Business With Blain: Changing Course?
Kevin Thelwell's departure may bring about a new structure at Everton.
By JohnB
Everton, or so it seems, have been dabbling for almost 10 years with a sporting structure that includes a Director of Football.
It started with Steve Walsh back in 2016, before he was replaced by Marcel Brands in 2018. It has perhaps concluded with the recent reports that the current incumbent, Kevin Thelwell, will soon be leaving, after being in post since February 2022.
Everton’s challenges have played out in clear view with multiple relegation battles and two breaches of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and lest we forget the small matter of a revolving door of first team managers.
Since Walsh was appointed as Everton’s first ever Director of Football in the summer of 2016, the Blues are onto their seventh permanent manager: Sam Allardyce, Marco Silva, Carlo Ancelotti, Rafael Benitez, Frank Lampard, Sean Dyche now, David Moyes. Ronald Koeman was appointed before Walsh, perhaps the first of many mistakes in the Farhad Moshiri era.
Having endured a torrid time under the ownership of Moshiri, Everton fans looked forward to positive change under new owners The Fredkin Group (TFG), who also own AS Cannes in France and AS Roma in Italy. With the change of ownership being finalised in the week leading up to Christmas, TFG immediately appointed two of their own to the Everton board, enjoyed the holiday season and then started the New Year with a bang by dismissing unpopular and failing manager Sean Dyche on January 9th.
That brief history of the “worst run club in the country”, as called by Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher, is not a Freudian Slip; it’s quite deliberate, and especially considering the wide held belief among Evertonians that owners have hired and fired more managers than any Director of Football since Moshiri asserted his authority with the dismissal of Roberto Martinez and his appointment of Koeman, his ‘Hollywood Manager’, in 2016.
Everton waiting until TFG took control to dismiss Dyche, a long overdue sporting decision that seemingly only then came about when the former Burnley boss essentially threw in the towel, while Thelwell apparently stood by, impotent as the club tumbled towards the Championship, was not a good look. Indeed, it draws the obvious conclusion from this writer, as Edwin Starr might sing: “Director of Football, what is it good for…?”
Dyche’s replacement, Moyes, has lost only once in the Premier League since his appointment, and that was the first game. Everton are on an uplifting run of seven games undefeated and have put plenty of distance between themselves and the bottom three.
Moyes’ performance with broadly the same players as Dyche had at his disposal, if not less, given new injuries to Orel Mangala, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Iliman Ndiaye, has given the owners the confidence to be bold and go early with a decision on Thelwell’s future.
The next question for the Everton Board and TFG to decide is what comes next.
Do Everton recruit another Director of Football, or do they go another way considering they have a manager who is currently enjoying more on-field success than anyone could have imagined and doesn’t typically like anyone but himself having the final say on players?
The smart money at this time says that Everton will go a different way: Abandon the Director of Football role and shift the power to make major sporting decisions to the manager, supported by a Head of Recruitment and the club’s Chief Executive Officer, almost implying that the manager will only be truly accountable to the owners.
Time will tell on that, but what of Thelwell and his performance in the role for the last three years?
Thelwell certainly found himself in a difficult environment, with mounting financial issues, an interfering owner and an extremely poor Board of Directors who left en masse in June 2023, leaving stadium director Colin Chong behind to pick up the mess — he remains in post to this day as Interim CEO.
In a world driven by statistics, Thelwell’s tenure is best understood by his efforts to replenish a squad in which players with any value were sold and incoming players were hired on a shoestring, via loans or financed by paying inflated fees due to the need to push spend as far into the future as possible.
During his time, Everton suffered two points deductions for breaching PSR and he later stated that he did not fully understand the PSR issues; a shocking admission that implied he relied upon others who themselves lacked experience as the Finance Director was one of the board members who walked away. A learning curve for all involved.
Thelwell is a decent man and came to the club with a good reputation, but it is hard not to conclude that he did not fully grasp what he was walking into and was certainly ill-prepared for the hands-on firefighting role he found at Everton.
With Evertonians having an insatiable desire for information, Thelwell staying in the background and only occasionally talking to the fans — either directly, or indirectly through the media — did not help. From the outside, he failed multiple times in transfer windows to secure the right calibre or profile of player, yet it is almost impossible to know how much better, if at all, he or anyone else could have done in the circumstances.
Under Walsh and Brands, Everton’s squad value increased and continued to rise even after the crazy spending at the beginning of Moshiri’s ownership had slowed before the stark drop-off in investment in 2021.
At the end of the 2020-21 season, the squad was valued at over £500million, with the average age being just over 25. The value of the squad has been falling for almost four years now, as the average age has increased to almost 28, and the value has dropped to around £350m.
Those numbers are stark and do not look good, and Thelwell certainly endured a tough time, but he hung in there, and one can hardly imagine how much of his time at Everton was spent in the crossfire of gross mismanagement and a lack of leadership off the field.
The irony is that of all the Directors of Football hired under Moshiri, Thelwell was likely ultimately given the most autonomy, but with the fewest funds available to play with.
Thelwell, though, did have to deal with having to sell both key players — Richarlison, Anthony Gordon (albeit MTAG understands Moshiri took the lead on negotiations with Newcastle United), Alex Iwobi, even Amadou Onana — to try and balance the books, while youngsters who the club may have preferred to send out on loan were also sold to quench the immediate thirst for cash.
There have been, though, notable misses. The signing of Neal Maupay; the failure to secure a much-needed injection of pace into the attack, and seeming indecision over the future of Calvert-Lewin. Indeed, Thelwell vowed, in a meeting with Everton shareholders last year, that the club would not allow the striker to leave on a free transfer. With less than four months left to run on his current deal, it appears Calvert-Lewin will indeed leave the club for nothing.
Despite all this, the current squad has some gems that Thelwell and his team can be proud of. Yet his greatest legacy will be that this squad, this team, this club and its fans are still in the Premier League, and almost certainly will be when the new stadium is finished in August of this year.
Thelwell leaves behind a squad that is much better than Dyche showed, and the new owners have the luxury of knowing that it is on them and their Board, with the support of an excellent manager, who will decide which of the dozen or so players who are out of contract are renewed, and which provides an almost unique opportunity for a reset of the squad.
In short, Thelwell leaves Everton at a place called start, and it is now likely others will enjoy the fruits of his labour from these last three tumultuous years.