Everton finished the 2019/20 Premier League season at 12th place in the table, stagnating Sheffield United, Burnley and Southampton, despite their aspirations for the European standings.
It was a disappointing end to the campaign, to say the least, and it’s a familiar feeling of concern for Everton. It’s about needing a reconstruction and looking for answers from the outside that from the inside.
The positive thing this time is that, in theory, the club is in a bigger position than it has been for some time to bring this task up, at least in terms of design and especially in the form of the technician and the sporting director.
It remains to be noted whether the existing staff is up to the task and if they will get the mandatory budget to carry it out, but Marcel Brands and Carlo Ancelotti have a sports director who came to the club with a smart reputation. and a manager whose history of victories itself fuels ambition.
While Everton’s 2019/20 season finale has sometimes been as disappointing as the start, the club will want it to be a platform. The wonderful merit of the next crusade is that Ancelotti now has the opportunity to start building his own team.
Sometimes this platform has been complicated to build. It’s a complicated task for enthusiasts who have had to go underneath some turbulent presentations to pass with occasional hopes and promises.
An inconsistency runs through the team at the individual level, although Ancelotti has taken a step forward in the collective.
One or two players will leave the game with credit, however, they are never, at most, the same players one or both weeks. So it may not be unexpected that the most encouraging symptoms of the last few weeks of the season come from young players who hadn’t noticed much playing time before: Moise Kean, Anthony Gordon and Jarrad Branthwaite.
There’s encouragement in a new face. A player unrelated to poor past performances, as has been most of this Everton team sometimes in recent seasons. Everton wants more new faces.
They want player teams to take matches with credit, just one or two. Then they want those teams to be consistent and reek of the position in the game after an impressive performance. Andre Gomes and Tom Davies.
But where do they start? Everton smart players sit on the sidelines of the team rather than at their heart.
There are flashes of creativity through Alex Iwobi, Bernard and Lucas Digne, fleeting reminders of why Barcelona once flirted with Gomes, a centerpiece of Gylfi Sigurdsson, an exceptional reaction from Jordan Pickford, or Richarlison generating a moment of magic to exceed their expectations. objectives (xG): nine xG, thirteen targets (FBref), but everything is a bit transient.
At the moment, of all the key spaces that want to be strengthened, it can be argued that the one who wants immediate attention is the goalkeeper.
Pickford is not a bad goalkeeper, you are not the No. 1 of England if you are, but in Everton there is a rotten painting similar to the one you noticed with Kepa Arrizabalaga at Chelsea and David de Gea at Manchester United, and the only one to get out of their respective grooves, the club and the player can simply components of roads.
In terms of expected goals after firing fewer conceded goals (the number of goals a goalkeeper is expected to concede less than the goals he concedes), Pickford is the second-worst goalkeeper in the league when measured every 90 minutes. Only Kepa is worse.
But blaming Pickford’s door would be unfair. Everton wants a new centre defender, a new central midfielder, reinforcements in the side positions and more speed and candor in wide attack areas.
And those are just the spaces that require immediate attention. That this list of minimum needs is so long shows how deficient the club’s hiring has been in recent years.
This is partly due to what, from the outside, turns out to be a random technique for recruiting players.
Alex Iwobi is an example. The Nigerian came to arsenal with the right underlying figures in terms of creativity, but Everton’s recruiting team discovered those positives in the data, the moment when the paint component was not finished. It was not used discovered in those assets once it arrived at the club, and there never seemed to be a plan to do so.
This suggests a department between recruitment and coaching/management, where the reasons why a signed player are not exploited to the fullest on the field. But all of that can replace this summer.
Ancelotti and Brands have a normal conversation. When the Italian first arrived at the club, watching Everton face Arsenal from the stands, he spent a lot of time talking to the sporting director, who certainly continues the scenes.
Sports managers are sometimes guilty of hiring the coach, and this does not seem to have been the case in this case, it is unlikely that Brands opposed Ancelotti’s appointment, and It is unlikely that Ancelotti would have opposed running with Brands.
That’s why this summer will be a key moment in recruitment. Even if this is said each and every summer in Everton, 2020 will be the first in which Ancelotti and Brands will paint in combination to shape this team. This can have a domino effect on the club in terms of the taste for the game from the first team to the youth teams.
In many ways, Ancelotti’s reputation means that his influence can also extend to sports director duties, but as it turns out that no constant philosophy has extended to the club since Everton enthusiastically followed the style of sporting director in 2016, this would possibly not be the case. be a bad thing.
The task this summer is confusing due to the monetary implications of the coronavirus, however, many other clubs are already working to do the business they need.
The Everton will have to do the same, and will have to do so with a transparent plan to recruit players who are hunting well in the recruiting branch but who do not appear on the court because they have no compatibility with the system.
This is a potentially exciting time and challenge for the sports director and recruiting team. Everton enthusiasts expect to see the effects of this summer’s paintings off the field next season.
From America to Africa, I practice football all over the world for Forbes. My Fit Day reports on the English Premier League, Liverpool, Everton and
From America to Africa, I practice football all over the world for Forbes. My match day reports are concentrated in the English Premier League, Liverpool, Everton and Manchester City teams from the press gallery in the UK and Europe. The widest angles are concentrated in world football: from World Cups to the Champions League finals, from youth football to foreign matches, I have written on all facets of the beautiful game for media such as The Guardian, BBC and Goal. I have reported on matches in the main nations of European football, adding the Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga, and I have also written a lot about football in North America and Africa. Some of my paintings come from in-depth tactical research and popularity reports, examining the play styles of various head coaches, game numbers and their long-term stars. I am the founding editor of the Football Media Global Football Index, which produces articles, podcasts and reports from journalists, scouts, coaches and fans.