Recruitment and Crisis

One of my favourite literary quotes I enjoy is Hemingway’s descriptor of how a character went bust. In his 1926 work When the Sun Rises, he opines, “two ways, slowly then all at once.” It hints at the non-linear nature of the universe that feels so perverse to human experience: that problems can grow exponentially and go from slow and seemingly manageable to being wholly out of your control. I’ve basically come to the view that humans (myself included) cannot process the world in a non-linear way; it’s wired deeply into our evolutionary DNA. For most people, the best you can hope for is to recognise it and challenge it.

For example, ask yourself what 8 + 8 + 8 is? Most of us can instinctively know it’s 24 within a second or so. Now do 8 x 8 x 8. For most of humanity, the answer doesn’t come immediately into your head. The programming we have—that the world moves as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a linear way—is easy for us to understand, yet the world, and crisis more broadly, tend to move as 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 17, 83, 643. If you have waited until you are at point 17, it is probably too late to deal with the incoming crisis (and to an extent underpins the unfairness people feel when things go wrong. There is an unfairness, but it’s a perception based on a flawed understanding).

Football, for a myriad of reasons, to me is uniquely positioned to be exposed to this. There is an article in itself on this concept, but the TL;DR of it is that a mixture of hubris and arrogance brought about by having 30 years of almost continual growth has left it fragile and not understanding the risks faced when a crisis hits. For what it’s worth, I think the league is becoming more “all at once” and less “slowly.” 2025 was the lowest collective points for the “top 6” this century, and the lowest collective finishing position. Manchester United and Tottenham finished in the bottom 5. It’s truly profound and is not being truly remarked upon. The old orders are coming apart in a manner that most people in football struggle to comprehend. The only question is whether it’s cyclical and will revert, or deeper/structural and reflective of a more fundamental shift. This season will tell us a lot.

The focus of this article is more on Everton though rather than football broadly. Football clubs, I think, are uniquely difficult businesses to manage. So much of the output is judged by such a compressed time frame (1-2 90-minute segments) that are also beholden to randomness. You can be doing everything right and still lose. The contracts for players mean if you have a problem, you can’t move those people on, short of incurring a huge loss, so it negates any real ability to have dynamic change management. As Jim Radcliffe has tried at Manchester United, you can try using principles in business, and end up making things a LOT worse—they have had consecutive years of the worst performance in living memory. You can’t get the staff out, which makes it hard to get better staff in, which totally undermines a turnaround motive where cynicism sets in. There is then a media landscape that trades on this, and a fan culture that increasingly adopts this approach to exacerbate these tensions. Much of the trend of “watch alongs” is supporters getting irate at a series of very random moments, and using them to generalise some big meta narrative about what does or doesn’t work.

It’s within that context that Everton sit as of August 2025. I have started to see the word crisis bandied about, and truthfully this is not a crisis currently. And I don’t say that as refusal to point out a crisis; I say it because it has not reached that point yet. However, Everton are flirting with crisis, perhaps at the “slowly” stage in Hemingway’s quote. We saw similar dynamics with Moshiri too—slowly things weren’t right, you’re left fragile, a war happens, “then all at once” comes and you’re in a tailspin that you can’t react to. One of the lessons from the quote is to deal with businesses when they are at the early stage as if it’s left later it becomes unworkable.

If Everton went into this season with the existing squad, they would struggle. I don’t think they would go down (I will repeat my prediction of the previous 2 seasons, that have been roundly rubbished but played out, that the 3 promoted teams go down and don’t get to 30 points), but they would struggle. Everton currently have 15 of last season’s outfield players who have made a start left at the club. This includes Roman Dixon, who I don’t think will play for the club, which is 14. It excludes Armstrong/Chermiti who didn’t start a league game and who may stay, and we have signed Barry and Aznou which would take us to 19. It simply isn’t enough. The previous season Everton went in with 23 outfield starters, which was low—you tend to play between 22-26 outfield league starters in a season. 23 was low, 19 is a huge gamble. Everybody would agree, more players need to be bought, and this should be done before the Leeds game.

To some degree, there is a bit of a perfect storm, which I have sympathy with but also cannot be allowed to become an excuse. The 9 teams in Europe and Manchester United not in Europe—but Manchester United being Manchester United—makes things difficult. The club allowed for 8 outgoings—3 of them (Doucoure, Young and Calvert-Lewin) featured heavily. You get the sense that a new management team, in a new structure, with new owners, wanted to take the club in a new direction. This is admirable, but words and structures don’t provide change; actions do and, in truth, the only conclusion to date is that they have been sorely lacking.

