Everton Season Review 2024–25

So Everton finish the 2024–25 season with a 13th place finish, 23 points clear of the relegation places (for context, they are 18 points off Champions League-qualifying 5th and just 21 off “top 4” Chelsea). We will revert back to those numbers a little more as we go on, but it gives a useful framing for where Everton sit in the ecosystem, and moving forward, where ambitions ought to be set.

The season itself, with the moving on from arguably the most famous and storied football stadium in the country, was always going to dominate, and certainly via the second half of the season, late equalisers (specifically Tarkowski’s versus Liverpool) and wins against Tottenham, Wolves, and Leicester will be remembered, as well as a very emotional send-off against Southampton. From a “mile high” view, the season looks like one that is mission accomplished — lower mid-table league placing, substantial water between the relegation places, and a league points tally that has traditionally been synonymous with mid-table obscurity were the output the club was after through an enormously turbulent period. Football, though, perhaps more than any other sport, is one played in the moment, and that detachment didn’t feel right for at least half of the season.

In truth, the season is a season in two acts. This has become something of a common trait for Everton. Three of the last four seasons, and four of the last six, have seen managers come in around the halfway point. It’s hard to speculate quite why that has emerged. Perhaps weak leadership has led to managers being retained over the summer who were ill-fitting? Poor summer windows hampering the club with late recruitment may have added into this. Food for thought indeed.

This season saw a continuation of that, with Moyes and Dyche both taking half the season, and the points total nearly doubling from Dyche to Moyes. Dyche would take just 17 points, while Moyes would take nearly double with 31 points. It was a stark transformation, where Moyes not only outshone Dyche this season, but also, frankly, Dyche in the previous seasons — and indeed Messrs. Lampard and Benitez, who also failed over the last three years.

There will be more on Moyes and Act 2, but a little moment has to be focused on Dyche, who would win only three of his first 19 games. Having seen the entire season, history has not been overly kind to him. With the introduction of O’Brien, the re-introduction of Beto, and the improvement of numerous other players, Moyes put an exclamation point to the concept that Dyche wasn’t getting the best from a reasonable group of players. Thelwell emerges more positively over time, with Dyche much less so.

If I were being kind to Dyche, I would say he was another manager who was not only ground down by the size of Everton, but also the anarchic, self-indulgent weak leadership of the previous two regimes and 25 years. The additional ludicrous injustice of last season’s points theft may have added an extra strain, and the first 19 games may have been the final collapse of a manager who had run out of ideas and was unable to do their job effectively.

The warning signs were on the wall a little regarding Dyche, who had always previously had good underlying metrics. By the second half of the previous season, those numbers were tailing off, with a cumulative 22.8 expected points from his final 19 games, against 30 expected points from the first 19 games of the season. This continued into this season, where Everton would only have 17 points from 19 games, but the expected points were just 17.4. He had gone from being an unlucky manager to simply being a poor manager.

In truth, I found his attitude over the summer months a little quizzical. There was talk about the team not being that great, and that leaving Goodison would not fundamentally alter team performance, and that we were not going to be close to challenging for Europe. It was odd on a number of levels — not least that it negated any potential advantage that could have been attained from leveraging the supporters in the stadium for a final time. In a world of marginal gains, this felt like an obvious one missed (and an obvious one utilised by David Moyes). Even if you think it’s total guff, surely you look for any small advantage you can attain?

Alongside that, the players had attained 48 points the previous season, under challenging circumstances. They were 22 points above relegation, four off 9th place, 12 off 7th, and just 20 off 4th. Dyche was speaking as if we had just been promoted, not as if we were statistically closer to Champions League (never mind European) qualification than relegation. I’m not saying he should have been talking about European qualification, but it would have made a lot more sense than the constant reference to just surviving — and it seemed to talk it into existence and impact the players.

