What causes Everton FC to continuously let themselves and the fans down?
For the past 5 years a lot of money more than ever before has been pumped into this club but we cant seem to get to the next level.
Why is this?
Is the mentality within the club from the top?
Is it Moshiri
Is the DOF (Brands & Walsh)?
Is it the managers?
Is it the players?
Is it the wrong type of players for certain managers styles when they arrive?
Is all of the above combined?
I mean all jokes aside we've had 4 managers and 2 DoF within 5 years that cant be good but how do we fix it?
...and no Ye Ma isn't an option.
It could be an issue with club culture. That sort of thing is pervasive and you can't overturn it. But I don't think culture is the major issue. I know many will knock the "family" and "charity" aspects of the club, and these are real qualities of the culture of the football club that can't be ignored, but they don't necessarily indicate the club is soft. Certainly Kenwright has seemed this way in the past and nobody liked Elstone, but if you look at Moshiri, DBB, Brands, Ancelotti, these four don't give off the soft image. Moshiri has spent on the club and is bringing in a waterfront stadium (not to mention he bought the Liver Building for club headquarters... that's not a soft move), DBB stays in the shadows but her words on the Super Duper League shows she knows when to bring it, and it's simple enough to say that neither Brands nor Ancelotti give an air of soft or second rate about them.
So if it's not club culture, we have to jump straight to the players, with a mention to Walsh. Walsh did severe damage to the club. Martinez made decent signings on the whole and Silva's downfall was similarly tactical/predictable, but neither Allardyce nor Koeman picked good players to bring in and the Walsh-Koeman catfight was horrendous. That was a mistake by Moshiri in selecting the right people for the job (unless those were Kenwright mistakes). But since then Moshiri has shown enough Paul Anka about him to answer my questions. So unless you believe Moshiri is the bumbling fool who hires bad people (which Brands and Ancelotti seem to discredit), and if you've agreed that Walsh made huge mistakes that set the club back as much as 5-8 years, then it's the players.
There aren't enough players who've got enough bottle to get the job done. On the whole this squad is built with players who've got no bottle (Sigurdsson, Delph, Gomes), or depend upon confidence (Richarlison, Keane), or simply lack the skill or have aged past it (Coleman, Iwobi, Bernard, apparently Holgate). Add to that the injury and mistake prone (Mina, maybe Holgate fits here as well) and you're left with mercurial players (James and to a lesser extent Davies) and new players (Allan, Doucoure, James too), and you only have a few players with any will to take the game into their own hands. At the moment that may only be Digne (who has been absent at times), Doucoure (who is new and sometimes injured and let's see if his energy translates into dominance), Godfrey (who is new and out of position), and Pickford (who moves from blinder to blunder in the blink of a vowel.)
Did I miss anyone? Outside of a few players I have grown to hate (I won't mention again) and a few who don't have the requisite skills to perform for Everton (I'm looking at you Iwobi and Bernard), you have a band of misfits fit for an Aardman movie but not for anything above Premier League mid-table.
Granted, many of these players can stay and fit into a good squad, but we need 3 quality additions, specifically players with the physical and mental/emotional tools requisite to carry the team on their backs, to go along with those few players in the squad now who have any measure of the requisite character before we will see anything representing good football out of these.