billyblue80
Player Valuation: £70m
Is Brands actually making the decision going off the names it sounds like Mosh and Kenwright are leading this again. Which doesn't make me hopeful.
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Bob Elstone
Player Valuation: £35m
Hopefully brands is better at finding a manager than he is at finding a centre back and a striker.
billyblue80
Player Valuation: £70m
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
If that muddle headedness is still there, suley it proves that he's failed in the time he;s been here to assert himself? And if it's that great a struggle to control Everton, why did he take the job up? Money is my guess.
JJK
Player Valuation: £5m
Anyone with a subscription able to paste this on here?Joyce sticking the boot in.
Time for Marcel Brands to prove he can lead Everton forward
In normal circumstances, a manager whose side were trailing 1-0 to the bottom club might look along his substitutes, spy the £25 million summer signing who has just scored his first goals of the season and believe he represented the most likely source of a comeback. However, these are different timewww.thetimes.co.uk
The job wasnt the most difficult one, it was to build a squad spending 250 mill in two years, to challenge for a Europa league place until we moved into the stadium.
Seems the more we spend and buy the worse we got, the squad just isnt balanced and hasn't gelled or look likes its progressed.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Exactly.
Moyes said it a few years ago: keep your best players and strengthen your squad by two each season. To be fair to him, he never had the luxury of keeping our better players.
This summer we should never have sold Gueye and we should have had nailed early in that window the CB we required and a striker who had a reputation and record for snapping up goals.
If he;d have done that we'd be ok right now.
The feller looks completely out of his depth and way too beholden to industry sharks. He just isn't the sharpest tool in the box.
Daytripper
Player Valuation: £40m
Don’t think it was well run before Farhad came in, I remember reading those Ian Ross emails and dysfunction was clearly evident then.
Does my head in mate, time and again we end up a laughing stock.
Its hard not to say its been a dogs dinner since hes been here, the upheaval in the summer of 18 was understandable as we had committed to a reboot, as was the sluggish start to the season, but from Feb - May we were purring and looked odds on to be the team to watch heading into 19.
It was clear what was needed, continuity and incremental improvements. What we got in the summer was every line in the team, defense, midfield and up front either tore asunder by the loss of a pivotal player or woefully misjudged in recruitment. Gueye, Zouma all lost and under recruitment in the forward position. We brought either potential or work in process players or head scathing players, over stocking some positions particularly wide areas and criminally under stocking in central defense and up front. How we manged to over complicate what was needed and make it worse by spending 100's of millions is beyond me.
Its undermined everything and where do we end up, of another total reboot, great!!!
Brand has to take his responsibility in all this, his work has completely undermined what looked like a steady ship to build on in May. Thats before we mention, we are about to publish our sorst set of accounts in our history and managed to spend more to get worse under his stewardship of recruitment.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Time for Marcel Brands to prove he can lead Everton forward
In normal circumstances, a manager whose side were trailing 1-0 to the bottom club might look along his substitutes, spy the £25 million summer signing who has just scored his first goals of the season and believe he represented the most likely source of a comeback. However, these are different time
www.thetimes.co.uk
Time for Marcel Brands to prove he can lead Everton forward
In normal circumstances, a manager whose side were trailing 1-0 to the bottom club might look along his substitutes, spy the £25 million summer signing who has just scored his first goals of the season and believe he represented the most likely source of a comeback.
However, these are different times at Everton and so in the 66th minute of Saturday’s defeat by Norwich City, Marco Silva brought on Seamus Coleman for Djibril Sidibé, right back for right back, and left Moise Kean kicking his heels on the sidelines.
Only 24 hours earlier, Silva had publicly described the forward, who had scored twice for Italy Under-21 last week — albeit against Armenia — as the “present and the future”.
Here, he was a nowhere man again.
Of course, it could simply be that, after replacing Morgan Schneiderlin with Alex Iwobi and deciding Dominic Calvert-Lewin would be replacing Theo Walcott, bringing on another offensive-minded player would have left Everton lopsided and susceptible. Or, more susceptible and more lopsided.
Yet those substitutions once again brought into focus the inner workings of the Merseyside club. How much Silva wanted to sign Kean in the summer and how much the deal with Juventus was the work of the director of football, Marcel Brands, who was unveiled on the same day in June 2018 as the man he must work alongside for the greater good and so inherited the appointment rather than making it.
Silva had an unrealistic fancy for Nicolas Pépé, whose £72 million price tag meant he was out of reach for a club which, at one point, was solely seeking to balance the books. He has hardly impressed since swapping Lille for Arsenal but, if by chance, Pépé had ended up at Goodison Park it is difficult to imagine Silva ignoring the claims of his own man.
And so while Silva squirms in an unforgiving spotlight, Everton’s continued struggle brings the input of Brands, who arrived from PSV Eindhoven, under scrutiny. Especially as he is central to what happens next at a club unravelling at the seams once more.