There have been some frankly worrying comments creeping in from personnel either at the club or those close to them in the media, which to me need to be challenged. I found Kinnear’s comments bizarre. His phrase “things are going to plan” is a little perplexing when the team haven’t won a game in preseason and whose squad is palpably weaker than their competitors’. If this was “the plan,” there have to be some serious questions asked of the man’s judgement. If he’s trying to put a positive spin on something, how he communicates and evaluates his message needs to be questioned. It frankly did him no favours.

I’m also worried about his “judge on September 2nd” message. For a starting point, it could be too late by then. Secondly, I’m really bewildered as to why a deadline weeks after the season started has become the de facto deadline for the CEO. One of the more frustrating things for Everton over recent years has been an inability to conclude business early. It’s unprofessional and self-defeating and damages the team. The hope would have been that with a new ownership, the culture of writing off 3/4/5 games at the start of the season would go, yet it appears it is back with a vengeance. If the CEO is saying judge us 3-4 games in, what message does that give to the people working under him? I may be incredibly old fashioned, but to me the objective of a transfer window is to equip your team with the players you need to meet objectives, and to have that concluded for the first game of the season. You may not hit your objective, but you should not be planning to not do so.

There seems to be some talk of going deep into August and this is when more opportunities become available as sellers will blink. I have to question the logic of this, as primarily they may blink, but likely only with players they don’t want. For players they do want to keep, which are probably the players we want to buy, the opposite process may be true—that the price may increase. If somebody was going to offer to buy Braithwaite now, I suspect Everton’s price would be higher than in June, where there was the benefit of having time to replace him (albeit the current recruitment team show scant evidence of being able to utilise such time). Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t take into account the additional pressure that also exists for buyers in the market. A frustrated manager, a restless fanbase, a poor result in some plumb early fixtures cranks the pressure up further, with the glib reality that 19 senior outfield players isn’t enough and time is running out.

I’m not averse to the idea conceptually that you can go late into August for certain players, but this would be for “bonus” type players. Everton have a core problem with their first 11 currently, and seem to have willingly put themselves in a fragile situation for no reason other than a miscalculation that sellers will buckle. Lots of teams still want to do business, and lots of buyers may buckle which could drive prices up further. I would be genuinely intrigued if Hammond/Kinnear have factored this in. The team currently doesn’t have a right winger. Do we want to be playing chicken on this?

For what it’s worth, I think they have made a mistake in letting too many players go, and leaving themselves too much to do. There was a strong desire for transformational change, but that is hard to do. It requires high-level negotiation, an ability to do things in parallel and an ability to work at speed. Everton have simply never shown that ability to do those things, and frankly Kinnear and Hammond have also failed to demonstrate they can do so. It’s not really an excuse to say “we had too much to do” if you contributed to that by:

1. Needlessly staying with your previous employer in a lower league for months;
2. Removing the existing director of football;
3. Allowing players to leave who you could have signed up.

Good management is sometimes about reflecting the situation you are in, and building a plan around the situation you face rather than what you want it to be.

Another worrying aspect has been the belief that the US tour is irrelevant and all that matters is Leeds. To some degree, I can forgive that. If the majority of the 6-7 players Moyes has asked for (as Armstrong, Chermiti and Patterson may not even be in his plans and are part of an existing 19 players he has) are in before the Roma game so are available, you can make a case it is just about forgivable. They will likely have missed over 80% of preseason and any real opportunity to build patterns of play with new teammates, but you can just about say it is passable. In truth, I have zero faith Kinnear/Hammond will get even 4-5 of what we need over the next 7 days or so. However, the way the US tour has been written off is worrying to me.

Everton have always had a significant, if underutilised, support in America. It’s clearly a growth area; it’s a positive that we are at last trying to build a base there. For the fans who have spent a lot of money turning up to watch Everton, against other Premier League teams, seeing the team lose, and lose because it has been so inadequately resourced, is poor for them. They deserve better. It is also shoddy for the club’s image. These games are quite high prestige, and commercially as significant a chance as any PL game, but are seemingly being treated as having absolutely zero importance. It is this culture that has to be challenged very quickly within the club. I can forgive an argument that says the lack of resources was unavoidable (albeit with some criticisms). What is not forgivable is the argument that these matches don’t matter. If you want to build a successful Everton, giving the best version of the club in America for high-profile games is essential, and some acknowledgement from Kinnear and the Friedkins that we have squandered an opportunity would be useful here.

So what next? Quite simply, deals need to be closed, and closed very quickly. To have a chance of being involved against Leeds, players need to be involved against Roma, so it gives Kinnear and Hammond 7 games to salvage what has been an underwhelming first 3 months in the job. The performance should rightly be revisited on September 2nd and we can only hope that Kinnear is able to show a little more honesty to supporters when reflecting on what has gone to plan, and what clearly hasn’t gone to plan when that moment comes.