The Derby – Trends and Expectations

In the lead up to the most recent Derby there appeared to be a bit of a trend emerging about how Everton, and specifically Moyes’s Everton, ought to approach the match. The idea being espoused that Everton and Moyes (who within this context get used interchangeably) should drop the caution, small c conservatism and embrace a more positive, adventurous game plan. Take the game to Liverpool as it were, buoyed on by a positive start to the season and the optimism of new signings (particularly Jack Grealish). The stat of Moyes not winning in 22 games at Anfield (as well as a similar record at numerous grounds) is often shown as evidence for the need for a change, and a slightly tiresome narrative gets cultivated by a substandard sports media, who seem to prefer easy, narrative-driven output rather than looking at fundamentals.

Psychologist Carl Jung would often remark that true insight, the truth as it were, is often very difficult to comprehend. It doesn’t fit easily into lazy narratives we develop and tell ourselves. It can be painful, it can challenge us and it may not always feel especially joined up. The glib truth is that the spending prowess between Liverpool and Everton (or indeed Everton and Manchester City, Arsenal or Chelsea) remains substantial. That it is not a fair fight, there isn’t a fair or reasonable allocation of resource, and this has to inform the strategy anyone adopts.

Everton have come out of 5 years of fiscal austerity in spending that has not been seen in Premier League history. No other team has ever had a 5-year period of negative net spend. It is staggering that writers such as Jamie Carragher, when writing about the match, don’t feel the need to even mention this. It is startling, a huge anomaly that frames any discussion. Conversely, Liverpool have spent more than pretty much any team in football history on wages for players, have inevitably won the league as a result and have subsequently spent several hundred million on new players, including breaking the world transfer record not once, but twice in a single window. They brought on 2 players from their bench who would cost a comparable amount to Everton’s entire starting 11, and two of their players brought off the bench cost more than Everton’s entire matchday squad who took to the pitch. The reality is, the two clubs operate on wholly different stratospheres in terms of level of financial spend. Stating this reality may annoy certain people, but it doesn’t stop being true. And this is with a huge summer outlay for Everton (relatively speaking) that the imbalance remains enormous.

That outlay has shifted expectations, and it is positive that it does. But there is a requirement for this to be grounded in realism. None of, say, Arsenal, Liverpool or Manchester City go to the other’s ground planning to take the game to the opposition with a feeling they need to win. They would hope to win, but it will be a cagey affair, hoping to stifle their opponents. Such is the spending power each have, there is respect. Quite why a club who have spent so little over the previous 4-5 seasons (excluding this summer) would jettison that caution remains something of a mystery to me.

There is a desire, largely driven now by TV companies, to make or keep the Merseyside derby as a big game. In truth, it’s not a big or totemic game any longer. I think this drives the narrative somewhat. They want the game to be a classic, one to remember. It makes no sense for it to be so. There have been exceptions, there was an excellent 2-2 draw under Moyes at Goodison, and the 3-3 draw in Martinez’s first season was a match that had a bit of everything. A bit of a modern classic. But they feel like exceptions that prove a rule. At present they are two clubs with geographical proximity but little else that binds them.

As a pastime, I enjoy analysing and investing in different equities and securities. As part of that, I like long-term trends, charts, data. It helps tell a compelling story, beyond the noise of one quarter to the next. What you realise is most of the football media is focussed on one quarter to the next as the longest time frame to work to. League derbies currently stand at 213 played, 59 wins for Everton, 70 draws and 84 wins for Liverpool. While Liverpool shade the overall record, the outcome is over 40%. It is a very close series of events. When you factor in the comparative record of both clubs, with Liverpool having (recently) got to joint most titles won, and Everton enjoying most top-flight seasons (and 2nd longest uninterrupted period in the top flight) as well as being 1st (Liverpool) and 3rd (Everton) in the all-time points tally (where Everton were first well into the 21st century), it is easy to see why it is a compelling narrative. You have two teams that historically dominated different metrics, a very close proximity and an inflection point story.

This assists in underplaying the match as a historical event, where tradition and evidence often lag reality insofar as this isn’t the match of 1985, or 1975 or 1965 that most of us grew up watching. The story of the Merseyside Derby is one of prolonged Everton dominance, then a transition period where Liverpool caught up and now Liverpool dominance. The transition period is always the most interesting, and that dynamic really starts in the early 1970s and is probably cemented by the late 90s. For most people attending the match who now work in media, that is their lived experience and it takes a long time to shake that belief, indeed it may never be shaken.

