It’s February, there are 12 Premier League games to go, and not only are you wondering where the time went — “didn’t the season just kick off a few weeks ago?!” — but if you are an Evertonian in any of the past four seasons, you have a permanent knot of anguish in your stomach over the club’s future.
Until around this time last year, the ghoulish spectre of relegation had hung over Goodison Park from the moment the wheels came off Rafael Benitez’s tenure and through points deductions, the forced sale of many of their best players, and two white-knuckle brushes with relegation in 2022 and 2023, Everton narrowly avoided utter disaster.
The man to banish all talk of relegation was, of course, David Moyes and, having made quick work of lifting Everton away from the bottom three last year, the Scot currently has the Blues sitting in the heady heights of 8th place, seven points shy of the Champions League spots and just five off the Europa League with 26 games played.
After all those years of misery and struggle, if you’d been offered that at the start of this season, you’d have bitten the hand off the proverbial benefactor. The devil, however, is in the details and the context of this maddening season muddies the picture because Everton sit where they do in an intriguingly tight and unpredictable Premier League in spite of a dreadful home record that has yielded just four home wins to date.
Leaving Goodison for Bramley-Moore Dock after 133 years of history, there was always the risk that the displacement into unfamiliar surroundings could affect the team’s form. As recently explored on these pages, however, the issues with the Toffees’ record at Hill Dickinson Stadium appear to have less to do with the new ground than with the team itself, the way it plays and its weaknesses in key positions. Just one more win by the waterfront this season would equal last season’s tally in L4 where Moyes managed just three victories in the second half of last season.
It’s hard to see where that next home win is coming from, though, and without an improvement at the Dock, European qualification might end up being just out of reach. Doomed Burnley would seem to offer the most fertile opportunity in the coming weeks but Everton struggled against an even worse outfit in the form of Wolves. And where, in years gone by at a bouncing Goodison Park, the visit of any of Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea could spark a stirring performance and victory by the boys in Blue, the new place has yet to make such history. Fixtures against the so-called big clubs of Tottenham, Newcastle and Arsenal yielded zero points.
The problem with Moyes at the moment is that he has Everton over-performing expectations from the beginning of the season but falling short of the ceiling hinted at when the Blues have been at their strongest this season, by the quality of their best personnel, and by their remarkable away record.
As such, the Scot is providing plenty of fodder for his detractors and supporters alike, the debate and the mood oscillating between rousing victories on the road and dispiriting failures on home soil.
"In Moyes We Trust"
On the face of it, Everton have come a long way in a short period of time under Moyes. Having had a tantalising glimpse of possible Champions League qualification around the turn of 2021, they found themselves having to completely reset the following summer without Carlo Ancelotti and with the financial walls starting to close in as the largesse of Farhad Moshiri’s reign came home to roost.
The situation was compounded by the most ill-advised and, arguably, most damaging of Moshiri’s managerial hires in Benitez. In the interests of backing the Everton boss, you could “both sides” the decision at the time but if foresight suggested it was unwise, hindsight clearly shows the Spaniard should never have been appointed in the first place.
The club were heading for the Championship until salvation was secured with that dramatic turnaround against Crystal Palace under his successor, Frank Lampard, in the penultimate match of the 2021/22 season and it required a fraught 1994-/1998-esque escape on the final day of 2022/23 after Lampard had himself been jettisoned in favour of Sean Dyche.
Like Lampard, Dyche did just enough to claw Everton away from the jaws of relegation in his first few months in charge and deserved credit for maintaining morale in the face of the punitive action from the Premier League that thrust the Blues back into a battle to beat the drop just when it looked like mid-table respectability was on the cards in 2023/24. However, by the waning weeks of 2024 it was clear he had lost his way; one win in 11 and a team that appeared to have forgotten how to score goals told their own story and his departure in early January 2025 felt inevitable.
Enter Moyes, the safe pair of hands that a club and a fanbase, exhausted by the previous four years of chaos, needed just weeks into a new era under the ownership of The Friedkin Group. Everton were effectively safe within a month of his return to Goodison and a Premier League table for the calendar year of 2025 would underscore his impact — the Toffees had a top-10 record for that 12-month period and only title-chasing Arsenal could boast better away form among top-flight clubs.
For much of the current campaign, thanks in part to some important signings, like that of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Jack Grealish, Everton have been within touching distance not only of the guaranteed Europa League slot but of the Champions League places as well. Along the way, Moyes has overseen surprise wins at Old Trafford, Vitality Stadium and Villa Park and completed the double over Nottingham Forest and Fulham.
Rounded up, the club’s average position after 26 matches over the last four seasons is 16th with 27 points and the Blues currently have 37, three points shy of the magic 40 that might end up being a requirement this season to finish above 18th spot.
