Welcome to Everton Football Club – a team steeped in history but seemingly stuck in a present-day purgatory. Over the years, as results have faltered and the cracks have started to show, one familiar refrain has echoed across Goodison Park time and time again. Fans have grumbled, managers have pointed fingers. Both have claimed: “The players just aren’t good enough.”
But is this claim valid, or is it a convenient scapegoat for deeper issues at the club? Let’s unpack this narrative and, crucially, introduce some nuance.
Comparing Everton’s squad
It's first vitally important to place this whole debate in context. In his excellent book on the subject of young players and academies, No Hunger In Paradise, sportswriter Michael Calvin explains that, of all the boys who enter an academy at the age of 9, less than 0.5% ever make a professional career out of playing football. If you're one of the 1.5 million players who play organised youth football in England today, you have a 0.012% chance of one day turning pro, with the chance of making it to the Premier League even slimmer.
So, clearly, when we complain that an Everton player is a donkey, what we mean is that they're underperforming compared to other players in the league. Let's take a look at some of our players’ individual performances last season to see how this holds up.
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Jordan Pickford finished last season with a PSxG-GA (the number of goals he'd be expected to concede based on the quality of the shots he faced minus the goals he actually did allow) of +0.12 which puts him in the top 83% of Premier League goalkeepers. This compared favorably with the likes of Bernd Leno, Alisson, Neto and Sam Johnstone. So certainly not a weak link.
James Tarkowski ranked among the top Premier League defenders for aerial duels won (4.6 per game), putting him in the same ballpark as Newcastle’s Sven Botman, while also being one of the best in his position for blocks, interceptions and touches in the opponent's penalty area. Jarrad Branthwaite also featured in the 70th percentile or above (i.e. top 30% in the league in his position) for tackles, shots blocked, clearances and interceptions. Interestingly, he was arguably the best defender in the league at tackling dribblers.
What about midfield? According to FBRef, Idrissa Gana Gueye posted stats that make him a comparable player to the likes of Wolves’ Joao Gomes, Fulham's Sasa Lukic, Palace's Cheick Doucoure and Man Utd's Kobbie Mainoo. Not all these players are world-beaters, but they're solid Premier League standard performers.
Most fans considered the summer sale of Amadou Onana to be no great loss, especially as he was often not making it into our strongest 11 by the end of the season, even though he recorded 5.2 progressive carries per 90 minutes last season – an attribute in high demand for breaking through the lines and comparable to Bruno Guimarães of Newcastle.
Even an injury-ravaged Dominic Calvert-Lewin boasted an xG per 90 (the number of goals he could have been expected to score based on the quality of chances presented to him) of 0.42 last season—similar to Gabriel Jesus at Arsenal. The rest of his numbers suggest a player with similar attributes to Dominik Solanke, Rodrigo Muniz, Chris Wood and Ivan Toney.
Transfermarkt.com estimates Everton's total squad value at £353 million; that is, based on the current market and our current player values, how much we could reasonably be expected to fetch if we sold our entire squad today.
That puts Everton at lower mid-table, alongside the likes of Wolves and Bournemouth, and above Fulham, Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich. Not great, of course. Not where we should be, by a long shot. But, given that this valuation comes after a period of cost-cutting and also accounts for the fact that many of our players are in the final few months of their contracts, that goes to show that our players can't be that bad after all.
The sum of their parts
If the numbers suggest that our players aren't total sluggers, let's be clear, the eye test often says otherwise. Browsing the FBRef stats for the season so far doesn't make for pretty reading. Everton feature in the bottom three for goals scored, assists, expected goals, progressive carries and progressive passes.
These numbers are a reminder that football is not just about individuals; it’s about systems. Could our current struggles owe as much to disjointed recruitment and tactical setups as to simple player quality?
When looking at those FBRef stats relating to Everton players, one thing stands out. Also appearing on the list of ten midfielders who, statistically, played most similarly to Idrissa Gana Gueye last season were both James Garner and Amadou Onana. I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a failure in imagination on behalf of the recruitment team – to my eye, at least, these aren't necessarily extremely similar types of midfielders. So, you'd have to deduce that they're being asked and coached to do exactly the same thing.
