Everton slipping into a "deep crisis" after not signing a single player in January In point of fact, the action plan consisted almost entirely of the same elements that led to the commissioning of the review in the first place: fire a manager and then hire a replacement with little or no time to recruit new players for an Everton team that was fighting for relegation.
The date can shift from January 2022 to January 2023, and the players' names can change from Rafael Benitez to Frank Lampard to Sean Dyche. However, the song will remain the same: Everton will continue to slide through more dysfunction and chaos before entering a serious crisis.
Denise Barrett-Baxendale, Everton's chief executive, claimed that the 120 points in the action plan would improve the club's approach in all areas, including recruitment. However, Everton was the only Premier League club that was unable to sign a player during the January transfer window.
It does not appear that there was a strategy to strengthen a squad that was not up to the task.
What Dyche will bring to Everton as manager The most important things Dyche must fix at "broken" Everton Given that Everton is 19th in the Premier League with just 15 points and three wins this season, the transfer window was widely regarded as one of the most important in recent history.
Despite owner Farhad Moshiri's public assurance that the team needed a striker, they did not sign any new players.
Additionally, Moshiri insisted that Everton would close the window stronger than they had started. When the only significant transfer transaction was the £45 million sale of England under-21 international Anthony Gordon to Newcastle United, with no reinvestment in the team, he has no way of proving his point.
Even before Lampard was fired as manager 23 days into the window, this makes the Everton situation even more complicated.
It was a catastrophic failure on the part of owner Moshiri, chairman Bill Kenwright, Barrett-Baxendale, and director of football Kevin Thelwell alone in the context of football.
In the final moments of the window, Everton were reduced to scattershot inquiries and rejected offers in a variety of forms, while their rivals, Bournemouth and Southampton, were paying a lot of money to strengthen.
On Tuesday evening, it became clear that Everton were having trouble signing even one player. As a result, a group of Everton fans took banners to their Finch Farm training headquarters and demanded that the board be removed. More protests are planned for the first game under new manager Dyche, which is at home against Arsenal.
Dyche is not the focus of any of this. In fact, there is some sympathy for the task he has taken on and hope that he can accomplish what, based on the evidence currently available, appears to be a miraculous feat of keeping Everton in the top four.
It is difficult to comprehend how Everton got to the point where they did not add a single new player to their team. However, this is entirely consistent with their poor decision-making and organizational structure, which has resulted in spending more than £500 million to exacerbate the situation since Moshiri took over in February 2016.
Kenwright once stated to Everton supporters that the board's approach to problem-solving was "revered" and a model for others. Now, Everton is portrayed as the ideal example of how to create problems rather than solve them.
Even in their managerial search, Everton failed to demonstrate that they had a well-defined strategy.
It did not smack of structure or aligned thinking about what was required to be reduced to two main candidates as distinct in every way as the irascible former Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa, who was favored by Moshiri and flew in from Brazil to tell his potential new bosses he was happy to take charge of the club's younger sides before assuming control in the summer, and Dyche.
Moshiri, Kenwright, and Barrett-Baxendale are also being targeted once more. Due to security advice, they, along with two other board members, former striker Graeme Sharp and finance chief Grant Ingles, did not attend Everton's last home match against Southampton. After the game, which Everton lost 2-1 to the bottom club to hasten Lampard's demise, there was a peaceful protest.
It is unknown whether they will attend Saturday's match against Arsenal, but if the new manager looked behind him in his first game in charge and saw empty seats where the club's hierarchy should be, it would be a brutal reflection of Everton's precarious situation.
Even though Thelwell was there, he is now under intense scrutiny due to the fact that no deals were made and that Everton reportedly had a long list of names they were interested in but were unable to acquire.
Everton supporters' relationship with the board has been badly damaged in recent weeks, and the mood has gotten so bad since the end of the transfer window that it's hard to see how it can be fixed.
Dyche stands amidst this. All of Everton's hopes are built on the experience he gained in a decade at Burnley, where his strong character and engaging personality were expected to motivate a failing team. At the very least, he has been warmly received.
Everton's board and director of football ended up doing football's equivalent of dry January, so Dyche will have to work with what he has inherited. However, Dyche has Everton's immediate future in his hands.
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