In his weekend Royal Blue column, Joe Thomas discusses the current feeling of frustration in the fanbase over the club's home form
David Moyes reacts during the Premier League match between Everton and Manchester United at Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Carl Recine/Getty Images
David Moyes reacts during the Premier League match between Everton and Manchester United at Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Carl Recine/Getty Images
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St James' Park may have been a happy place for Everton on the final day of last season but David Moyes had the air of a man at the start of a journey, not the end.
His side had just secured an impressive win with an injury-hit XI against a team that had everything to play for. Carlos Alcaraz's header - and his second match-winning display of May 2025 - had made it an easy decision to make his loan move permanent but the summer ahead would be much harder and Moyes knew it.
Fast-forward nine months and I do not know anyone who would have turned down the position Everton now find themselves in. That should not be forgotten amid the pain and frustration of recent missed opportunities.
For the first time in five seasons the Blues have not - and will not - become embroiled in a survival scrap. If there is to be a lack of drama this season then that is genuine progress, even if it is not as big a step forward as perhaps seemed possible at the start of 2026.
Moyes - with justification but unsurprisingly - is of that view. Speaking ahead of the return to Newcastle, I asked him how he would have felt on the journey home from the north east if he had been told that, in February 2026, Everton would be in the position they are.
He said: “I think if somebody gave you that, you'd say: ‘Yeah, that sounds okay, we'll take that’... I think, if you had given me that and said roughly where we are, I'd say I think it's decent progress for a first season back. There have been quite big changes, lots of new players coming in, and it's very rare any club can get all their signings correct. Some of ours have worked really well, some of them haven't.”
Since that afternoon in May, Everton have started a squad rebuild that will take several summers to complete, moved to a stunning new stadium and started well at their new home. That home form has nosedived since the start of December and the defeat to Manchester United on Monday extended the winless run at Hill Dickinson to seven matches. There is context to that disappointing stretch - namely the selection crisis through Christmas and the new year that, at its height, left Moyes without nine senior players.
But that is the backdrop to an undercurrent of frustration among sections of the fanbase over recent weeks. The Blues are living two lives - for those who travel away with the team, wins have continued to come with regularity since that home win over Nottingham Forest late last year - at Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Fulham and, indeed, Forest. For the tens of thousands more who only see the club at home, it has been nearly three months since they last saw a win in person.
That tension between the potential shown on the road with the frustration at home is an awkward nuisance. It is even more painful given the failure to beat the likes of Wolves and Bournemouth from promising positions has undermined what can still be an exciting tilt for Europe.
Europe was always going to be a big ask for a club in the infancy of its rebuild. The chaos of the crises on and off the pitch that characterised the final years of the ownership of Farhad Moshiri seeped into the opening months of the reign of the Friedkin Group, which took over in December 2024.
Yet for all that qualification for the midweek football on the continent would have looked like a fever dream even back in May, Moyes bears some responsibility for the increased expectations that are guiding opinions of his decisions right now.
Unlike his predecessor, Sean Dyche, who pulled what felt like a phantom idea of Everton supporters who believed the club should be in the hunt for Europe simply because last season was the historic farewell to Goodison Park, Moyes has pushed the idea that this club should be aiming for a return to the prestige of those UEFA competitions.
And if, in doing so, he has made some supporters dream of a success that might just be out of reach this season, he has no regrets. He explained: “Part of the manager’s job is to raise expectation. If you raise expectation then you are doing your job. What you have to hope then is we can keep living up to it and keep going.
“As I said right from the start, I didn’t want to come in here and say: ‘Let’s see if we can finish above the bottom three’. I could have come in here and started that way. I tried to be more upbeat so I don’t believe for a minute that Evertonians are like that. Not at all. I think Evertonians in the main are saying we are heading in the right direction and moving on. That is how I see it.”
One of the most fascinating parts of my job right now is that disparity in opinion depending on the extent to which you follow Everton. It took just seven minutes by my watch for the away end to start singing his name at Craven Cottage earlier this month. Either side of that game he and the Blues had left the pitch to the sound of boos after the draw with Leeds United the defeat to Bournemouth, both at home.
The contrast in opinions was again interesting on Monday night. Inside the stadium there was resounding applause after the game for a team that many could see had fought hard and come up just short against a Man United side that left with three points due to a combination of fortune and one moment of magic from a £200m strike force built in the same summer that Everton were genuinely investing in their squad for the first time in years.
Yet once I got on the last train home and went through my notifications, the views of some supporters online was damning - particularly over the line-up. Moyes continued to defend his selection on Friday and in many ways believes what happened on Monday was vindication of his approach. While some supporters saw ‘square pegs in round holes’, he saw a team that came very close to a good win and, while the defence may have appeared makeshift, it conceded just three shots on target and the best chances - Benjamin Sesko’s goal and his late one-on-one - both came with Everton chasing a goal.
If Moyes has a problem right now it is two-fold. Firstly, it is trying to get his squad of players to be more than the sum of their parts - a constant battle given the issues he clearly sees at full-back, the loss of the influential Jack Grealish and the struggle for a sustained supply of goals up top. Away from home he has had real success on that front but on the banks of the Mersey, where there is greater expectation on the Blues taking the initiative in games, it is much tougher and not working.
And the problem with that, is that performances are under such scrutiny because the dream of Europe he pitched to supporters suddenly started to appear realistic after the start to the campaign Everton enjoyed. Moyes still wants Europe and believes it to be attainable, though he will stick to his own beliefs about how to get there.
Whether he is showing a stubbornness that is causing him more harm than good is a fair question - Jarrad Branthwaite may have stopped that Sesko goal had he been playing at centre back, moving James Garner to full-back does deprive the Blues of their best central midfielder and playing Harrison Armstrong on the wing may have limited the attacking threat down the left. Those decisions also left Everton in a position where, with 20 minutes to go, they were in the ascendancy and a win was in reach, though.
There is a good debate to be had about those decisions and the disappointment over the result - and the frustration around how other matches have played out at home - is absolutely fair.
It is only fair if both sides acknowledge that the reason for the disappointment over the struggle to push on in the past six weeks only exists because Moyes has taken Everton so far that the club is now in a completely different world to where it has been for years - and that he has led the club there far quicker than many could have hoped for.
Growing pains may be tough but they are an inevitable part of progress and, while the speed of it may be open to argument, the Blues are certainly moving forward.