The summer solstice, June 21, 2023 is the longest day of the year but Everton have already given us the longest ‘48 hours’ in history as the wait goes on for the statement they told the world would be made about interim appointments and the future of the chairman.
Readers of this article will need no reminding that at 5pm on Monday June 12, Everton Football Club released details of a board room exodus with chief executive officer Denise Barrett-Baxendale, chief finance and strategy officer Grant Ingles and non-executive director Graeme Sharp all departing and it was added that further correspondence regarding interim appointments and the future of chairman Bill Kenwright “will be made” in the next 48 hours. Not only has that self-imposed deadline passed, we’re now a whole week on from it with not a peep on the record from the club.
The silence is deafening and encapsulates the power vacuum that currently appears to be enveloping the club in what is a crucial summer for its survival among English football’s elite and what should be a time for change, new ideas and leadership. Quite understandably, loyal but long-suffering Evertonians are contacting the ECHO and asking what the hell is going on.
Some inside the club don't know what the current status is in terms of an update on the chairman's positions, while others claim the matters are 'playing themselves out down in London,' far away in terms of both geography plus hearts and minds of most of those who are the lifeblood of the club, those aforementioned supporters. As majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri admitted in his apology last summer after a previous relegation near-miss: “More than any other club in England, Everton is the club of its people, its community and its fans, and always will be.”
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Yet here we are, still waiting for the Blues’ absentee landlord, the owner who hasn’t attended a game at Goodison Park for 20 months since the 5-2 capitulation against Watford – two of his seven managerial appointments in as many years further on – to thrash things out with Kenwright. If this was how long the process was going to take, why in the world was the now infamous “48 hours” timescale inserted into club’s own statement?
Perhaps Everton chiefs genuinely believed it was going to be met but even if we are to give them the benefit of the doubt for that, when it wasn’t, no explanation or apology has yet been forthcoming. Unfortunately beleaguered Blues have become all too accustomed to both waiting games and being let down by this regime.
In January, when speaking in a video interview with Jazz Bal, the club’s Fan Advisory Board chair, Moshiri proclaimed: “If we need a striker, we’ll get one.” Despite being the lowest scorers in English football at the time, Everton ended the month as the only team fighting against relegation from the Premier League to have not strengthened their squad despite director of football Kevin Thelwell understood to have been looking to bring in two attacking recruits and Anthony Gordon having been sold to Newcastle United for £45million.
Lamentably, given what seems like the glacial pace they often operate at compared to many of their rivals, Everton have become the masters of squeezing all the life and feel-good factor out of even the most positive of developments. When Sean Dyche became Blues boss there was a three-day time lapse between the deal getting done and the official announcement of his appointment – a period which included him working at Finch Farm – while twitchy fans were left wondering why they had been kept sweating again.
Compare that situation to Bournemouth’s change of manager this week. While it was a brutal sacking of Gary O’Neil that smacked of a vanity appointment, regardless of whether the decision to bring in Andoni Iraola proves successful or not, the swift and decisive way in which the process was carried out by a much smaller club with far less resources who still managed to outperform Everton last season is a lesson to the Blues when it comes to conducting their own business.
It is worth hammering the point home to emphasise the gravity of the situation as those responsible need to take culpability for it - 2022/23 was the lowest equivalent points total in the club’s 135-year Football League/Premier League history. Never – including the two occasions that the Blues were relegated – have they performed so poorly.
The fact that this has happened at a time when the club are under an owner who has lavished and all-too-often squandered large amounts of his fortune on poor recruitment makes the whole sorry situation all the more inexcusable. Surely no team has ever splashed out so much to become so bad and as Moshiri himself also admitted last summer: “We have not always spent significant amounts of money wisely.”
After the boom – in outlay if not results – now comes the bust and with Financial Fair Play restrictions continuing to bite, a profit and sustainability charge hanging over them and this summer’s transfer budget understood to be tight, Everton more than ever are having to box clever both on and off the field. Given that they finished 17th in the Premier League after a 36-point season there is literally no more margin for error when it comes to falling off a cliff and into the financial abyss of the Championship at a time they are constructing a new 52,888 capacity stadium that Moshiri said in January was costing £760million.
As the wait for an announcement goes on, comments from Neville Southall, the man who played more games for Everton (751) and won more silverware with the club than any other, continue to fill the void regarding the chairman who has overseen the longest trophyless period in their history when he said that “time’s up” for Kenwright of whom Everton’s Fan Advisory Board declared they had no confidence in back on April 28. While the long goodbye from his potential exit from the role might represent the clean break that so many of the fanbase desire – The Everton Fans’ Forum criticised his open letter on the eve of the team’s trip to Crystal Palace last season as being an “insult to Evertonians” – perhaps the most crucial element among all this is the paralysing delay in bringing in the new blood to within Goodison Park’s corridors of power.
Everton’s new leaders need to get to work and fast because even if you stand still in the Premier League you go backwards. Dyche has only been at the club for less than five months but he is already acutely aware of how much things need to improve.
The Blues boss is well-grounded in trying to grind out results on a relative shoestring from almost a decade in charge at Burnley but there needs to be a clear strategy over how the club is operating in such circumstances and at present Everton resemble a rudderless ship that is in serious danger of drifting off course from where they need to be.
As he said in his post-match press conference after the 1-0 win over Bournemouth preserved the Blues’ top flight status by a hair’s breadth: “It’s a big club, make no mistake. Big history, big club but we are not performing like a big club. We have to find a way of changing that.”
