Angus Kinnear has spent the last week telling us, and presumably transfer targets – that this is a club with European ambitions and chasing trophies. Four days after an opening-day win, David Moyes is talking relegation. Again. The gap between the two messages is stark.
Asked on Tuesday about the importance of the cup competitions, Moyes did not dismiss them. He was, if anything, irritated at the suggestion that he might.
He called the question one that every journalist asks every manager, wondered aloud whether those journalists were “dead stupid,” and pointed out that no manager alive doesn’t want to win a cup.
He described the competitions as hugely important.
I can’t believe my ears. Me Negative. pic.twitter.com/KMEATxVmfD
— All Everton (@AIlEverton) August 25, 2026
He has hinted he will not repeat the wholesale rotation that saw Everton beaten at Wolves in this competition last season. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall said after the Crystal Palace win that the message behind the scenes has been to go deep.
So this is not a manager waving the white flag.
The problem is that to argue the cups matter, Moyes had to weigh them against something – and the thing he reached for, instantly, unprompted, was the one subject nobody in the room had raised.
“Would it be more important than staying in the Premier League?”
Nobody had asked him about the Premier League.
Nobody had asked him about staying in it.
He was being asked about the Carabao Cup, four days after his side had beaten Crystal Palace 2-0 on the opening weekend, at a club that has finished closer to Europe than relegation in each of the last three Premier League seasons.
Check it against the table rather than the PTSD.
2025/26: 13th, 49 points ten points clear of 18th.
2024/25: 13th, 48 points twenty-three points clear of 18th.
2023/24: 12th*, 48 points won on the pitch, twenty-two points clear of 18th. Twelve short of Newcastle in seventh.
So when Moyes reaches for staying in the Premier League as his benchmark, he is describing a version of Everton that has not existed on merit for three years.
The circumstances have changed. The expectations have changed. The reference point needs to change too.
Relegation was the least relevant subject in the room.
Of course staying in the Premier League matters more than winning the Carabao Cup. Nobody is seriously arguing otherwise.
The question is why that, unpromoted, needed to be the comparison at all.
“Is winning a cup more important than qualifying for Europe?” does exactly the same rhetorical work.
It shuts down the lazy question just as effectively. It makes the same point about competing priorities. It is the comparator a manager at a club with Everton’s stated targets should reach for.
He didn’t reach for it.
And that say’s a lot.
What the club says the season is for
We are not guessing at Everton’s ambitions.
The chief executive has spelled them out in public within the last fortnight: compete for Europe in the league, and challenge for a trophy that would otherwise end a 32-year wait.
Kinnear pointed to Newcastle and Crystal Palace as proof that clubs of Everton’s stature can win things, and confirmed there have been direct conversations with ownership and with Moyes about how the Carabao Cup and the FA Cup are used.
The Friedkin Group regarded missing out on Europe last season as a failure.
Days later, the manager is talking up survival, unprompted, as the benchmark against which everything else is measured.
That’s the disconnect.
This isn’t a one-off
Rewind to February 2025, before the FA Cup tie with Bournemouth.
Asked about balancing the league and the cup, Moyes said the biggest importance was to be a Premier League club, before pivoting to giving supporters a day out.
Same construction.
Same instinct.
At two very different points in the club’s trajectory.
The defence, and why it only goes so far
When Moyes arrived in January 2025, Everton had 17 points from 19 games and were 16th in the Premier League. They were only a few points clear of the relegation places, so survival quite reasonably became the immediate priority. Eighteenth ultimately went down with 25 points, meaning Moyes’ team needed just eight more points from their remaining 19 matches to reach safety.
But that was a stadium ago.
It was before a club-record spend. Before the CEO started relaying ownership views of 13th as failure.
If the reference point hasn’t moved with the club, that isn’t a defence – that’s the argument.
And supporters are entitled to ask whether the manager’s expectations have moved with it.
That tension was already being picked up by supporters before Moyes’ latest comments.
As ToffeeTim put it on the forum on Friday:
“TFG and Kinnear cannot keep claiming this is an ambitious club while backing a manager intent on downplaying expectations at every opportunity.”
That’s a supporter’s view, of course. But it captures the contradiction at the heart of this.
Everton’s CEO is telling us to look up.
Moyes is telling us the floor still matters most.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
But when the question was about winning a cup, nobody asked him about relegation.
He brought it up himself.