Everton manager 'list' highlights Friedkin takeover dilemma after Sean Dyche admission

Predecessor Frank Lampard never recovered from a December home fixture against Wolverhampton Wanderers, so Sean Dyche must hope he is made of sterner stuff. The Everton boss has been speaking a lot recently about the ghosts of Christmas past that he inherited in his role but like in Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s those ghosts of Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come that are haunting loyal but long suffering Evertonians.

Following their previous home game against Brentford when his side failed to break down their opponents who had been reduced to 10 men for over half the match with a goalless draw, handing the Londoners their first away point of the season, Dyche himself admitted: “We’re not winning as many as we should be.” And since then of course the team have suffered a 4-0 shellacking at Manchester United, regardless of whether he wants to dispute if it was a 'collapse' or not.

This correspondent stuck his neck out when many were calling for Dyche’s head after the 6-0 defeat at Chelsea on April 15, cautioning that continuing the managerial churn to look for a ninth incumbent of the home dugout at Goodison Park in eight years was not the answer.

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With Everton responding with a hat-trick of victories in a week – including a first Merseyside Derby success in front of fans for 13-and-a-half years – to secure Premier League survival before the final month of the campaign for the first time since 2021, despite the abuse I received from some quarters, I felt totally vindicated in my coverage.

Despite having to endure the unprecedented strains of two separate points deductions and a club record winless run in the Premier League that saw the Blues fail to taste victory between Christmas and Easter, Everton finished the season with what was an ‘on-the-field’ points tally that matched 11th-placed Brighton & Hove Albion, an upwardly mobile outfit rightly lauded for the way they have established themselves in recent times through canny off-the-pitch stewardship.

After enjoying what was generally viewed as a positive summer transfer window by relative standards given the tough financial landscape the club was operating in, hopes were high that the team could kick on this term.

Director of football Kevin Thelwell hinted that any further potential PSR woes had been offset by the sales of Lewis Dobbin and Ben Godfrey; half a dozen new faces added thanks to the sale of Amadou Onana, who had not even started any of those three wins in a week that kept Everton up; and arguably even more importantly, the services of both Jarrad Branthwaite and Dominic Calvert-Lewin were retained. With some more expansive options added to the squad, the mood music for Goodison Park’s historic final season was finally playing a cheery tune after the funeral marches of the three previous fraught campaigns.

Unfortunately, the diverging directions of Everton and Brighton, supposed equals so recently, was highlighted on the opening day as the Seagulls triumphed 3-0 at Goodison and the result set the tone for both clubs. Brighton currently sit just two points shy of second-placed Arsenal in the table but Everton could see Wolves jump out of the relegation zone and leapfrog them should they lose tonight.

Last season’s (on the pitch) points per game average for the Blues was 1.26. Despite having what the statisticians calculated was the ‘easiest’ start this term, with more of those daunting December fixtures lying ahead, Dyche’s men have so far averaged just 0.85.

Even their paltry 12 goals from open play this calendar year was averaging one a month. Everton didn’t find the net once in November. though, and they carried that on with a fourth consecutive blank at Old Trafford.

Nobody was naive enough to expect a vintage year but after all the turmoil of recent times, all that beleaguered Blues wanted from this season was an end to the sleepless nights and a chance to appreciate the first purpose-built football ground in the country during her final days. However, the team’s failure to either entertain on the pitch or deliver with results – there has been just one home win to cheer so far against Crystal Palace and that was far from convincing after the hosts were awful in the first half – has brought us to yet another winter of discontent.

Nobody, either in the stands or in the Goodison boardroom, should want to change partners midway through ‘the last dance’ with the Grand Old Lady. But like all managers Dyche knows he is judged on results and as stated earlier, by his own admission, they are not winning enough matches so speculation comes with the territory. That's especially when the keys to the castle are poised to be handed over to a Texan billionaire who is already on his fourth head coach this year at Roma, having hired and fired Jose Mourinho before sacking the Serie A outfit’s club legend Daniele De Rossi plus Ivan Juric before being forced to coax a 73-year-old Claudio Ranieri out of retirement to try and steady the ship.

