ToffeeWeb

Hi Stan. Fair points.

I was going from memory and was out of date.

On the wage bill – you’re right we’re 11th. About £45m from Newcastle in 9th. About £30m from Burnley in 20th.

In terms of the spend, I was also slightly out. We were 15th out of 20 last season, not 14th. It looks different with net spend, yes, but obviously that is skewed when you have nothing of value to sell. Lots of clubs run a side-operation in trading players these days, to free up room to spend more on first team. We’re not there yet.

My point, if that was unclear, was about how the owners might be viewing all of this.

I expect they’d take the chronic under investment since 2021 into account – and not just this years’ financials. I also expect they will look at the table and note that we were 2 wins of 7th (and Europe) and 2 defeats off 17th. There wasn’t a huge amount to choose between about 10 clubs.

Whatever the case, we don’t really stand out as having underperformed relative to investment (like the RS, Chelsea, Spurs, Forest and West Ham) or overperformed (like Villa, Bournemouth, Sunderland and Brentford).

It might appear ambitious to sack the manager – but it’s all a bit illusory if it isn’t matched with spending. That’s why I said spending levels is a better indicator of (short term) ambition than the managerial appointment. Moyes only has a year left in any case.

Would I like another season with Moyes? Not really no. It’s boring. But if we spend a decent wedge this summer then even with Moyes we should be much better placed to play some decent football and kick on.

#4 Rob

I like Charly. He is erratic but I think he should have played more, as I write in the piece.

But he scored 1 goal (v Mansfield) and provided 1 assist, and doesn’t rank highly for anything else and in most of the (brief) cameos he had, didn’t do much.

Not sure I can give him higher?

#5 Rob

I was actually having to hold back on the negativity, but that was the end of the season rubbing off on me I think.

Everton had the sixth-worst expected goals against figure in the league. They gave up chances for fun. They conceded at least 2 goals in each of their last 7 games. I don’t think any of them deserved anything above a C, bar Pickford, who as some have said did start to drop off too.

Branthwaite, had he stayed fit, would of course probably have been higher, but the injury has to be factored in.

Do you consider KDH to be a very top player Raymond?

Looks like the flash in the pan,inexperienced,flavour of the month manager is signing for liverpool.
Deffo not good enough for us though.