The fallout from Everton’s late-season collapse, one that saw them pick up just three points from a possible 21 and our European hopes shattered, has seen an out-pouring of frustration from supporters who were invited to dream after the hammering of Chelsea but who have been slapped back down once more by reality.
The words “stability” and “ambition” have dominated the discussion over the hierarchy’s immediate steps as the limitations of both the current squad and David Moyes’s management have been exposed. Moyes’s own future has come into question, as has The Friedkin Group’s hunger to push Everton into the upper echelons of the English game.
Part of that is down to Chief Executive Officer, Angus Kinnear’s rather tepid programme notes ahead of the Sunderland defeat, his “happy dissatisfaction” with the Blues falling short of Europe, and his seemingly unequivocal backing of the manager; a message viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the discontented masses as tacit acceptance of mediocrity.
It’s also partly down to those behind the curtain itself, the Friedkins — specifically Dan and his son Ryan, neither of whom attended a match at Hill Dickinson Stadium in its first season or said anything publicly about the club since their takeover went through in December 2024.
It’s a curious state of affairs but no one should be surprised; the Friedkins are notoriously media-shy, preferring to conduct their business in the background. That is largely how they have run AS Roma for the past six years, Dan emerging only after the Europa League final in 2022 and celebrating the achievement by posing on the pitch with the trophy after the _Giallorossi’s_ victory over Feyenoord.
TFG have appeared to be a bit more “hands-on” at Roma but, in the main, their running of Everton so far is in line with what it said on the proverbial tin when they came on board — they let their actions speak loud in the absence of words, with their representatives on the ground (Kinnear and Executive Chairman, Marc Watts, in Everton’s case) providing the public face of their operation. That won’t stop Evertonians from trying to coax them out of silence in desperate hopes of gleaning some sense of their vision for the club but they’re unlikely to change.
This is Everton joining the 21st-century model of Premier League ownership; a shift accepted reluctantly by a fanbase who, frustrated by the inadequacies of the Bill Kenwright era and bruised by the near-disastrous reign of Farhad Moshiri, welcomed a stable, billion-dollar American firm as their new overlords in the hopes of being able to compete with similar set-ups up the road at Anfield and in North London as well as the nation state-backed entities in Manchester and Newcastle.
It’s a far cry from the days of Sir John Moores, the local man made good who helped propel the club back to the forefront of the domestic game in the 1960s. When he remarked that “Everton expects success”, it came from an understanding of both the club and the people because he was one of them.
Having spent so little time in Liverpool and had no interface with Evertonians since their interest in the club emerged in 2024, the Friedkins couldn’t possibly know what makes Scousers tick or form any emotional bond with the supporters whose hopes and dreams they took on their shoulders 16 months ago.
Likewise, while Blues heard the pronouncements at the outset from the likes of Watts and Kinnear around “custodianship” and “stewardship” of “this iconic football club” and “a new era … marked by ambition and professionalism” and, more recently, the CEO’s emphasis on “stability” as a foundation for longer-term growth, we don’t have a sense of the kind of team the ownership want Everton to be on the pitch and what kind of managerial approach they envisage delivering yearned-for success.
In the absence of any real connection with and direct communication from the Friedkins, in particular, beyond these more corporate-style utterances from the club’s immediate hierarchy, scepticism and cynicism has been growing among supporters — at least if social media and online discussion forums are any indication.
Accusations that The Friedkin Group see Roma as the thoroughbred in their stable and Everton as the cash cow to be milked and then sold off for profit down the line have been gaining traction amid the frustration of underperformance in the transfer market last summer and on the pitch during the Americans’ first full season as owners.
TFG’s actions to date, however, demonstrate a lot of the pragmatism, professionalism, and sound under-pinnings that the majority of Evertonians wished had been consistently shown by Moshiri, particularly on the footballing side of the operation.
The Anglo-Iranian’s delivery of the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock was efficient and timely but Everton struggled to replace the sponsorship deals with USM Holdings they suspended following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a scattergun and profligate approach torpedoed his regime on the pitch, plunging the club into regulatory jeopardy and financial peril.
To begin with, the Friedkins’ acquisition of Everton came at a not-insubstantial figure. To date, the company has injected over £100m above what it took to acquire the club taking their commitment so far to close to £600m, a strategy that echoes their investment in Roma which has surpassed €1bn and has seen them return to the Champions League with a third-place finish in Serie A this season.
They restructured Everton’s debt, including that which went towards financing the construction of Hill Dickinson Stadium, and took advantage of a closing PSR loophole leveraged by Chelsea and Aston Villa by spinning off Everton Women and Goodison Park into separate entities under the Roundhouse Capital umbrella.
In less than a year and a half, the new owners have also secured a multi-year making rights deal with Hill Dickinson, added a number of well known brands as sponsors at the new ground, among them Pepsi, Heinz and Budweiser, and appear to be on track to replace the Stake.com front-of-shirt agreement with a comparable deal with CMC Markets while the betting firm’s logo moves to the sleeve.