The reality is, the players signed were good, but probably ill-suited to Dyche. We lost Onana (not best utilised by Dyche but still a loss), and also peripheral players such as Gomes and Ben Godfrey, who while not setting the world on fire, provided height, experience, and physicality. The replacements — Lindström, Mangala, and Ndiaye — were good players, but the height was lost, and a large part of Dyche’s approach was somewhat mitigated (essentially balls into the box off set plays). I think the unique approach probably became a little predictable too. To some degree, Dyche was let down, but in others, the recruitment team had begun to plan for a less limited, one-dimensional manager.

The big unforgivable for Dyche was the start of the season, where the team looked badly prepared, not fit enough, and not tactically ready. It’s hard to avoid that conclusion. The first four games were un-Dyche-like. Thirteen goals were conceded in those first four games, including a shambolic collapse against Bournemouth. In any circumstance, such a start would be a big problem, but for a manager who had spent the summer downplaying the final season at Goodison and whose main MO was around defensive stability, rigidity, and physical strength over aesthetic attacking football, this was unacceptable.

The previous season had given him a warning — picking up just one point from the first five games. To make a mistake once is no great sin, but to repeat it the following year is not really forgivable. The manager, to his credit, dug Everton out of that hole the previous season, but he had gone back to the well once too often this year. The problem is, in a world of enormous scrutiny, a bad first four to five games brings undue pressure onto a team that then makes it harder to get positive results, acting as a gravitational force. Humans also anchor to first impressions, and the poor starts have certainly given rise to a false notion that both seasons have been simple relegation fights — when the reality is Everton have survived comfortably on both occasions and should not be giving relegation even a cursory thought.

That is somewhat my abiding memory and frustration with Dyche, who left the team narrowly above the relegation zone, and whose scoffing at the idea of European football has been shown up by Moyes’s performance of 31 points through 19 games — which is solid form that gets you in and around European qualification, with largely the same group of players.

Act 2 and the return of Moyes has transformed the feel around the club, culminating in a very special day against Southampton (and an experience that I feel will help us enormously in the new stadium). Thirty-one points from 19 games — considering two of them were against table-topping Liverpool — is an outstanding achievement. In his first spell here, David Moyes inherited a similar team and would eke out 27 points from his first 19 games. The truth is, that felt transformational. Within 18 months of that, the team would finish 4th and subsequently never lower than 11th.

The mood music changed around the club, in no small part due to the radical shift in momentum that first occurred. I saw 27 points as a high-water mark and one that I would have happily signed off on back in January. To attain 31 points, with the injuries faced and the tougher-than-normal fixtures, is an enormous managerial feat.

What Moyes has done very well is use the foundations that Dyche built (defensive stability), but have more of a focus on rectifying the weak areas (possession, attacking output) without losing those foundations. The introduction of O’Brien has been a masterstroke, as has Moyes’s own adaptability. His first tweak — using a hybrid back 3/4 with Lindström acting as a part wing-back, part winger — allowed for Ndiaye to be a part winger, part striker with the asymmetrical system. This ended up being ditched when, firstly, Ndiaye, then Lindström got injured. The loss of Dominic Calvert-Lewin had previously sidetracked the previous three managers, but again Moyes tinkered to introduce his only remaining striker, Beto, to adapt a system to his requirements, utilising the physicality of Doucouré further forward.

Both centre-backs have fallen injured at different times, which again has forced reorganisation, but the manager has overcome each challenge masterfully. He has had to adapt two or three times in a 19-game period to get results, and the optimism has to be that with funding and time over the summer, we can begin to plan for a Plan A system that we can perfect.

The room for optimism is high. Of course, there is the argument about new manager bounces, although the longer-term way Moyes works means he is not an enormous new manager bounce exponent. Even if that were factored in, it would not be unreasonable to state that injuries and more difficult fixtures perhaps cancel out any advantage of a new manager bounce. Thirty-one points over 19 games feels like a reasonable starting point for Everton’s ambitions going forward.

The summer gives us a manager who has been able to have a long look at the squad in a pressure-free way (unlike other managers who are under pressure), and the stability this brings is a clear advantage. There again will be no European games, which is another advantage, but the injection of funds over the summer is a huge upside — not just because it provides an opportunity to build on what is top-8 form, but also because it is such a shift from what has been allowed over the previous 4–5 years of austerity.

