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David Moyes' myriad of small changes has transformed Everton's season
By Alex Keble
Football
Mon February 17, 2025 · 1h ago
The disappearance of the new-manager bounce is a phenomenon that can be explained away, like most things in the Premier League, by the competition’s increasing wealth and status.
The technical and tactical quality in the division continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, and as it increases - insulating the established from the newly promoted - the psychological factors are of diminishing importance.
There is a structure to everything; so much fine-tuned detail in club-building that if the last manager couldn’t raise the bar the chances are the next one won’t be able to either, not without a summer transfer window.
From Ruben Amorim to Ruud van Nistelrooy, from Vitor Pereira to Graham Potter, new managers are finding their team is at exactly the right level for their current ability. There are no kind words or harsh ones that can lift them.
The Premier League is far too complex and intelligent for emotionality to dictate a rise or fall in the table.
Which brings us onto David Moyes, who has thrown all of that out of the window.
Everton have won 13 points from six matches under Moyes, compared to 17 points from 19 matches under Sean Dyche.
They only need four points from their next three league games to match their entire season total under Moyes’s predecessor in less than half the number of games.
It’s a credit to Moyes’s attention to detail and subtle tactical nous. But it’s an even bigger damnation of Dyche, a manager widely seen as doing a decent job by disinterested neutrals but loathed for a long time by Everton supporters forced to watch his dreary and regressive football.
Moyes has changed a lot, albeit you wouldn’t know it from listening to a mildly bemused pundit class or even if you poured through the statistics. That’s because we aren’t used to seeing one tactical philosophy replaced by a broadly similar approach, only better.
There is no wild swing easily visible to the half-watching eye or to the statistician finding patterns.
Instead, a myriad of small changes: keeping the ball on the ground for longer; taking care with possession; crossing less often; shifting the defensive line 15 yards further forward.
And, most of all, playing the best players.
Jake O’Brien was ignored by Dyche, starting a single Premier League game this season before Moyes took one look at him and decided he could do a job at right-back.
O’Brien has since been one of Everton’s most consistent performers.
Jesper Lindstrom was in the starting lineup for only eight of Dyche’s 19 league games this season but is already on four under Moyes.
His 1.49 chances created per 90 is second only to the injured Dwight McNeil, and the same goes for his 0.61 completed crosses per 90, making Lindstrom the new creative force in the Everton team.
Beto is reborn, revelling in a team that actually creates chances from open play; that doesn’t simply exist to strangle and survive.
He didn’t start a single league game under Dyche in 2024/25, but has now started each of the last four, scoring four goals in the process.
Along with James Garner (injured for most of the season under Dyche) and new signing Carlos Alcaraz, who scored one and assisted another on his league debut at Crystal Palace, that’s five players – or half the outfield team – who barely featured under Dyche just five weeks ago.
There aren’t normally quite so many good players hanging around the reserves. Premier League clubs tend to be far better run than that. That there suggests what we’re seeing here is the last of the dinosaurs; the extinction of that old-school clique who once came in to firefight through the spring.
That has to be the case for Everton, whose decision to cling on under Dyche was over-praised by onlookers and who, with a new stadium coming and Premier League life secured, must ensure the Dychian days are over.
Moyes has already shown the folly of trusting out-and-out defensive coaches in the modern game. Dyche was surely the last of them at Everton, and, quite possibly, the final one in Premier League history.
Fantastic article. I agree with every single word of it.
It feels good that an "outsider" can actually acknowledge all of this.