Is Everton’s Strategic Review Working One Year In?

From “strategic reviews of the football structure” to “root and branch assessments of all operations to shape and guide structure, process and culture,” Everton Football Club has boldly announced its attempts to get back on the right track.

Kevin Thelwell was hired as a director of football at the end of February 2022. He replaced Marcel Brands who left the same role at the end of 2021, having seemingly been hampered by those above him when trying to carry out his role but also joined them on the club’s board towards the end of his tenure.

Thelwell has revamped the structure behind the scenes including making new appointments in roles such as academy director, head of sports science, head of academy coaching, set piece performance analyst, head of recruitment, and other recruitment-related roles.

Recruitment of players for the first team, and indeed first team results, are the most visible way for supporters and other spectators to assess how this restructuring is faring. So far, it is not convincing.

One immediate problem for Thelwell is that he didn’t appoint the first team manager, Frank Lampard, who arrived at the club a month earlier.

CEO Denise Barrett-Baxendale commented following Lampard’s hiring in January 2022: “Frank fits everything we are looking for as we build for the future—and as we seek to immediately improve our form and results in the second half of our [2021/22] season.”

At the end of that season Everton narrowly avoided relegation thanks to a huge effort from their fans, especially at home at Goodison Park.

The relationship between the director of football and the manager is an important part of the whole recruitment process. Players should be identified to suit both a style of play and the needs of the manager in order to make the first-team squad as effective as possible on the field.

This is much easier when the director of football themselves have appointed the manager, as that allows them to find a manager or head coach who matches their preferred style—a preferred way of playing that presumably will have been decided upon during the root and branch strategic review of football operations.

Everton did this the wrong way around, appointing the manager first and then the director of football. Despite this, there are no obvious signs of any clashes between Thelwell and Lampard, but neither are there obvious signs of an emerging playing style, yet.

It’s around this time, with one transfer window already behind them and another about to open, that the results of such wholesale changes should be starting to show in the first team, in that aforementioned most visible form for spectators.

Since Thelwell’s arrival, Everton has not only revamped their backroom staff, but they have also signed eight first-team players. James Tarkowski, Dwight McNeil, Amadou Onana, Neal Maupay, James Garner, and Idrissa Gueye all arrived on permanent transfers, while Rúben Vinagre and Conor Coady came in on loan.

The football transfers website Transfermarkt lists the total spend on those players at $83 million with around $62 million coming in from the sale of Richarlison. The wage bill continued to be trimmed with the daparture of players such as Cenk Tosun, Allan, and Fabian Delph, continuing a process that had started—however unharmoniously—under Brands and previous manager Rafa Benitez.

Those new signings under the Thelwell-Lampard leadership add up to just three short of a full team’s worth. Regardless of net spend or total spend, this should be enough for the club to show some kind of improvement or at least some kind of direction on the field, but any such signs are struggling to show themselves above the surface, on the field, at this moment in time.

This list of players does not include the signing of Dele Alli, made just after Lampard’s arrival and signed off by the new manager at the time. It is safe to say that Alli’s signing was not a success, and though he arrived pre-Thelwell, it is telling, perhaps slightly worrying, that such an unsuitable signing was made while there was advice and assistance coming in from external consultants who helped put together the strategic review from which Thelwell is now working.

Every transfer window feels like it is a big one for Everton, but the next two are particularly important for the new structure, for Thelwell, and especially for Lampard. It is always the manager who falls first, rightly or wrongly, and this is not helped by the fact the new director of football tasked with implementing the review, didn’t appoint the manager.

The new year should be when the branches begin to show as a result of the roots put in place following these wholesale changes at Everton.

It is now more than a year since the club announced the undertaking of a strategic review. The answer to the question of whether it is working or not, is that we don’t really know, which in itself could be an indication that it is not working.

These things take time, though, and the rot at the club ran so deep it cannot be fixed overnight or in one transfer window or in one year. It is not unreasonable to expect more indications that it is beginning to work, though, and few such signs exist on the field for fans to see at this moment in time.

This is the challenge now facing Lampard, and he has almost a new team’s worth of players and a new structure behind him in order to attempt it, but even if he fails, like Everton managers before him, it would not be all on him.

The challenge facing Thelwell is to stop this from being the case in the future, but even if he fails, like Everton directors of football before him, it would not be all on him.