David Moyes is the ‘True Blue’ who has come in to save Everton’s historic final season at Goodison Park and oversee the move to the new stadium - but he’s also set to work trying to cure the club’s travel sickness. Just as he did when taking the reins in 2002 – forging an instant bond with the fanbase by dubbing Everton ‘The People’s Club’ – the Glaswegian has followed up a maiden home success with victory in his first fixture on the road.

Back then, Derby County were the fall guys as goals from David Unsworth, Alan Stubbs, Niclas Alexandersson and Duncan Ferguson secured a 4-3 win for the Blues at Pride Park. This time around it was a solitary strike from the penalty spot courtesy of Iliman Ndiaye that did the trick.

As the gaffer himself said on his return, it’s a different David Moyes and a different Everton. True, but he’s just picked up another three points all the same.

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Now the Rams hadn’t established themselves in the manner of Brighton & Hove Albion in recent times, but they had finished above the Blues in three of the previous five seasons. Twice champions of England, a club that has lifted the FA Cup and were founder members of the Football League alongside Everton in 1888, when none of the current so-called ‘Big Six’ or Newcastle United with their petrodollar-fuelled sovereign wealth fund of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia behind them, were involved, Derby have a long and rich pedigree in the game.

While they can’t get close to the Blues’ 122 seasons in English top-flight football, the East Midlanders have spent 65 campaigns in the elite division. For context, this is the Seagulls’ 12th at this level – Moyes himself has personally got more experience in the competition.

Yet where are Derby now and where have they been for many years? Brighton have quite rightly been receiving many plaudits in recent times for being the best-run club in the country.

Given the way they have established themselves in the Premier League, playing progressive football, unearthing gems, then selling them on for huge profits and reinvesting those funds back into the team to go again with new sets of stars, it’s a mantle that is richly deserved. It’s also an exemplar of how to operate a modern football business in sharp contrast to the dysfunctionality at Goodison Park where Farhad Moshiri squandered millions in the transfer market before being forced to draw in his horns, leading to a brace of points deductions for PSR breaches and a string of relegation battles.

Yet, despite Everton being at their lowest ebb, if it hadn’t had been for that double dose of sporting sanctions last season, they’d have finished level on points with the 11th placed Seagulls in the Premier League. Such ‘parity’ last May though was followed up by wildly contrasting approaches to the summer transfer window.

Transfermarkt calculates Brighton to have splashed out the biggest net spend of all Premier League clubs in 2024/25 with an outlay of approximately £164million while Everton had the lowest, turning around a trading profit of more than £28million. Perhaps it was such disparities that have prompted many of the Seagulls fans within the Amex Stadium on Saturday to appear so affronted by the Blues success in the game?

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Curiously, whether played on Merseyside or the Sussex coast, this fixture has favoured the away side in recent times with the visitors now undefeated in the last nine head-to-heads. Until they had triumphed 3-2 at Goodison Park on January 2, 2022, in what proved to be Rafael Benitez’s final home match in charge, Albion had waited 109 years to beat Everton in their own back yard from their first ever visit.

Yet fast-forward three more years and the natives at an outfit who have failed to win a major trophy in their 123-year existence were in uproar over losing at home to a club who – despite their current record-breaking drought – have lifted silverware across nine separate decades, a feat only surpassed by Manchester United and neighbours Liverpool. There are a lot of very good people at Brighton and this correspondent spoke to one before the game who has given them loyal service throughout the dark days of the Gillingham exile when, after the long-time home, the Goldstone Ground was sold, they endured a 150-mile round trip for home games over two years, and then the wilderness at the Withdean Stadium, a converted athletics venue, before their current home was built.

Like for Albion though, Everton’s upcoming move to their new stadium later this year can be a financial game-changer on and off the pitch and the start of a bright new dawn. But first of course it is imperative that the Blues get there intact as a Premier League club.

With just 17 points accrued in the first half of 2024/25 – less than 50% of their final total in 2022/23, which was the lowest equivalent tally in the club’s history as they avoided a first relegation in 72 years by a single goal on the final day of the season – things were looking bleak under Sean Dyche. Yet in little more than a week, Moyes has revived their fortunes dramatically to put clear daylight between Everton and the relegation zone with players and fans alike responding enthusiastically to his more positive approach.

Because the Seagulls have been run so efficiently, a rookie like Fabian Hurzeler, the first Premier League boss to be younger than the competition, can come into his job and enjoy instant success with relatively seamless transitions from Graham Potter to Roberto De Zerbi and now himself. At Everton though, it took a wily old campaigner like Moyes, a manager who guided them to nine top eight finishes, including a Premier League best of fourth in 2004/05, to hit the ground running for new owners The Friedkin Group in the current, testing conditions.

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Perhaps Hurzeler, who is younger than Everton captain James Tarkowski, and was still in primary school when Moyes was first winning Premier League matches, should show a bit more deference towards his elders then?

Speaking in his post-match press conference on Saturday evening, the 31-year-old was initially gracious when asked what he might learn from Moyes on a landmark occasion on which the 61-year-old became only the third manager to enter the Premier League’s 700-game club after legendary pair Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, replying: “It’s a big number. He has an impressive career so far, so there are always things you can learn from. I have a big respect for him and his achievements.

“To manage 700 games is a massive number and I’m just at the start, so, let’s see how it continues.”

However, when the same reporter came in with a follow-up question, suggesting Moyes might have used the wisdom of his experience to secure the three points, the Premier League’s most-youthful gaffer snorted and muttered: “Oh my...” before snapping back: “You can write it like this, but that was not the key for this game.”

Moyes is older, and as he says, hopefully wiser, but even when he was managing in the Premier League in his 30s, he wasn’t like that. Becoming a long-term success in the world’s toughest domestic division also entails having to deal with defeats in a dignified manner and that’s a lesson that Hurzeler and some others at Albion seemingly still have to learn.