da heads bet： It’s all about how they gel. After making nine signings this summer, it’s only natural that Everton would suffer problems on that front, but so far this season, things haven’t looked too bad.
da bwin： After the sale of Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United, the Toffees had money to play with, and they seem to have spent it totally overhauling their squad.
Much to the delight of Everton fans, however they’ve invested in young English talent and looked to strengthen the spine of the team with players who all seem to fit with a certain way of playing, and one that will probably be different to what went last season.
Last year, with Lukaku and Ross Barkley – who won’t now be leaving the club until January at the earliest, and who can, admittedly, still recover his place in the starting XI if he hasn’t already burned his bridges – Everton were something of a counter-attacking team. Set up with a pacey striker who looked to run in behind and who wasn’t as adept at holding the ball up to play with his back to goal and an attacking midfielder known for his ability to bring the ball from midfield into attack, they weren’t the most adept at possession football, despite being one of the top seven teams in the league. And being one of the top seven these days, given the gap between them and the rest of the league, means being forced to take the initiative in games.
This season, thanks to a summer in which Ronald Koeman seemingly had the idea of changing the style of Everton’s attacking output, we might see a more patient team take to the field at Goodison. The arrival of Davy Klaassen, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Sandro Ramirez means that the Toffees’ attack will be filled with creative players, rather than an attack based on counter-attacking power.
But what is probably the most impressive part of Everton’s transfer window this summer is how they went about their business. It may have taken a while to get the Gylfi Sigurdsson deal over the line, but most of the rest were done right at the start of the summer. And if they’d waited longer – as the deal with Swansea hints at – Everton may well have been parting with a great deal extra cash.
The transfer market has been inflated all summer. TV money in the Premier League has forced everyone to up their game, but about halfway through the summer things started to get silly. Neymar’s release clause was triggered by Paris Saint-Germain, and even though that’s a special case, every transfer fee began to be measured in relation to others.
Well, if Kyle Walker is worth £50m, then surely our player is worth just as much?
That’s something Everton avoided for the most part by doing business early. Davy Klaassen was signed for just over £20m, in a deal which now looks very reasonable indeed, whilst even Jordan Pickford and Michael Keane were bought for the kind of prices that may well have been inflated had Koeman waited until later. Manchester City couldn’t sign Jonny Evans because West Brom valued their defender too highly. If Burnley, for example, had been able to compare Michael Keane to his former Manchester United colleague Evans, presumably the price would have gone up.
And in this age of overspending and excess, it sometimes seems as though money is no object for Premier League sides. But in fact, value is still something that we should pay attention to. And this summer, Everton have managed to find that.
It will surely take a while for their new signings to gel, but the fact that Koeman and his backroom staff have been able to bring the average age of the squad down and assemble a squad which blends homegrown youth with some real quality should be heralded, especially given the money they’ve spent isn’t over the top.
The only gripe is surely the failure to add a prolific striker to the ranks to replace some of Lukaku’s goals. But all in all, Everton have had a pleasing window.