sport news GRAEME SOUNESS: People thought I hated Everton but it breaks my heart to see ... trends now
It's been another extremely tough week for Everton. On Monday, their financial results showed they’d doubled their losses, to £89.1million, last season. On Tuesday, they set a club record for games without a win in the Premier League.
Their supposed No 1 striker, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, scored his first goal since October, 24 games ago, in that draw at Newcastle. And there, in a nutshell, is your problem. They don’t score enough goals. Only Sheffield United have scored fewer in this season’s Premier League. Please don’t look any further than that.
Because of my history and association with Liverpool Football Club, it might be perceived by some that I don’t like Everton. But I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
I lived in that city for eight years as a player and some of my close pals were Evertonians. Of course there was banter – there always is in Liverpool – but I would always want them to do well, so long as it was not as well as Liverpool. It grieves me to see the state they are in now.
This club have given a masterclass in how not to recruit players. And why is that? Because of the scandalous way they have been run into the ground by those at the top of the club.
Everton have reported losses of over £89million - almost double the deficit of the last year
The club’s total debt now stands at £330.6m though that does not include care packages offered by prospective owners 777 Partners
This club’s crisis comes down to total – and I mean total – mismanagement by those further up the food chain. By that, of course, I mean owner Farhad Moshiri, listening to the wrong so-called ‘football advisers/agents’ telling him which footballers are worthy of playing for Everton. I cannot reinforce strongly enough the folly of taking such poor advice. It has brought years of purgatory to one of our most distinguished clubs.
The fact that Carlo Ancelotti, one of the most successful managers in the game, made very little difference at Everton during his 18 months in charge from 2019, emphasises a point about running football clubs which I will say until I’m blue in the face: that recruiting good players is paramount. And that it can be even more important than getting the manager right.
Ancelotti subsequently got a better offer from Real Madrid. (Everton or Real Madrid? Let me think about that one for a nanosecond.) The manager would have a big say in most things in my day but now he is so reliant on the people above him doing their job properly.
There’ll be a lively atmosphere there again on Saturday afternoon but how many more times can the
