Sean Dyche has been sent in to fix Nottingham Forest and he could repeat a trick he performed at Everton to get to the root of the problem
Richard Garnett
16:30, 21 Oct 2025Updated 16:30, 21 Oct 2025
Sean Dyche encouraged his players at Everton to complete a questionnaire on what was going wrong at the club
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Sean Dyche encouraged his players at Everton to complete a questionnaire on what was going wrong at the club(Image: Mike Egerton/PA Wire)
Nottingham Forest's confidence-sapped squad could find themselves committing their true thoughts to paper, if Sean Dyche's time at Everton is anything to go by.
The new City Ground boss was hired by the Toffees in January 2023, when the Merseyside club was rooted to the bottom of the Premier League, having amassed just 15 points from 20 games at the midway point of the season under Frank Lampard.
One of the former Burnley manager's first exercises was to issue all of his players with a sheet of paper featuring a series of open queries. The document was a questionnaire that he encouraged all of his players to complete.
The idea was that players could share their own individual thoughts on what was going wrong at the club, but Dyche stressed that he did not want anyone to be named in the answers. He would then cascade the results to his backroom staff for assessment.
Dyche touched on the exercise with reporters during his first Everton press conference, including the Liverpool ECHO. He said: "I am not going to say what it was; it is nothing too deep.
"It was just feedback on where it is all at, what is your opinion of it and just trying to be as open-ended as possible because by giving a question you can sometimes guide people to a place. It wasn’t about that, it was dead short, as simple as possible, and they have an option as well. You don’t have to fill it in, you are not under any obligation and I definitely don’t want your names on it.
"I just want feedback, honest feedback, anything you want that you think is relevant. Often, I have done this before, similar themes come back and I said 'right that is what we have to look at'. If you are telling them to me, then they are things we definitely have to look at."
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Although he did not reveal what any of the questions were, or for that matter the answers, he did express satisfaction with the process, revealing that all but two players had filled out the questionnaire. He did not know who the players who declined to participate were because he had insisted on anonymity.
The results gave him a detailed understanding of the mood in the dressing room and led to a feedback session with the players. A similiar process was undertaken with staff at the club's Finch Farm training ground with follow-up Q&A sessions planned for later in his tenure.
It's not clear yet whether Dyche will follow suit with his questionnaire exercise at Nottingham Forest, but his time at Everton suggests that all players will be given a clean slate and a chance to prove themselves.
The former Blues boss prides himself on being open and transparent and clear on what he expects, telling reporters in that first Everton press conference: "There is one thing I don't do, I don't ask people to sneak about. Not my bag that.
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"I have been in football all my life. Within a training session or two, body language, tonality, reaction, you can tell pretty quickly who the runners and riders are."