Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
NEVER EVER LAND
£300m spent, five managers used, but Everton supremo Moshiri has still failed to find magic formula to turn Toffees into the cream of the Prem
HE has invested almost £300million in players, sorted out club finances, made some significant progress on a new stadium, but Farhad Moshiri now faces the most important spell of his time at Everton.
The majority shareholder is feeling the pressure to get his latest managerial appointment right, having bowed to the groundswell of supporter opinion and decided to sack Sam Allardyce.
With David Unsworth’s lengthy caretaker spell included, that means Moshiri will be looking for a fifth manager in his 27 months at the club. He has brought plenty of cash to the table but it has not brought direction to the pitch.
He wanted Marco Silva to succeed Ronald Koeman in October and the Portuguese will again be his No.1 target.
But Silva (far right) now has a sacking from Watford on his CV as well as that relegation with Hull. There could also be issues with Watford, who claim
“an unwarranted approach by a
Premier League rival” destabilised their season.
Moshiri will have a series of meetings with the board and senior staff to establish what went wrong in a season where Everton came a decent-looking eighth but had fewer than 50 points for the third time in four years. They were 14 points off the top-six finish which was considered to be realistic. An ambitious goal of top four turned out to be 26 points out of range. They splashed out £200m in two transfer windows but the scattergun nature of the spending was the signal for a troubled campaign – leaving director of football Steve Walsh facing following Allardyce out of the door.
Everton have been linked for some time with PSV technical director Marcel Brands. And with Robert Elstone set to leave his chief executive role, Moshiri will have to put his marker down in the appointments process. Underpinning the many decisions he must make will be the need to unify a disjointed hierarchal process.
Last summer’s acquisition of Gylfi Sigurdsson, for example, became protracted because Swansea were unsure who was really calling the transfer tune at Goodison Park. Chairman Bill Kenwright has an active role and was instrumental in the sentimental re-signing of Wayne Rooney ( far left).
Moshiri might have wondered why a club with ambitions of turning the Big Six into a seven was taking a player surplus to requirements at one of those clubs.