It is only a couple of weeks since Brands, 57, and Silva, 42, joined the first-team squad at a team-bonding meal. A few home truths were spoken by everyone present and a first away win of the season in the league at Southampton .
Then all it took was the international break for everything to fall apart again.
Brands’s career as a director of football suggests he does not usually make knee-jerk reactions. The Dutchman once spent four hours in a car with Louis van Gaal to talk him out of quitting AZ Alkmaar after a downturn in results [he had consulted senior players beforehand] and was rewarded as the club won the Eredivisie title the following year.
He is certainly not oblivious to the fragility at the heart of Everton’s squad, which would hamper any manager’s quest to make meaningful progress with the same resources.
Perhaps he privately shoulders some of the blame for that. If the challenge for Silva was to deliver European football this season, then effectively pinning hopes on a 19-year-old in Kean, who started only six matches for Juventus last season, to supply the goals was maybe not the most logical thinking.
Brands, of course, may argue the teenager has not been utilised properly.
The failure to sign a centre back to replace Kurt Zouma, who Chelsea insisted from early June would be staying after returning from a loan spell, was short-sighted. It made the decision to release Phil Jagielka, who could have been useful back-up, perplexing and makes playing out from the back more difficult.
Then there is Iwobi, who told The Times that his £30 million deadline-day move from Arsenal was negotiated while he was on a boat off the coast of Dubai. No medical for a multimillion-pound asset, just an exchange of records with a rival.
That last-minute trolley dash can happen when an owner like Farhad Moshiri is in charge, someone who wants to delve into deep pockets to support his manager even if the agreement with the rest of the board had been to keep the purse strings tight.
Then there is the story that has emerged of David Harrison, head of football operations, running through the streets of Barcelona on the final day of the 2018 summer transfer window searching for a lawyer in order to complete deals for Yerry Mina and André Gomes.
The sale of Idrissa Gueye, the club’s best player in the second half of last season, has been compounded by the injury of Jean-Philippe Gbamin, who has been restricted to only 135 minutes. The £25 million arrival from Mainz was another signing put forward by Brands.
The subsequent absence of Gomes with a broken ankle on top of that has been cruel.
Overall, the impact of Brands thus far sits uneasily with his reputation.
There is an apparent disconnect between the first team and the under-23s. They are on the same site at Finch Farm but “the academy may as well be in Hong Kong” was one verdict.
The atmosphere at the training ground is said to resemble a morgue and that was before the defeat by Norwich. Silva and his squad returned for training today after two days off.
There have been plenty of conversations among Everton’s hierarchy on the way forward over the past 48 hours and Brands’s position, and his promotion to the board within six months of his arrival, means he will have been central to them.
Stick or twist? With a run of fixtures that reads Leicester City-Liverpool-Chelsea-Manchester United-Leicester-Arsenal-Burnley about to kick in, there is an argument against exposing a new man too soon.
It is Brands’s job to formulate a plan to take the club forward. And right now that will mean working on, and updating, the list of potential managerial candidates he presumably started compiling last season when Everton won three league games between December 2 and February 9 and the board harboured reservations about Silva.
Since then, few managers have become available who would interest Everton. Mauricio Pochettino and Massimiliano Allegri appear out of reach for a club languishing in 16th position in the Premier League.
Ralf Rangnick? He guided RB Leipzig to a top-four finish in the Bundesliga last season, develops young players and is regarded by Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, as a big influence on his career and the high-octane football that has underpinned his success.
Against that obvious appeal is the fact that Rangnick, 61, was interviewed and overlooked for the Everton job in favour of Roberto Martínez when David Moyes left in 2013.
In addition, he has been a hugely successful director of football in his own right, knows how to build clubs — Manchester United recently tapped into his acumen rather than simply acquiring it — and so may be regarded as too strong a personality. A threat.
Brands’s task, and his overall brief, could yet be a thankless one should the owner take matters into his own hands and decide himself the path down which Everton progress. That comes with the territory.
Silva has needed to step up for a while now. He is not the only one.
Simon Buttle
Player Valuation: £50m
Im no fan of Brands Dave, but tbf to him during the summer we did make a bid for Izzo the Torino CB who's defensive stats are 3 times that of either Mina or Keane and he would have been a great signing but Silva was determined for us to sign Zouma and did'nt want Izzo by all accounts. I can't argue on the striker thing, Kean will be a good player eventually but we needed someone who could go straight into the team not one for the future.
Barry Rathbone
Player Valuation: £2.5m
If Mike Parry is putting the boot into the hierarchy it must be bad
Daytripper
Player Valuation: £40m
Surprising, usually he copy and pastes “don’t want to be Leeds, Portsmouth, Venkys”
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