The former Everton manager has reflected on his time at the club, including his first impressions as he arrived amid the turmoil of early 2023
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Former Everton manager Sean Dyche during the Premier League match at Bournemouth, his last in charge of the Blues. Photo by Robin Jones - AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images
Former Everton manager Sean Dyche during the Premier League match at Bournemouth, his last in charge of the Blues. Photo by Robin Jones - AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images
Sean Dyche said it took him just days to realise Everton were deeper into crisis than he thought - on and off the pitch.
Dyche took over in the chaotic January of 2023, replacing Frank Lampard as the club appeared destined for a second consecutive relegation fight and supporters were protesting against the board.
He said he was sold a picture of “positivity” about where the club was heading but quickly began to question that. His concern only intensified when, he said, three of his midfielders came last in a fitness test conducted upon his arrival. At that point, he said he thought: “Oh, there’s trouble.”
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Dyche, who departed Everton in January, has opened up on his near-two year stint on Merseyside in a wide-ranging interview on the SkyBet Stick to Football podcast. On it, he discusses how his job became to manage the club through a “s***storm”.
Asked whether he knew the extent of the problems facing Everton when he joined - the club had yet to be charged with either of the financial breaches that led to two points deductions the following season - the 53-year-old said: “No, because they’re never going to tell you the truth and sit there and say that it’s in an absolute dire strait. But you get there and within a week think: ‘Oh my goodness, what is going on here.’”
He said former chairman Bill Kenwright, ex-owner Farhad Moshiri and outgoing director of football Kevin Thelwell were the main figures in appointing him. On the talks that led to him getting the role, he said: “They wanted to sell me the positivity, saying: ‘Oh, we can do this, and we can do that,’ and then about an hour into the job you know that it isn’t going to happen – the reality hits you straight away.”
Dyche arrived with Everton having suffered chastening defeats at home to Wolverhampton Wanderers, Brighton and Hove Albion and Southampton and with the club lurching into another survival fight. Star academy graduate Anthony Gordon had just been sold to Newcastle United and, amid the search for much-needed firepower, Arnaut Danjuma had performed an 11th hour U-turn and opted to join Tottenham Hotspur instead of Everton.
Adding further context to those discussions before he joined, Dyche said: “There was no skullduggery, they were just trying to paint a picture that it’s going to get better and we [the board] will support you. Then the reality hits quite quickly, and when the points deduction came in, you thought: ‘Really, is that better?’ and it started getting more challenging from then. Weirdly, that galvanised us all.”
The first of the two deductions under the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR) came at the end of 2023. Before then, Dyche helped to steer the club to safety - secured on the final day of his first season in charge when Abdoulaye Doucoure’s strike sealed a narrow victory over Bournemouth.
Reflecting on his first thoughts after starting work at Finch Farm. Dyche told of an initial ‘yo-yo’ fitness test that intensified his concerns over the situation. He said: “My idea was to strip things back. I was trying to link the modern view of Everton with the past – all these stories of Dogs of War and how tough it was to play there.
“The club had gone through all these different transitions with different managers on the pitch, so I tried to get it back with a bit more edge to it all and regroup a bit. I thought that we somewhat got there.
“I do the yo-yo test, and it’s only because I’ve got years of stats, to try and see if they were fit or not and they weren’t. Three of the midfield players came last and I thought: ‘Oh, there’s trouble.’
“That’s where I thought we needed to start changing it all around. Things like yo-yo test shows you both the fitness and mentality – who’s going to get back on the line and keep going and who’s going to start saying: ‘Oh, I’m really tired.’ Before you worry about anything in football, you need people to try. You’d be surprised how many footballers you think: ‘Are you even trying?’ So, we needed to get the tryers on the pitch before we even worried about anything else.”