I speak to one of my older uncles, who supported Everton pre-1960, and he is always disparaging about Liverpool. When he first started watching Everton, who were competing for (and winning) titles, Liverpool were halfway up Division 2. Most of his classmates at school supported Everton (ratios of 5 or 6 to 1 in Everton’s favour). They had fewer fans, had won fewer trophies, were not even in the top division. Indeed Everton held the record of most domestic trophies won out of each club until the late 70s, and the head-to-head advantage until the early 80s, where the head-to-head lead tended to trade between the two sides (albeit with Liverpool slowly gaining the upper hand) through to the new millennium where Liverpool have started to pull away. For those born and with an understanding of football after 2000, it is not a big game, and in truth the narrative of one team catching and supplanting the other doesn’t make sense as it’s not what’s happened. The reality of what’s happened in the derby mirrors Everton’s own decline as a big club, a seriously big club who aimed to win titles every season. If you don’t believe me, ask your dad, uncle, auntie, grandad etc. about when they stopped thinking Everton were challenging for the league and you will get a date in the 90s and it has never returned. That remains the challenge for all at the football club to attempt to remedy.

You don’t remedy this, though, by adventurism, and the misguided belief that going gung-ho at a team who have substantially outspent you is a shortcut to doing it. Maybe Everton win at Anfield, or the Emirates, or the Etihad, but at present it would be the exception that proved a rule. It wouldn’t symbolise anything other than a random event in a sport that is governed – at least in the short term – by randomness. Better commercial performance, more astute capital allocation, better recruitment and player trading as well as stable management of the team are what moves the needle, slowly and gradually but in a way that compounds over time.

It is this time of year that a renewed criticism emerges. Incredibly dull people from opposing fanbases start mentioning how often he has won at a certain ground, as if it means anything at all. As if in a 38-game season, performance is evaluated over 1/2/3 games at specific away grounds. Put very simply (and in a way that you can only hope they can comprehend), a manager is judged upon their performance across an entire season, and there is little to be gained from highlighting single games, especially where single games are often ones where the balance of spend and resource are so skewed toward an opponent.

David Moyes is a good manager. He has managed 720 in the top flight (one of the few insightful parts of Carragher’s latest article was where he placed Moyes between Catterick and Kendall in terms of games managing Everton). In the Premier League pantheon he sits only behind Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger. It is elite company for him to be in. Wenger, Ferguson, Catterick and Kendall are amongst the best managers to have operated in this country over the last 60 years, and while you wouldn’t put Moyes into their class, you clearly can’t be a bad manager and get to that level. Especially in the modern game, where managers are sacked regularly following a run of 4-5 bad games. It shows a longevity, consistency and innovation that mark him out from his peers.

What has helped Moyes get to that level, aside from being a good manager, is his long-term thinking in jobs, and his ability to minimise risk when at clubs. He crafts effective, functional, solid if unflamboyant teams who often achieve (if not surpass) expectations. If you look at the Everton teams he put together in MK1 they were very well drilled units, greater than the sum of their parts and a little machine-like in their output. They would win against those around them and regularly defeated those below them. Essentially winning the games they ought to win, the fact we can remember the times we didn’t do so (especially at Goodison) is testament to the regularity we did it. It became a surprise to lose to teams below us in the league.

It was sort of underpinned by the players he had. With the exception of probably Leighton Baines (and Rooney at the start of his tenureship), it would be hard to describe any of the players as world class, very good maybe but not world class. They were not the biggest or quickest and didn’t possess a lethal striker. Some may put this down to Moyes’s natural conservatism, though I would probably link it to the lack of resource that existed. Those sort of players cost money, and we had very little, so compromises had to be made. It developed a team who would routinely accrue points where it ought to, but would fall short when the next level was needed. There was a consistency and predictability in this, and the pragmatism of Moyes wasn’t perhaps as concerning as some may be, he was delivering on his MO of getting a team to at least 50 points and the top half. His teams have always been well-coached and disciplined, but it was not an approach that easily lends itself to going away to Anfield, Old Trafford, Arsenal or Chelsea and winning games against often bigger, quicker or more ruthless players. Sure it is a failure, but it’s a failure that exists from the very thing that makes him a positive. A paradox, so to speak.

As with most discussions, any conclusion will tend to throw open more questions than it answers. While Moyes was undoubtedly the right man in 2025, as he was for most of 2002-2012, there may indeed come a point where he may not be the right man in perpetuity (as he wasn’t for champions Manchester United in 2014). If the club wants to win more at Anfield, there are the same lessons to be learnt as to the club challenging to win titles again, as that is what it takes to go and win at top teams. Shortcutting wins like the late 90s but struggling is unlikely to happen and is papering cracks at any rate. To do that requires a wholesale and drastic improvement of all aspects of the club, including the (or any other) manager.