018-19 and 2019-20 and how strongly he was being touted as a possible hire for Tottenham before they appointed Nuno's former manager at Porto, Jose Mourinho. (He was linked again this time but was, presumably, further down Daniel Levy's shortlist than he was on Moshiri's.) In their first season following promotion, Wolves reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup and qualified for the Europa League by finishing one place above Marco Silva's Everton, beating Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal and winning at Tottenham and Goodison along the way. The season after that, they successfully juggled a run to the last eight of the Europa League with domestic commitments to finish 7th again, missing out on repeat entry to Europe by virtue of Arsenal's FA Cup triumph.
Blending the talents in midfield of Ruben Neves and Joao Moutinho with the striking chemistry of Raul Jimenez and Diogo Jota, Wolves were lauded for their counter-attacking prowess and, though his long-time associate, Jorge Mendes, was credited hugely for assembling many of the key pieces, Nuno received plaudits for making it all work as a team.
After a fairly unremarkable career as a goalkeeper, most notably at Porto where he was mostly an understudy for seven years, Espirito Santo began his head-coaching career in 2012 at Rio Ave. In only his second season in charge, he led the minnows into the Europa League for the first time in their history as finalists in both of Portugal's domestic cups.
That led him to Valencia where, with André Gomes in his team, he steered Los murciélagos to fourth place in La Liga and was named Manager of the Month three times. That would be his only full season at La Mestalla, however, and he resigned in November 2015 after a poor start to that campaign.
A season back home at Porto ended with a 2nd-place finish, a shortfall that ended with him being sacked in May 2017 which paved the way for him to become a somewhat surprising appointment at Championship Wolves, whom he took into the Premier League as emphatic Champions at the first attempt.
While the focus of Evertonian disappointment has been on Nuno's apparently dogged reliance on the kind of five-man defence that seemed to be at the heart of Everton's attacking short-comings under Ancelotti, a look at the various examinations of his methods by online tacticians reveals a manager who can be a good deal more flexible than 2020-21-edition Wolves suggested.
Indeed, as Tifo Football explained in video from 2019, “His ability to adapt to different scenarios is what has helped him rise to every challenge wherever he's been. Instead of being married to a certain playing style or formation, Espirito Santo kept general principles throughout, adapting and improving his approach to the players that he had available.”
At Rio Ave, he employed the system that he would use to such great effect at Molineux until Jota was sold to Liverpool and Jimenez suffered a season-ending skull fracture — a counter-attacking style that benefitted their pacy wingers. At Valencia, his approach was geared more towards dominating the ball and mixing 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3 and 3-5-2 formations when needed.
At Porto, where the demand for a system that could break down low blocks employed by most of the smaller teams in the league was high, he eventually adopted a 4-4-2 formation whereas, at Wolves in the Championship, he preferred 3-4-2-1. He switched to 3-5-2 in the Premier League to provide an extra body, Leander Dendoncker in this case, in midfield, to aid Moutinho and Neves with one of Neves or Dendoncker dropping back between the wide centre-backs to evade the high press and open up passing lanes out of defence
Similar to Ancelotti's Everton, Wolves would drop back into a 5-3-2 or 5-4-1 and stay compact when they didn't have the ball, setting up a mid-block to force opponents out wide, with the trio of Jimenez, Jota and Adama Traoré tasked with pressing from the front as a unit — something that was lost once the Mexican got injured and the Portuguese forward departed. This made them much harder to beat and lay behind much of their success prior to this past season.
In yet more parallels, Nuno's system was heavily reliant on attacking, overlapping full-backs which have been favoured at Everton since the days of Martinez, to create space for inside forward runs and successive switching of the ball from flank to flank, but also on the talents of Neves and Moutinho, the likes of which Everton don't currently have in the middle of the park.
According to an analysis of Wolves under Espirito Santo by themastermindsite.com, in which the Portuguese's system is described as “one of the most tactically interesting 3-4-3/3-5-2 formations in the world of football”, Moutinho and Neves are “positionally aware”, have “incredible distribution”, and are such “key distributors and creators in possession [that] they are frequently used as a key mechanism for switching play”, mostly out wide.
“You would never catch Neves and Moutinho too far apart. They always seem to be practically within touching distance of one another, which obviously has benefits from a defensive perspective that go without saying.”
While Nuno might find plenty he likes in Everton's defence, and in Dominic Calvert-Lewin he would have a centre-forward of a similar-enough profile as Jimenez to base his crossing game on, finding those kinds of central midfield players — Neves himself has actually been linked with a move to Everton in light of speculation linking Nuno with Goodison Park — will place special emphasis on this summer's transfer window. Without an injection of quality and pace into the current Everton squad, the prospect of the Blues grinding their way through the 2021-22 season with more boring, unimaginative football feels all too real.