Again, I don’t wish to try and put figures on output, and we will need to see how much is spent, but there is potential for upside on this season’s performance when better players are added to a manager who has had time to think through how to utilise them.

Aside from the impressive headline numbers, the secondary/underlying numbers were also extremely good. Moyes’s expected points were just over 30 for the 19 games he managed, underlining that it was not a fluke. Since Moyes took over, Everton are joint 8th in the league, 20 points ahead of 18th-placed Leicester and just seven off top-placed Liverpool.

When you consider the tailwinds the club has, it is clear how the club has to start talking about itself and its ambitions. Interestingly, if you omit the shambolic first five games, Everton are 12th — but as close to the top of the table as the relegation places. The underlying point here is that any talk of just looking to avoid relegation needs to be shelved.

The other big positive has been the competitiveness of Everton in each game played. They have not conceded more than two in any of Moyes’s 19 games in charge, compared to five games where this occurred under Dyche. Yes, Everton lost games, but in each there were mitigating circumstances: at Anfield, a close offside call goes against Everton while a clear offside goal is bizarrely missed; at Chelsea, a sketchy goalkeeper puts in a MOTM performance to make two or three wonderful saves; the Manchester City game turns when Tarkowski goes down and his replacement Michael Keane can’t get up to speed with the game, and City score twice late on. In none of those games were Everton blown away in the way we had seen in the previous three seasons.

One of the unique games that underlines this was the cup game against Bournemouth, where Everton had a horrendous first 45 minutes, punctuated by two defensive lapses from Tarkowski. In years gone by, the game would have slipped away for an easy Bournemouth win. Yet on this occasion, Everton mustered a fightback. From memory, we hit the post on three separate occasions, as well as having a shot cleared off the line and Tim Iroegbunam firing just wide — all within around a 15-minute spell. It was not a game Everton conventionally deserved to win, or even draw, but it was a game that Everton, on another day, could easily have turned around to win given a different break of the ball. Where once there had been surrender when going behind, there now appeared to be some spirit infusing the team. These are the intangibles that start to move a team forwards.

We have touched upon the difference Moyes has made. He built some very good teams in his first spell here on a shoestring budget, and he may be an even better manager now. Teams that would have, in my mind, finished in the top 4/5 pretty comfortably in this league. He was hampered by finance last time, and we will likely see how he does when that restriction is removed.

In terms of player performances, there are a couple I would highlight:

Jarrad Branthwaite has perhaps not been at his absolute best (though I think some of this is a perception thing, as we have just become used to seeing how good he is), but his numbers have again been very strong. Everton have conceded 16 goals in the 10 games he didn’t play (across a season the 14th worst in the league), against 28 goals conceded in 28 games played (the 2nd best in the league). He remains a key difference-maker and one that it is critical to keep beyond this season.

While the collapse came post-2021 under Moshiri, there is little doubt that the club’s inability to keep Barkley — and to a greater degree, Stones and Lukaku — greatly undermined the project from day one. Where Everton have world-class young players, the focus has to be around trying to do everything they can to keep those players.

Gana Gueye and Tarkowski have also had good seasons, but Pickford has again produced saves that have helped keep Everton in the league and is probably my man of the season.

The hope of the season is that it marks the end of the chapter that has dominated the last four years — namely, just trying to exist before we get into the new stadium. With ambitious new owners and a determined manager, a new narrative needs to be crafted. I have defended the performance over recent years; with fiscal austerity placed on the club that has been unforeseen in Premier League history, it felt like the only course of action appropriate.

Yet the momentum that has been generated over recent months — infused with the tailwinds of greater finance, organisation, and structure within the club — marks an opportunity to move beyond what we have seen over the previous 3–4 years prior to Moyes’s arrival, and a unique chance to re-establish the club in a manner more befitting of its historical role as one of the leading teams in the country.