The club was again one of the lowest spenders on agent fees in the Premier League - even as transfer activity stepped up last summer. Everton FC correspondent Joe Thomas discusses the importance of that in his latest Royal Blue column
A general view of Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images
A general view of Hill Dickinson Stadium. Photo by Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images
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The big numbers associated with Everton this week featured in the club’s accounts but another figure was also indicative of the change sweeping through the Blues.
On Wednesday, the Football Association released the payments made by Premier League clubs to agents across the past year - essentially the money spent around deals that took place in the most recent summer and January transfer windows, plus that used on other issues like contract renewals.
For Everton, the total was just shy of £10m. Of all the clubs in the top flight this season, only Burnley spent less. By comparison Chelsea, who David Moyes’ side swatted away so dismissively before the international break, spent £65m (a figure they partly attribute to having sold a record number of players in the relevant time period).
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While the Premier League’s combined total grew by £51m, to £460m, Everton’s stayed similar, rising around £800,000. Of last season’s Premier League clubs, only newly-promoted sides Ipswich Town and Southampton spent less than Everton. It is three years since a side already in the Premier League spent less than Everton on agent fees and that year it was only Brentford that had that honour.
Now, Everton’s parlous financial state meant the club did little business in the previous two years - clearly limiting the expense of agents as so few deals were concluded. But what makes this year’s figures significant is they have been kept in line even as Everton have stepped up their activity.
Over the period in question Everton signed 10 players and renewed the contracts of Michael Keane, Idrissa Gueye, Seamus Coleman, James Tarkowski, Jarrad Branthwaite, Jordan Pickford and James Garner. That is a lot of business - and yet the cost of agent fees echoed that spent in each of the previous two years.
That trend is one of the many signs of the efforts to get to grips with the running of the club after the initial years of excess under former owner Farhad Moshiri paved the way for the financial crises that followed.
There was clearly an intent last summer, even as the new money of the Friedkins made a proactive transfer window possible for the first time in a while, not to get drawn into bad habits. Similar signs ran through the accounts released on Tuesday afternoon, ones that showed the initial work of TFG as they stabilised the club in their first six months in charge.
One of the biggest achievements of the documents was, in some respect, how boring they were. Gone were foreboding warnings of potential future catastrophe and the £450m of loans to Moshiri that hung over the club but which was converted to equity as part of the sale. Wage to turnover ratio, another red flag of the problems of recent years, was down again and compliance with Premier League spending rules now feels a given (even if UEFA’s stricter standards may be tougher to meet should Everton qualify for Europe this season).
It used to be that everywhere you looked on a week like this there was peril. Threats lurked in the shadows for a long time. In the worst moments they were not even hidden.
Now, everywhere you look you can find positives. Record revenue of almost £200m that will rise towards £250m; a club with hundreds of millions of pounds of debt removed from the balance sheet and where the lending that remains has been refinanced into a sensible deal. The sensible approach to agent fees is the latest evidence that so many of the problems that threatened to be a drag on progress have been dealt with.
None of this is to say that moving forward will be straightforward. Providing stability was only ever part one of the Everton project and the club will have to do more than pluck the low hanging fruit to catch up with those that have left it behind in recent years.
But a foundation, on and off the pitch, is being laid that will give Everton a genuine chance at moving forward and in a sustainable fashion. That felt particularly clear in the hours after the accounts were released, as I walked down to the stunning Hill Dickinson Stadium for Scotland v Ivory Coast. Everton were making money and helping to create memories even when the team was not playing.
After years of being the troubled institution that acted as a warning sign for the dangers of mismanagement, it is a club that others want to be associated with. Even the Premier League cannot get enough of the club’s players and supporters on its social feeds - though that is a jarring sensation after the zest it pursued the club with, a vigour that now appears to have been even harsher given the outcomes of some other high-profile cases.