To underscore that point, Dave Azzopardi from Talking Wolves spoke to The Toffee Blues of how, in contrast to his first couple of years at Molineux, the recruitment over the last two years “has been really poor. I don't think we've improved much as a squad or as a team overall.” He also described how Espirito Santo had tried to introduce a four-man back line this season for the first time since he came to England but felt he just didn't have the personnel to make it work.
In terms of style, Azzopardi likened Nuno to his old boss Mourinho in terms of his coaching style — defending leads, parking the bus, etc — but admitted that it wouldn't surprise him, if he got the Everton job, to see Espirito Santo completely switch his mindset and go with this attacking, possession-based game that he just didn't quite have the players for at Wolves.
At the end of the day, with Everton having tried an FA Cup winner from a smaller club, a man courted by Arsenal and who ended up at Barcelona, a “young, hungry” up-and-comer, and one of the most decorated managers in the European game — all without success — the whole manager lark feels like one big throw of the dice at times. Or, as this column opined in May 2018, perhaps you're waiting for “the unpredictable interplay of personality and fortune, chemistry and energy” for things to just click.
A deeper dive into Nuno the man reveals a manager perhaps more authoritarian, occasionally prickly, and fiercely driven than that avuncular countenance and warm smile would suggest. After 18 months of Ancelotti's laid-back, laissez-faire style of management, those qualities that the Portuguese is said to possess, which reputedly include plenty of the Italian's man-management acumen, could be just what is needed at Finch Farm.
Speaking to The Athletic, former Wolves midfielder David Edwards said: “Nuno makes the players think they're all that matters, regardless of any noise from outside. He has that perfect blend between respect and fear. You don't want to get on the wrong side of him but you want to play for him, too. He united everyone.”
Spiers added “Previous boss [Paul] Lambert had said there was no winning mentality at the club. Nuno sought to address that immediately, generating a fearless attitude among his players by providing them with short, basic, simple messages, or ‘their tasks' as he put it. ‘Do what I tell you and you'll win' was his mantra.”
In another parallel with Martinez's first season at Goodison Park, current Wolves defender Conor Coady lauds Espirito Santo for the speed with which he changed things at the West Midlands club and embedded his system in the players during just one pre-season, using a training camp in Austria to drill his new players with his methods.
This was echoed by Kevin Thelwell, also in The Athletic last year, who said: “From a coaching perspective, coaches, managers, etc, they tend to say, ‘I need more time to build a philosophy. I need more time to build my team and the way it looks'. Sometimes, that can be nine or 12 months. Nuno was able to build that in five weeks in pre-season. It was incredible.”
Nuno Espirito Santo
If he gets the Everton job, Espirito Santo will almost certainly have to do that all again but his ability to get everyone on the same page and develop a siege mentality could prove invaluable in galvanising a group of players that looked lost by the end of the 2020-21 season.
The return of fans and a more open country as the Covid-19 pandemic eases could also prove to be significant and the strain of the last year may have impacted Nuno — and, by consequence, Wolves' form — more than many realised. Spiers explains that “the pandemic had weighed heavily on his shoulders. It also robbed him of the control, organisation and detailed preparation that Wolves' success had been built on.
“He often didn't know what team he could pick a day before a game (due to an increase in injuries, yes, but also awaiting Covid-19 test results). Not the Nuno way — A toll was taken on a sensitive man who takes things to heart. You wonder if that transmitted to the players.”
Nuno Espirito Santo is neither the glamorous nor the exciting name that many Everton supporters were hoping for this summer. It's been difficult feeling almost naà¯ve for believing that, despite our serial under-achievement in the Premier League era, we deserved a man with Carlo Ancelotti's CV, and to now have to endure the media putting us back in the box of mediocrity we've been in for so long. There's also a fear that, given the way his imminent arrival has been received, he will face an uphill battle with supporters if he starts slowly.
He may ultimately prove to be a safe but uninspiring choice who might guarantee a top-half finish, some decent cup runs, and a flirtation with the European places without ever moving the club forward to any significant degree. The overriding benefit — or jeopardy! — of his tenure may end up being the recruitment possibilities opened up Mendes, the “super agent” which would, arguably, leave the Blues better positioned in terms of the squad at the end of it.
But there was enough in Wolves' first two seasons under him in the Premier League and enough has been written about him by tactics nerds and students of the game to suggest that we have yet to see what Nuno can really achieve. As ever, the hope is that, by coming to a club of Everton's stature, ambition and resources, the man can meet the moment and find long elusive success. If he is the man chosen and unveiled this week, we will back him regardless — but the key to all of it will almost certainly lie in the transfer market... and that's a whole other story.
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