A positive spin on this could be that there's clarity of role and purpose. However, I'd suggest that asking Gueye, Garner and Onana to play the same way is to limit their strongest individual attributes, such as Onana's ball-carrying, Garner's box-to-box engine and ability to spray passes, Gueye's terrier-like instincts. The result is players being asked to curb their natural tendencies and, more importantly, a workman-like adherence to a conservative game-plan over daring, creative and offensive football. The best managers have always married tactical and philosophical rigidity with the ability to maximise players’ strongest attributes.
It's impossible to separate tactics from individual performance levels. Is it any wonder that DCL looked like a dead-eye assassin when told by Don Carlo to limit his movements and surrounded by creative forces like Luca Digne and James Rodrigues, but seems incapable of hitting the proverbial barn door with his banjo after 90 minutes of hustling, harrying, running channels, battling centre-backs and chasing his own knock-ons?
Manager or players?
I want to shine more light on the idea that a bad player is just a bad player. And that the only way to make changes to the style of football the team is playing is to bring in better players.
In 2019, after five years of attritional football under Chris Houghton, Brighton appointed Graham Potter as manager. Almost overnight, Potter transformed that Brighton team from a reactive, defensive team to a team that rivalled the top six in terms of possession, high-pressing and aggressive counter-attacking; culminating in Brighton's highest ever league finishes to date. He did this with a team that initially featured the likes of Maty Ryan, Shane Duffy, Martín Montoya, Davy Propper, Dale Stephens, Solly March, Glenn Murray and Jurgen Locadia. Few of these players were household names and many have since disappeared off the footballing map (Locadia has been leading the line for Persepolis in Iran), but they were molded into vital cogs of a cohesive machine.
I hate to aim praise across the park, but Jurgen Klopp’s first Liverpool lineup in 2015 featured Simon Mignolet, Adam Lallana, Nathaniel Clyne, Alberto Moreno and Divock Origi. Of course, both Potter and Klopp improved the quality of their squads over time and brought in players more suited to their styles of play, but through intelligent coaching and a clear tactical identity, both almost immediately elevated existing players to far greater heights.
Conversely, we all scoffed when names like Danny Welbeck, Sean Longstaff and Chris Wood appeared alongside Everton in the rumor mill. But all have proven to be high-performing members of successful teams when deployed and coached sensibly. It's easy to imagine all three of those players being booed off the pitch had they been unfortunate enough to end up at Everton over the past few years.
That was a fate often suffered by Alex Iwobi who, it turns out at Fulham, is a really very good player indeed. Anthony Gordon, promising but frustrating at Everton, has become a game-impacting England regular under Eddie Howe's coaching. Moise Kean has 10 goals and an assist from 14 appearances for Fiorentina so far this season. Hell, even Neal Maupay has two goals and four assists this season – figures that would tie him with Dwight McNeil as our most productive player, although Maupay has done it in fewer games. So, are Everton players really bad or are players just bad at Everton?
Off the hook?
The reason for this deep dive? I understand that it's far easier to shout “Mykolenko, you're $h!*” than it is to start a chant of “Mykolenko, you're a symptom of a decade of mismanagement and sleepwalking towards irrelevance and obscurity, resulting in being shoehorned into an unambitious tactical set-up by a safety-first manager!”
But the main reason that I dislike the “Our players are just not good enough” argument is that it lets off all the owners, board members, directors of football, analysts, coaches and managers we've had over the past few years. It provides a convenient scapegoat to which our managers have been more than willing to hitch their trailer. It provides the all-too-easy "what else could you have expected me to have done with this group of players?” excuse.
Everton’s players are not world-class, but they are not relegation fodder, either. They have shown glimpses of quality and resilience, often in the most adverse circumstances. What they lack, more than anything else, is guidance. A manager with a clear vision that goes beyond “defending the V” – coupled with a competent recruitment strategy – could unlock the latent potential that's undoubtedly present somewhere within this squad.
The recent rise of Newcastle and the sustained success of clubs like Brighton and Brentford offer blueprints. At Everton, for all our flaws, we will shortly have the resources and fanbase to emulate these successes. The question is whether those who will very soon be steering the ship are willing to learn the lessons from the past.
In the meantime, it’s worth reconsidering the narrative that the players “just aren’t good enough.” More often than not, they’re only as bad as the system that fails to support them.
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