Money Talks

So the Brands - Silva partnership has kicked off in earnest, with our first signing. We have bought a player with potential, a player with Premier League experience, a player who the manager knows well. Sounds good… except the reaction from many on Toffeeweb, on the street, and in the mainstream press has been dubious at best. Much of this pessimism extends from recent transfer windows. The Moshiri era has left a lot of us feeling like lottery winners who invested in a Ponzi scheme. So can the singing of Richarlison inject some life force into the upcoming season?

We Evertonians have had nearly 30 years of transfer anonymity. We (briefly) broke the British transfer record to sign Tony Cottee, a year before I was born, and my dad sat me down for my first game, a 6-2 drubbing by Aston Villa that set my despair threshold as high as it needs to be as a Blue. Since then and bar a couple of exciting transfers – Kanchelskis springs to mind – we have been used to selling to buy. Rather than worrying about money that we have spent, we’ve had years of wondering where the Arteta money went.

Well, that riddle has finally been solved… it was a premeditated £10 million loss on Davy Klaassen. We have gone from scraping loose change behind the sofa to throwing money at mediocrity. Our scattergun approach last summer left us with three Number 10s, no quality cover in key positions, and a squad sorely lacking in… well, pretty much everything. It is no wonder, then, that fans are dubious. As the fare on the pitch has grown more stale, fans have become fluent in SkySportsSpeak, chuntering away about sell-on clauses, bonus payments and more.

Under the stewardship of Marcel Brands, we have started off with a player with potential who, as Lyndon points out in his article, was in great form until a glut of games, extra attention and a change in manager lessened his impact. It is a change in tack from Steve Walsh, who advocated some rather obvious buys at inflated fees. Only Pickford could be said to have increased in value and so it is only right that we are cautious when it comes to fees around the £30 million mark. Yet to spend around £40 million on potential still feels like a risk, with recent big signings like Bolasie, Schneiderlin and Keane showing that big fees do not equate to success.

It should be remembered, however, that this is a different era for football; we signed Tim Cahill for £1.5 million from the Championship, whilst nowadays Derby County and Sheffield Utd are considering splurging £8 million on Martyn Waghorn, a 28-year-old journeyman striker who scored a few for Ipswich last season. Southampton have brought in Angus Gunn from Man City for £10 million, while Danny Ward has left Liverpool for a cool £12 million from Leicester City. You are talking about two goalkeepers in the John Ruddy - Iain Turner variety, who have hardly pulled up trees.

Adam Rooney – no relation to the prodigal son – has signed for Salford United (a rather grotesque conglomerate of people from the 90s that we all loathe) for a big fee and wages of £5k a week. For a non-league side... Yes, it’s crazy; yes, it raises moral questions; and yes, it makes you wonder if we are going to get some Candy Crush branding on Niasse’s snood come Christmas, but it’s the way it is. We all love the game, and we are willing investors in the mania. And yet our recent investments still leave visible scars – a Sandro on huge wages here, a smug Ashley Williams there... But it could be worse.

As a kid growing up in the shadow of the ’80s glory years, I would spend mornings waking up, checking teletext to see who we hadn’t bought. I would watch young talent leave through one door and watch Mickaël Madar stroll into obscurity through the other. If you’d have told me, after relegation near misses and years of hapless financial mismanagement, that not only would we be pretty firmly entrenched in the top half of the league, but buying a hot young Brazilian thing for anywhere around £40 million, I would bite your hand off and call you Rodrigo.

Let’s give him – and the new management team – a chance. Let’s stay positive, let’s make Goodison a fortress, let’s press, harry, play and produce. Let’s beat the Red Shite. Let’s laugh about the time we were angsty about which defender we bought from Barcelona. Let’s play Angry Birds.

Reader Comments (6)

Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer

About these ads