Everton need to be wary of the mistakes of Tottenham and Liverpool
By Stephen Fox
Despite having what appears to be a successful transfer window, Everton need to be weary of the mistakes of Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool from previous transfer windows.
Nobody has been more active this summer than Everton as they have already spent over £90 million to bring in Jordan Pickford, Michael Keane, Davy Klaassen, Sandro Ramirez and Wayne Rooney along with the club still targeting Olivier Giroud & Gylfi Sigurdsson as well. Their business this summer is surely to be a welcome bonus for Everton for years had to make do with David Moyes doing his best to make five pounds stretch out for years but with the club having been bought out last year allowing the club to freely spend money to strength the club in an attempt to break into the top six in the Premiership.
There is no doubting that the signings that Everton have made so far have looked good on paper and the players that they have been linked with certainly are very good players as well but Everton do need to remain on the side of caution as well.
It was only a few years ago that Tottenham Hotspur were in a very similar situation to one that Everton now find themselves in – They had sold Gareth Bale for a then world-record fee and sought to improve the team by adding seven new players in the infamous quote from Tottenham being that they had ‘’sold Elvis and bought the Beatles’’ with the club being expected to go from knocking on the door of breaking into the Champions League spots to a team that could break into those top four spots and potentially challenge for the league.
This obviously did not happen, as Spurs under Andre Villas-Boas failed to gel together and the team greatly underperformed given the expectations on them which lead to AVB losing his job along with many of the players Tottenham bought end up being sold by the club, who are now performing much better in the league.
The same is very similar to Everton’s local rivals Liverpool as well, who sold Luis Suarez to Barcelona a year after Tottenham had sold Gareth Bale to Real Madrid and looked to use the money that they had been given for Suarez to bolster their team, after coming second in the league and letting it slip through their hands, to go for another title challenge or at the very least stay within the Champions League spots. This obviously did not happen and much like Tottenham, Liverpool’s new signings failed to live up to expectations and saw manager Brendan Rodgers lose his job.
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This is what Everton need to be wary of, signing a load of players may look like the right move but they need to be careful that the players can gel together and perform, especially after selling their best player in Romelu Lukaku. Of course, the expectations for Everton are going to be much different from they were for both Tottenham and Liverpool.
Nobody will be expecting Everton to be able to break into the top six this season and unless any of the teams currently expected to finish in the top six do have a disastrous season, it likely won’t happen either.
The main expectation for Everton will be to once again get a top seven finish and make a serious run in the Europa League. However, the issue they will face is the fact that they will need to either find somebody or find a way to get more players to score to fill Lukaku’s twenty-five goals from last season, which will be a heavy task on hand.
The one good aspect for Everton and Ronald Koeman will be that the majority of the players that they have signed this season have come from the Premiership so they will at least be familiar with the league and will not need to any adapting or settling in period.
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It will be interesting to see how Everton do for the rest of this summer transfer window, whether they will finally have a bid accepted from Swansea for Sigurdsson and if they can bring in another striker. The expectations may not be too high for Everton this season but they still need to be very wary of what happened to both Liverpool & Tottenham years ago and learn from it.