Guardian writers’ predicted position: 7th (NB: this is not necessarily Andy Hunter’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 8th

Odds to win the league (via Oddschecker): 250-1

“A big project and a big challenge for us as a technical staff” was how Marco Silva described his new job at Everton eight weeks ago. The scale of the challenge has been exposed before the Premier League season begins. As for the big project Farhad Moshiri envisaged when he bought into the club two years ago, the realisation is further away than ever.

Everton have serious problems as a team and club at the start of yet another new era, this one with Silva and the director of football, Marcel Brands, the latter lured from PSV Eindhoven after helping the Dutch side lift three Eredivisie titles in four seasons.

The summer has yielded more worrying performances than necessary additions to a flawed squad. Richarlison, signed from Silva’s former club Watford for a princely £40m, and the Barcelona left-back Lucas Digne are the only new faces. The need for more was underlined during heavy pre-season defeats against the Championship newcomers Blackburn Rovers and the French side Rennes. Neither slow transfer business nor poor performances constitute a surprise, however. They are as Brands predicted.

“I will try to build a structure for a long-term relationship,” said the influential 56-year-old in June. “It will go step by step and it will not go every time as everyone wants, but finally we will achieve the goals we want.” A priority, he admitted, was to drastically reduce an inflated wage bill and a squad of 38 players.

Cleaning up the mess of the damaging Ronald Koeman/Steve Walsh era has consumed the summer. It has been a trying process, with players such as Davy Klaassen having been on a contract worth over £100,000 a week, and it is far from complete.

A recovery could be painfully slow and patience has not been a virtue of Moshiri or exasperated fans in recent years. Silva’s supply appears limited, too. The 40-year-old’s head was turned by Everton four months into his debut season at Watford and he has not spent more than a year at any of his past four clubs. Yet he must restore stability and unity while improving players he has inherited, a basic requirement that has proven beyond Everton’s recent managers.

The high managerial turnover – Silva’s is the fifth voice Everton players will have heard in just over two years if David Unsworth’s caretaker reign is included – has inevitably left a disjointed and uncertain team.

For the second summer in succession Everton have parted company with their leading goalscorer and not replaced him. Last year it was Romelu Lukaku and now Wayne Rooney, for reasons the former England captain is clearly unhappy about. Rooney may not have been as crucial as the Belgium striker to Everton’s style of play or chances of challenging the leading pack, but his 11 goals and an intelligence on the ball that few teammates could rival vindicated the decision to return to his boyhood club.

True, his goals all arrived before Christmas and at times it appeared Koeman, Unsworth and Sam Allardyce were trying to shoe-horn him into imbalanced teams. But, as with Lukaku, the qualities he brought have not been replaced.

Rooney and his agent, Paul Stretford, approached Moshiri towards the end of last season to discuss Everton activating the one-year option on his contract for 2019‑20. That may have been optimistic, albeit necessary when planning the future, but the pair were taken aback by Moshiri’s response that he had received several offers for Rooney and they should consider them. Cutting the wage bill was again at play, with Rooney earning £150,000-a-week from Everton before moving to DC United on a three-year deal with no transfer fee involved.

Goalscoring has been a long-term problem and the onus will be on Cenk Tosun, an Allardyce purchase, to show not only why he was signed for up to £27m from Besiktas but that he meets Silva’s requirements for a front man. The only alternatives are Oumar Niasse, Sandro Ramírez and Dominic Calvert-Lewin, the latter one of several young players Everton must hope will only benefit from last season’s gruelling experience.

The four strikers scored a combined 17 league goals last season. Richarlison, Theo Walcott and Ademola Lookman, providing he stays having enjoyed a successful loan spell at RB Leipzig last season, must also improve Everton’s threat from the flanks.

The same applies to Gylfi Sigurdsson in the No 10 role. The Iceland international had a mediocre campaign following his club record £45m arrival from Swansea, although being played out of position on the left by Koeman, an unfathomable decision by a manager obsessed with making Sigurdsson a vital cog in his team last summer, offers ample mitigation. With Rooney and Klaassen sold, the Dutchman for half the £24m Everton paid Ajax last summer– another disastrous Koeman decision – the path is clear for Sigurdsson to become what his former manager envisaged and the club paid for.

Throughout the spine of the team there are deficiencies – with the notable exception of the England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford – but it is Silva’s defensive options that explain his desire to strengthen both at left-back and in central defence.

Digne’s former Barcelona team-mate Yerry Mina has been targeted but, as things stand, it is not unrealistic to expect Everton to start the season with 75% of a David Moyes’ back line in Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka and Seamus Coleman. Outstanding servants all but Baines is 33, Jagielka turns 36 on 17 August and Coleman enters his 30s in October. It is a credit to Moyes’s signings that they remain the best players in their respective positions at the club – Digne will have to show otherwise – but also damns previous attempts to rebuild.

It is also a vulnerable foundation, one easily exposed by pace and also hinders a manager’s wish to play a high line. Michael Keane has not demonstrated he can help correct those flaws since his £30m move from Burnley last summer.

Team spirit and a connection between the fans and players is also lacking at Goodison. Managerial upheaval is not the only contributory factor. The completely joyless football served up during Allardyce’s brief reign was a major cause of the disconnect last season. That appointment turned out as badly as the vast majority at Everton expected.

The worrying exceptions were Moshiri and two members of the board who have taken on more prominent positions after a boardroom reshuffle this summer, Sasha Ryazantsev and Keith Harris. The one-game England manager’s style on and off the pitch alienated him from the Goodison crowd but there was no argument with Coleman’s withering assessment in June that the players were also responsible for Everton’s regression.

“It’s always very easy for us players to hide behind the manager,” the Republic of Ireland captain said. “We’ve had three or four now, and maybe we’ve been getting away from some of the stick that’s been flying around because it’s been on the manager be it Roberto [Martínez], Ronald, Sam, Moyesie before that. It’s about time us players step up to the plate. We’ve not been close to winning anything for a very long time.”

By the end of this season it will be 24 years since Everton won a trophy. That would equal the worst drought in the club’s history, set between 1939 and 1963, and the second world war accounted for six of those years. Silva’s challenge appears formidable.