Then there is the succession of non-football events that TFG have been able to attract to Everton’s new waterfront home, including Rugby League matches, a recent international fixture between Scotland and Ivory Coast and, of course, a number of games at Euro 2028.
And while it has proved to be a controversial move, albeit one also in accordance with the running of the club more like a business, the hierarchy have also raised ticket prices to further boost match-day revenues that had already been elevated by a wider array of concessions.
All of this beefed-up commercial performance will increase the Blues’ spending capacity when it comes to player trading under the new Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) framework which will replace PSR (Profitability and Sustainability Rules) starting in the upcoming 2026/27 season.
Closer to matters on the pitch, TFG have also taken additional steps to modernise the operations at Everton by hiring data and analytics consultant, Chris Howarth, for the club’s new football leadership team and bought his former company, Insight Sport Ltd which brings football performance data, now central to player analysis, recruitment and development at the top level of the game, in-house and serving both the Blues and Roma.
Howarth’s appointment was very much in line with the build-out of the broader footballing apparatus at Finch Farm, which has seen Nick Cox tempted away from Manchester United to become Technical Director (the closest thing Everton have to a sporting director under the flatter structure implemented by Kinnear), James Smith, formerly of Manchester City, as Director of Scouting and Recruitment, and Nick Hammond as head of player trading.
Though this new setup has yet to bear fruit — Smith and Cox only officially joined last Autumn so this summer’s is the first transfer window where the new recruitment committee will have had enough time to draw up and attack its list of targets and Cox’s work on the Academy side will, naturally, take much longer — it has established a foundation on which the club can, potentially, build for future success. (It is certainly an advance on the days of Moshiri often ignoring Marcel Brands in favour of players pushed by the likes of Kia Joorabchian or responding to his own impulses.)
Taken in aggregate, what TFG have achieved with efficiency and in relatively short order at Everton should be encouraging — again, after so much chaos and unpredictability during the Moshiri years — and taken as evidence of their commitment to putting in place the conditions under which the club can now thrive.
Even if you take the most cynical view that the Texans are merely building the club up to offload it for future profit down the road, every positive move they make on and off the pitch should be of benefit to Everton — the Toffees’ success is TFG’s financial gain; the better we do, the more they stand to make.
The one missing piece, then — and the one most closely tied to supporter morale — would appear to be the team and the manager. As Kinnear has been at pains to point out, the leadership viewed the immediate squad-rebuilding project as a two-year plan, one which they expected would be rounded out this summer.
Even so, it’s unlikely they foresaw a season where a £35m acquisition like Tyler Dibling would spend the vast majority of the Premier League campaign kicking his heels on the substitutes bench alongside another teenage addition in the form of £9m signing, Adam Aznou, while the opportunity to thoroughly run the rule over loanee Tyrique George was largely squandered by the manager.
With Jack Grealish losing half of the season to injury and Thierno Barry running hot and cold after a very difficult start to life on Merseyside, only Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was a consistent and productive addition to the core team that Moyes inherited from Sean Dyche in January last year. Viewed through that lens and with the lack of any right-back signing also in mind, the 2025 summer business was frustratingly incomplete.
Even so, despite Everton’s frustrating home form, the team had European qualification in their own hands heading into the final international break of the season in March. That the Toffees, over the final seven matches, so dramatically regressed to the mean hinted at by their underlying metrics meant that they and the manager passed up the kind of opportunity to accelerate the broader recovery timeline that might not come around for a good number of years.
The justification for criticism of Moyes, not just in the run-in but over the course of 2025/26, is laid out [in this piece](/articles/46043.html) and without repeating it here, the salient points are that the Scot was frustratingly inflexible in terms of his team selection and tactics, overused a core part of the squad at the expense of youth, was often out-thought by opposition managers, and ultimately oversaw a season where there was almost no visible progress in terms of playing style and effectiveness between the opening-day shambles at Leeds and the appallingly impotent display at Spurs in the final game.
Many Evertonians, looking at the likes of Bournemouth, Sunderland and Brighton qualifying for Europe under dynamic younger coaches and Crystal Palace and Aston Villa winning silverware with their own impressive managers, are wondering what the medium- to long-term plan is for their club. If three successive 48- or 49-point seasons aren’t indicative enough of stability, when will Everton put in place the fundamental piece that will take them forward in a post-Moyes world; a footballing world that is very different to his first spell in charge?
It’s why Kinnear and TFG, having set their stall out in defence of continuity and steady progress while effectively discounting change in the dugout, need to thread the needle this summer over the manager. Handing him a new contract after the way in which his team’s form fell apart in the final weeks of the season, with no visible attempts by Moyes to alter course, would send the wholly wrong message. It would risk the kind of disconnect with supporters that is being cited by many as the reasons for Arne Slot’s dismissal from Liverpool.
In that sense, either a definitive announcement now that Moyes will be given the next 12 months to secure Europe or leaving the question of his future unresolved going into the 2026/27 season would be preferable to the angst and frustration should Everton struggle again in the market and suffer another middling start to the new campaign.
Either way, unless the Blues have a spectacular close season and make a flying start in August, the calls for change while other clubs appear, at least, to be more decisive and ambitious are likely to remain.
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