Everton behind the break | Maverick

Exactly a year ago, Everton It reached a state that fans of the club could describe as rock bottom. That was when Rafa Benitez, then the team’s sixth permanent manager in six years, got his walking papers after only a few months in charge. Everton were 15th in the Premier League at the time, had just sacked their director of football, and previously sold two of their most creative strikers while offering few reinforcements. This was a bad place for a storied and wealthy club like Everton to find themselves in, but things certainly couldn’t get any worse. Except they did: after Frank Lampard took over as manager in January, Everton Immerse yourself in the battle of relegation He barely survived thanks to A.J Exciting comeback win over Crystal Palace. Well, but that was as bad as things were going to get, right? right????

wrong! Everton are just a year away from Benitez’s stewardship, and this is where the team finds itself: bottom of the Premier League table, with just 15 points and 15 goals scored in 19 games. Everton have won just one of their last 13 games in all competitions and, since November, have lost three at home to teams entering the game bottom of the table. The latest of those losses came on Saturday against Southampton, where the Blues squandered a 1-0 half-time lead in inopportune fashion:

Just as bad as the loss was what happened before and after it. A few hours before kick-off, Club A statement was issued Pointing out that the Everton board of directors will not attend the match due to “concrete threats received by the club and the intelligence information we have collected.” a few minutes later, the liverpool echo published The article, quoting sources, told the paper that one of the Everton board members, Dennis Barrett-Baxendale, was “put into trouble” by a fan as she was leaving the Directors’ Box after losing 4-1 at home to Brighton on January 1. 3. (Merseyside Police since A statement was issued Saying that no threats or other incidents had been reported to them by the club prior to the Southampton match, when asked to provide further details about the lockout incident, the club A short statement was issued saying that it “will not make any comment relating to specific historical events.”)

After the game ended, a few thousand fans stayed inside Goodison Park to carry out a planned sit-down, which included Angry Pants unveiling a medley. Surprisingly lyrical banners Asking the club’s entire board of directors to step down.

The crowd’s anger eventually spilled into the streets outside the stadium, where A.J A few Everton players have been harassed while trying to get home from the game. One of the players, centre-back Yerry Mina, who did not play in the Southampton match, got out of his car and spoke to the fans for some time. He didn’t look like he was having a good time:

But wait there’s more! On the same day as the Southampton match, Watchman He published a story about the strange relationship with Everton With Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who was recently sanctioned by the UK government for his close relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was always known that Usmanov had a close relationship with Everton’s majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri, and after the sanctions the club had to cancel Lucrative sponsorship deal with Usmanov’s company, USM Holdings. But Watchman The story claims that Usmanov was more than just a wealthy patron of the club: according to the newspaper’s sources, he was present and involved in several of the team’s interviews for the manager’s vacancy last year, even telling one candidate that he was the actual owner of the club. Usmanov’s story is just another reason to worry about Everton’s financial condition – the club have been hemorrhaging money since Mahsiri took over in 2016, and he is currently Monitoring its spending by the English Premier LeagueHundreds of millions of pounds have been allocated for the costs of building a new stadium, which is scheduled to open the following season.

All this is enough to make any Everton fan’s head spin. This was never a club anyone expected to be one of the giants of the Premier League, but never was it expected to go down like this. What Everton lacked in the big games and top four finishes they should always make up for with quiet efficiency. This is a team that is meant to be defined by its ability to maximize resources, maintain a strong organizational identity, and foster a deep connection with its fan base. This is why last season’s relegation friction felt like an emergency, and why the relief expressed after the team’s flight was so overwhelming. This is not supposed to happen to us.

But maybe it is. Zoom out a bit, strip out the colors, name, and date, and just see what’s there. what do you see? You see a team that has spent the past six years going through managers with no idea what kind of recruiting or practice philosophy it wants to foster. You see such reckless spending that it is unclear if the club will be able to bring in reinforcements during such a pivotal transfer window, or even able to afford to sack their current manager. You see fans losing their minds while engaging in a PR war with the club’s hierarchy. In the middle of that is a beleaguered, overbearing manager who’s running out of ideas on what to do with an increasingly frustrated group of players. You see a path downward, built not by an unlucky break or two, but by years of persistent mismanagement.

Do you know what all this looks like? It appears to be a bad football team, not unlike any other that has previously seen its light extinguished by the most competitive league in the world. Observers are free to make whatever they want from the fact that Everton have been in the First Division since 1951, or that the club were founder members of the Football League in 1888, but the team’s history and legacy have no bearing. What is it now. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between an Everton fan and a Watford fan now, for example, because for more than half a decade there wasn’t much difference between the way Everton and Watford were run.

It is now clear that facing relegation last season was not the end of something, but the beginning. When the home side’s fans flooded onto the field after the 3-2 win over Crystal Palace, it was easy to get caught up in the moment and see brighter days ahead. This is Everton, after all! A club with this kind of history and pedigree would certainly not allow itself to end up in this position again. But history and lineage can’t balance the books, or suddenly empty incompetent decision-makers with a clear vision of success. It’s time for a file error idea Everton with what the club really is for a long time, and reality must be faced. The truth is, the worst club in the Premier League currently sits at the bottom of the table and looks poised for relegation. It happens to be called Everton, but that doesn’t really mean anything.