A glance at the names on a bookmakers’ list for the odds over the next permanent Everton manager show just what a difficult dilemma the Friedkin Group are potentially walking into as they hope to complete a takeover of the Blues before we sit down for our turkey. Gambling.com have created a market on who could potentially replace Dyche and for all the issues surrounding the 53-year-old who is now the longest-serving manager of the Farhad Moshiri era – perhaps a hollow boast akin to being the tallest of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs – it’s generally a pretty uninspiring list.

Seemingly for no reason other than he’s the most recently employed out of work Premier League manager, former Liverpool academy coach Steve Cooper, sacked last month by newly promoted Leicester City after just a dozen matches, having also been given the bullet last season by Nottingham Forest, who have since come on leaps and bounds under Nuno Espirito Santo, incredibly somehow finds himself as 8/5 favourite. For old times’ sake, David Moyes is second at 7/4, and is arguably the only name you could mention with a straight face given his previous achievements at Everton.

However, the old adage in football is that you should never go back and while the Scot himself debunked that theory at West Ham United, steering them to a first major trophy in 43 years in his second spell, his first tenure was so short, it changed the whole dynamic of that idea. In contrast, while Blues legend Howard Kendall had a 16-year gap between the start of his first and third Goodison Park tenures, it’s now almost 23 years since Moyes was appointed Everton manager back in March 2002.

Next up is Burnley’s Scott Parker (9/4) who is again going well in the Championship but after taking big-spending Fulham down in 2021, he was dismissed by Bournemouth in August 2022 after a 9-0 walloping to Liverpool at Anfield. Graham Potter (5/2) is someone else who benefitted from the slick Brighton model but after being chewed up and spat out by Chelsea, the fear must be whether he’s mentally scarred ahead of potentially stepping into the Merseyside football cauldron.

Middlesbrough’s Michael Carrick (3/1) and West Bromwich Albion’s Carlos Corberan (8/1), the latter previously spoken about as being someone Thelwell supposedly admires, are both at similar stages of their careers as Moyes when he came in over two decades ago, but would Everton take such a risk with a manager having no Premier League experience at such a pivotal but delicate moment in the club’s history? Between those two, you have former England manager Gareth Southgate (4/1), a failure at club level before landing the Three Lions job, having taken Middlesbrough down; and Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder (6/1), who was unable to stop the rot at Sheffield United last season as they also suffered relegation with a record 104 goals conceded and the third lowest points total (16) in the competition’s history.

After them, it really is scraping the barrel as the names are Kjetil Knutsen (9/1), who I must confess I had to Google, who is a 56-year-old Norwegian in charge of Bodo/Glimt, who like Everton have been beaten by Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United at Old Trafford over the past week, although they did hit Friedkin’s Roma for six in a European game under Mourinho. Somebody it seems also has a wicked sense of humour because bringing up the rear are failed former Everton manager and Kop Idol, Rafael Benitez (12/1) and Erik ten Hag (14/1) fresh from getting the axe by the Red Devils.

Another significant issue here is that the task this season could be very different for the brief next term when Everton move into their 52,888 capacity new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock to embark on what they hope will be a bright new dawn. Dyche’s current contract expires next summer and having insisted he wanted to stay on and lead the club to the Mersey waterfront after the Friedkin takeover deal was first announced, his pitch for the job has so far not gone to plan.

As Everton fan and author Jim Keoghan remarked on X after the 4-0 loss at Manchester United: “The deal with Dyche was an acceptance that we’d sacrifice creativity for robustness. And with that have security.” The strength of that ‘deal’ could become clearer one way or another in the coming days after tonight’s crucial fixture ahead of Saturday’s last ever league derby at Goodison.