With seven managers since 2016 and now a third director of football, Everton's recruitment in recent times has come under scrutiny as a squad widely reported to have the seventh-highest wage bill in the Premier League battles to stay in the division. International recruitment is common place now but a generation ago before widespread global scouting and easy to access digital footage, casting your net overseas was often a precarious business.
The 1990s were a ‘golden era’ if you could call it that, for audacious Everton transfer pursuits of foreign players that didn’t quite come off. Those of you who watched last year’s BBC documentary series Fever Pitch! The Rise of the Premier League will recall how it was a time of change both on and off the pitch in the upper echelons of English football.
While the Blues had long been one of the game’s powerhouses, known as the ‘Mersey Millionaires’ during John Moores’ ownership of the club, had enjoyed their most-successful era in the previous decade of the 1980s and were one of the lead players in the creation of the Premier League under Sir Philip Carter, they struggled to keep up with the game’s elite as the 20 th century drew to a close.
