As Everton fans prepared to bid an emotional farewell to Goodison Park, David Moyes offered up a rare dose of positivity and an even scarcer message of hope.
The Scot’s reputation for downplaying expectations had earned a nickname of ‘Dithering Dave’ which long preceded his return to the hot seat in January 2025. But Moyes managed to strike the right note after the final Everton men’s first team match at their spiritual home with a genuine mission statement.
“This club felt like, to me, one which was a big family but looked broken, felt broken – and it doesn’t feel like that anymore,” he began. “I hope the owners are recognising what they’re seeing today as well, because this is to be built up, brought back and get us back to where we belong - and where we believe we should be. There are 100 players here today who played in some great games here and have been in some great teams. We have to now try to make that happen again.”
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Everton owners’ greed is destroying the club
Barely 15 months since that rousing on-field address, life in the blue half of Merseyside has again become fractured following a summer transfer window underpinned by worryingly familiar traits of deception and dismay for royal-blue devotees.
When owners the Friedkin Group (TFG) pitched up, just six months before the Toffees made the move to Hill Dickinson Stadium, they arrived with the usual promises of a brighter tomorrow. Head honcho Dan Friedkin pledged to ‘contribute positively’ to the club’s history and strong local identity while executive chairman Marc Watts vowed the Americans would ‘usher Everton into a new era, one that is marked by ambition and professionalism’. This summer made a total mockery of those boastful soundbites.
A fortnight after Angus Kinnear publicly assured hand-picked fan media that the club was finally back on a firm financial footing, TFG well and truly shattered that illusion.
The CEO's previous claims of a 'two-summer window plan' have also fallen by the wayside as surreptitious attempts to sell homegrown star Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest, only scrapped after fan backlash at Bournemouth, marked the start of a chaotic countdown to the end of the market.
Attempts to pin the entire saga on the owners affords them far too much credit on knowing the value players within the current squad could fetch, especially with Armstrong still only a peripheral figure despite the growing fanfare around his clear potential.
An established light-touch approach to life at Hill Dickinson Stadium precluded them from making such calls without a helping hand from the likes of Kinnear and recruitment chief Nick Cox.
Moyes’s squad is now alarmingly paper-thin until January with just 18 established outfield players at his disposal, including Thierno Barry as their sole recognised striker.
They ranked 18th for net spend in the Premier League, at a time when eye-watering amounts were sloshing about, while holding an equally dubious honour of the lowest squad value from all the top flight's 17 non-promoted teams.
Unlike his many predecessors, the likes of whom only broke their silences on transfer frustrations after leaving the job with the gift of hindsight and often creative licence, the manager remained forthright about Everton’s market shortcomings throughout a summer in when he took a rare step of not conducting media interviews until the last possible moment.
A late pursuit of Folarin Balogun ended in farcical fashion with the Monaco marksman walking away from formalities at Finch Farm in the final hours of deadline day. Prior to the United States international’s U-turn, Everton took a scattergun approach to alternatives; exploring a loan deal for Manchester United’s Joshua Zirkzee as well as Tammy Abraham at Aston Villa which failed to find favour with either party.
Iliman Ndiaye’s departure, joining Manchester City after a brief flirtation with Tottenham, was widely expected but his upfront £60m sale left a sour taste. Initial plans to offload the Senegal international to north London for an identical fee were offset by the prospect of Richarlison returning to his former club in a £35m deal - the exact figure he had cost eight years prior, without the added tax of injuries or advancing age. Another loan spell for Jack Grealish, returning from the Etihad Stadium for a second summer, did little to soften the blow of losing Everton’s most potent attacking source in recent times.
More than £100m was recouped in player sales on the final day of the window, almost double what Everton spent throughout the entire summer. It was asset stripping on an industrial scale and comparable with the January 2023 window that marked the beginning of the end for Farhad Moshiri's ruinous premiership.
Suspicions that Friedkin and his son Ryan saw a financially troubled yet consistently top flight club with an impressive new stadium on the horizon and sensed an opportunity to sweat the asset are becoming increasingly inescapable for many supporters. Instead of offering accountability for a botched recruitment strategy, the hierarchy has doubled down on a collective vow of silence while the absentee owners have already embarked on sounding out potential investors to dilute their near-total shareholding.
The approach is in stark contrast to their continued handling of AS Roma, where they remain far from beloved. Fans in the Eternal City have told them to ‘go home’ during routine periods of tumult, yet that abrasive relationship appears to only have strengthened their resolve to address concerns head-on and often in person. Every cough and sneeze emanating from Trigoria prompts swift intervention, especially in the season when the Giallorossi endured a three-manager turnover during 2024/25.
Successive point deductions for breaching the Premier League’s now defunct Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) forearmed Evertonians from falling into the trap of believing that spending would be endless under the group who succeeded the perennially aloof Moshiri. But even those realistic expectations have not been met by an ownership whose priorities clearly lie away from the banks of the Mersey, with plans to launch an NHL franchise in their native Texas to sit within an already skewed sporting portfolio.
American owners are, by nature, ruthless operators but the Friedkins have taken that vulture capitalism to new levels. Kinnear’s declaration that his superiors are ‘winners’ lack credible evidence in their handling of a club with sizeable potential and an equally fervent fanbase, as they will have seen at the Vitality Stadium last weekend. Travelling supporters warned on the South Coast that their transatlantic overlords would have ‘a riot’ on their hands if Armstrong was sold from under their noses but the threat of uproar is not going away anytime soon.
Atmosphere group The 1878s have already confirmed pre-match displays for home matches will be 'stood down' for the foreseeable future in light of the recent transfer shambles while others are threatening to make a small dent in Hill Dickinson Stadium's profit margins by refusing to spend a penny inside, starting with Sunday afternoon's visit of Manchester United.
Healing the current division lies squarely at the feet of the Friedkins as well as those they have delegated to run Everton, very poorly it must be said, in their absence. This week’s events suggest that neither have the stomach to fix the mess that they created.