He has done it in spite of Jarrad Branthwaite’s absence for half a season and the loss to injury for significant spells of Dewsbury-Hall and now Gealish; in spite of a player availability crisis that left him barely able at times to field a starting XI of senior pros; in spite of not having either a natural or effective attacking full-back on either side of defence; and in spite of two strikers struggling — painfully at times — to make the grade.
In a season in which stability and consolidation was the order of the day, Moyes still has his team very much in European contention and, regardless of whether they achieve it, the promise for the close season is that the club will embark on the next phase of squad reconstruction by adding the quality needed to make a great forward stride towards the top six in 2026/27.
For Moyes’s biggest proponents, Everton are in the hands of a manager who knows the club inside and out, understands the supporters’ expectations, has come closer than anyone since Joe Royle to winning a trophy, and is impatient to get the Blues competing at the top end of the table and for silverware as quickly as possible as he nears the end of his career.
The Frustrating Arch-Pragmatist
A more cynical observer might say that Everton’s improvement in the weeks following Moyes’s return was as much a reversion to the mean under a competent and experienced manager as anything else; one able to not only focus on the basics but identify key ways of getting a woefully under-performing team to better click going forward.
There was a strong feeling for many Evertonians under all three of Benitez, Lampard and Dyche that the players at their disposal were much better as a collective than results were suggesting. That Moyes, once he’d had a chance to catch his breath following his re-appointment in January last year, was able to engineer three successive wins and then a nine-match unbeaten run in the League to vault Everton well clear of the drop zone by simply making subtle tweaks in personnel and approach could support that view.
If the current pattern holds, the Blues are on course to amass around 56 points this season, enough to finish between 8th and 10th in any of the last five campaigns. When you take into account Everton’s aforementioned record under Moyes in the calendar year of 2025, assuming the club adequately replaced outgoing first-team regulars like Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Abdoulaye Doucouré, placing somewhere around that part of the table would have been a reasonable expectation for this season.
Thierno Barry, the £27m acquisition from Villarreal for whom the jury is still very much out, may not compare to “DCL” in terms of his aerial prowess, ability to lead the line or hold the ball up but in terms of simple availability and goals, the young Frenchman has a better a return so far this season. In Dewsbury-Hall, Everton made a significant upgrade on Doucouré and were able to enjoy the injection of creativity brought by Grealish until he was struck down with a foot fracture last month.
On that basis, Everton should be better than they were last season but each impressive away result is being negated at present by failings at home. There is a risk that the Blues are in a vicious psychological cycle at Hill Dickinson Stadium and that not winning there is becoming a habit.
That Moyes is a good manager isn’t up for discussion and there’s a case to be made (albeit an unprovable one) that had he, not Dyche, been tasked with saving the club from the drop three years ago, he’d have done it handily. Not only that, he obviously has a track record at Everton — nine years of stability and regular top-half finishes, many of them in the Europa League places, the like of which no Blues manager has been able to match since.
The debate over the 62-year-old begins when it comes to considering how the rest of this season might pan out and whether it will end up being an enormous missed opportunity if the team fail to finish in the top seven or eight in the Premier League, having already meekly fallen at early hurdles in the cup competitions.
Will the failure on the part of a recruitment setup, where Moyes is the key decision-maker on all transfers, to adequately address key positions in the squad last summer — most glaringly, the long-standing void at right-back but also the weaknesses at left-back and centre-forward positions — end up being costly?
Likewise, will concerns over the manager’s tactical acumen, game management, and selection and substitution policies both limit what the club will achieve this season and then hinder Everton when it comes to making the next step up?
At present, he seems to have no answer to the Blues’ frustrating home form, their inability to control games at Hill Dickinson Stadium and the freedom with which visiting sides seem to enjoy playing there. His men routinely take 45 minutes or more to really get going in games and have really only put in two of what could be regarded as complete performances so far this season, against Forest and Fulham.
Moyes has been content to persist with the increasingly uncomfortable fit of Jake O’Brien at right-back, he and his colleagues appear to have badly misjudged both the short-term suitability for Premier League football of Adam Aznou and the readiness to meaningfully contribute of Tyler Dibling, and he has been forced to throw Barry in at the deep end as Beto reverted to type after his brief purple patch this time last year.
Barry has, of course, enjoyed a little spell amongst the goals of this own but despite Aznou’s energetic cameo against Sunderland in the FA Cup and Nathan Patterson’s part in the away wins at Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa, neither player has been involved since that ill-fated cup tie last month.
Charlie Alcaraz, an important squad member when he was on loan from Flamengo last season who might have sealed his permanent switch from Brazil with that Tim Cahill-esque winner at Newcastle on the final day of 2024/25 has just had 11 minutes off the bench since returning from injury three weeks ago. Merlin Röhl, who arguably had his best game of a disrupted first campaign in England at Villa Park five matches ago, has also not played a minute since.
Lately, the more players he has had at his disposal, the smaller his pool of “trusted lieutenants” seems to have become. Deploying a central midfielder in Harrison Armstrong on the wings is just the latest example of Moyes’s preference for putting square pegs in round holes and evidence, perhaps, of a lack of faith in those players for whom those positions are natural fits.
