Michael Ball tackles the big issues at Hill Dickinson Stadium following Everton's final game of the season at Tottenham Hotspur
Everton owner Dan Friedkin still hasn't attended a game at Hill Dickinson Stadium
Everton owner Dan Friedkin still hasn't attended a game at Hill Dickinson Stadium
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My big question to Dan Friedkin, the owner at Everton is: “what are you going to do in the summer?”
Ticket prices are going up, we’ve had the first season at Hill Dickinson Stadium, that box has been ticked. Now we want to start winning things.
Look at the teams who have been successful, many of whom have been in worse situations than us. Aston Villa; Crystal Palace, who now have an opportunity to win a European trophy; Tottenham and Newcastle last year.
These teams have overtaken us because we want to see silverware. The owners need to show the ambition to keep the fans on board and to get us excited that there’s going to be progression.
This summer there is a World Cup, so there will be lots of talk about trying to get players in early. Recruitment is going to be difficult for many teams but there’s no point in doing the majority of your business at the end of August.
As a manager, you want all your players brought in as soon as the transfer window opens but a lot of it comes down to money. I’ve been in that industry before and you get told you can’t press the button for another month, so they save money on wages, but that shows a lack of ambition, and you end up losing players.
Say you’re going for a £100,000-a-week player, you could save £400,000, but when you want to be ambitious, you’ve got to pay the price. It will actually cost you more money in the long run because look how much we’ll have missed out on when it comes to prize money for league positions, sliding down the table at the end.
We’ve had one summer window, January was a failure, but the Everton’s board, the transfer committee and David Moyes should have the targets of who they want. If somebody becomes available towards the end of the window who could boost us, great, but our priorities should be done as soon as possible and we can’t penny pinch.
Whether it’s David Moyes or whether it’s the board, they’ve failed in the transfer market. If you look at why we’re in this situation and how we can move forward, you look back at January and we only brought in Tyrique George, a young kid from Chelsea after Jack Grealish got injured.
We went into last summer knowing we needed a right-back. That was our number one priority, but we never got him, he [Kenny Tete] stayed at Fulham and we didn’t get a back-up option.
You’d then be expecting a right-back to come in on January 1, but that never happened and now we’re licking our wounds, wondering what could have been. Why weren’t the funds released?
Were we tight with money or were they thinking that David Moyes isn’t going to stay long-term, so we won’t give him a huge transfer kitty? That’s what has cost us this season.
We had a huge opportunity to get Everton back into Europe. Not providing that backing has made our season feel disappointing.
Everyone has got to take accountability from the players to the manager and the board. We all knew you couldn’t solve everything in one transfer window – I get that – but January was an opportunity to get a player in the position we needed.