It’s impossible to know at the moment if trying different personnel in their specialist roles or being more proactive in terms of the timing and nature of substitutions during matches would help because fans never get to see them. Is the manager’s pragmatism and innate conservatism holding the team back or is there just not sufficient quality in the ranks to get them over the line in games?
These are the frustrations that nag at the Moyes sceptics who would concede that in his first spell, he assembled an impressive squad that, at its best, could play some lovely football but would argue that, ultimately, he failed to crack the glass ceiling to the top four or land any silverware during his tenure. If the canny Scot has changed and evolved since he left the Blues in 2013, some still need convincing.
The Europe Question
How you approach the current debate over the team’s form, the question of where Everton could and should realistically be a little over a year on from Moshiri’s departure and what our expectations should be for the remainder of the season is probably coloured by your opinion of David Moyes, who has become the subject of plenty of discussion during this unwanted fortnight's hiatus without a game.
If there's another problem with Moyes, it's that he came into the club with an 11-year history and fans had amassed a mountain of opinions and experiences of his management and methods, both good and bad, during that time. Even his strongest backers would admit he has his foibles and points of frustration and, having seemingly returned a more relaxed figure and a more dynamic coach in the early weeks of his second spell in charge, there is a feeling that he has reverted to type somewhat.
Then there is the question of the strength of the current squad and whether qualifying for Europe would be a help or hindrance in 2026/27. Certainly there are those who feel that the demands of Continental involvement and playing midweek and weekends would place too much strain on the squad.
On the flip side, however, Moyes was open in admitting last summer that the club faced challenges landing their primary targets because they were not able to offer players European football.
There’s an argument to be made that if European football is on offer, you take it and worry about the logistics and implications later, particularly if it means you can shop in a more favourable market for players who would benefit the club over the longer term.
Moyes himself has wavered on the topic over the course of the campaign, hinting that he is itching to take any opportunity to accelerate the Blues’ recovery by finishing in the European places this season, if possible, while trying to remain realistic when results haven’t gone his side’s way.
At present, with Everton’s home form the way it is, the greater prestige of the Europa League is likely to remain out of reach. However, the Europa Conference League, the tournament Moyes won as manager of West Ham, could be a realistic target given the permutations around who wins the domestic cup competitions and how many Champions League spots will be given to English clubs for next season.
Bearing in mind the standard of opposition, Conference League qualification could be the ideal compromise option for the Blues next season, providing the manager to rotate out his senior players in favour of giving valuable minutes to younger or fringe squad members, at least until the later stages when the assignments become more difficult.
Should the club allow the prospect of any European involvement in 2026/27 slip through fingers, it would, to these eyes, be hugely disappointing. Obviously, there are those who point to the chaotic Moshiri years and those brushes with relegation and wonder what more Evertonians could ask for beyond mid-table safety.
It is true that most of us would have been quite content with a season of boring mediocrity but from the moment Everton signed Grealish, Dewsbury-Hall’s talents were added to a side already boasting the brilliance of Iliman Ndiaye, and the team found itself in the top six in the early weeks of the season, supporters’ eyes were opened to the possibility of more.
“You can’t go from fighting relegation to finishing in the top six,” has been trumpeted more than once by those arguing that the club can’t run before it can walk. Fans of Leicester in 2016 and Nottingham Forest last season would beg to differ and had either Claudio Ranieri or Nuno Espírito Santo taken the same attitude, those clubs would have been denied some wonderful memories.
Granted, both teams had deep squads and the Foxes, in particular, were able to capture lightning in a bottle in their stunning title-winning season thanks to some masterful recruitment and a perfect game-plan engineered to make the most of players like Jame Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and Ngolo Kanté.
And therein lies the key. One of the pillars of Moyes’s relative success in his first tenure as Everton manager was player recruitment. From Mikel Arteta and Steven Pienaar to Tim Cahill and Marouane Fellaini, the Scot built teams of tremendous ability and that thrived on the strong defensive foundation he built.
The game changed in the time he was away. Not only is it rare for clubs to find hidden gems like a couple of those aforementioned stars but the Premier League is full of teams coached to play more of a pass- and possession-based game, something that the current iteration of the Blues’ team often struggles.
What hasn’t changed is that sound player identification and acquisition remain central to surviving and thriving in the top flight and if Moyes and the transfer committee can get that right, next season should be a lot more even with a genuine tilt at Europe more sustainable.
In the meantime, Moyes himself will continue to divide opinion, particularly with the future beyond his current contract in mind (a topic for a future article), and there will be undue focus on Everton’s home form and its impact on the wider question of Hill Dickinson Stadium, its atmosphere, empty seats, early leavers and other bones of contention.
A win over Manchester United under the lights on Monday night would go a long way to quietening all that talk down, at least for a while!
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