“This is great news for our wider region, hopefully now it can turn the page and move forward.” The words there of Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, sounding very much like the kind of silk-hatted mayor in a Batman film who says stuff like this to a cheering crowd from the steps of City Hall shortly before being garrotted by the latest colourful maniac with an Oedipus complex.
On this occasion, however, the glad-handing feels entirely justified. The news this week that Everton’s takeover by the Friedkin Group has been confirmed really does feel like that rarest of things, good news for the club, the city, the league and pretty much everyone concerned.
Admittedly, given what went before, that bar is set very low. The Friedkin Group is a real, actual business with offices and a bank account. Dan Friedkin runs a sharp-teethed global company that trades in non-dark, vaguely comprehensible assets. He looks like a minor cousin at a wedding in Succession. He’s not obviously insane. This feels like progress.
True, this is the same ownership that appointed José Mourinho at Roma, but there is no evidence the same individuals will be running Everton’s football operation. In any case appointing Mourinho seems to be a phase you just have to go through as an owner, like teenagers listening to death metal. At the very least, appointing Mourinho once means there is zero chance you’re going to appoint him again. Late José seems to have become a kind of footballing measles. A necessary fever. But you only need to have it once.
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No doubt there will be a sense of double take for many supporters. After years of jeopardy, carpetbaggers and vulture capitalists with revolving bow ties, there is now a real prospect of Everton finding themselves in a new stadium, with £600m of manageable debt and being run by grown-ups. Why shouldn’t this happen? This club was never meant to be a vale of tears or hostage to overblown ambition. Everton should be able to exist happily, to be a fun club with a good fanbase and a realistic sense of its own reach. Maybe, just maybe, this is going to be all right.
At which point spare a thought for Sean Dyche, who is in danger of becoming the ghost at the feast in the middle of all this light and hope. His contract is up in June. New owners like new things. Exit music is already playing faintly. But the fact is Dyche has also played a huge role in basically saving the club over the last 20 months, has kept that burning zeppelin on course for the landing strip at a time when the whole thing could quite easily have folded in on itself.
I am biased on this topic, in that I just really like Dyche as a spectacle, a presence, a look. Ideally this is classic Dyche: ginger buzz-cut, horseshoe beard, shiny shoes, black trousers, white shirtsleeves, like a policeman washing the dishes. And yes Dyche will always be called a dinosaur, and a fossil (basically anything old: a harpsichord, a horse-drawn train). But he has also kept Everton up two years in row despite the double blow of a points deduction and inheriting a Frank Lampard team. He deserves at the very least to be remembered as part of the cure.
This isn’t an easy thing to feel right now. Everton have been terrible this season, and in a weird way. On the surface this is still Full Dyche. Second lowest for possession stats in Europe (go, Empoli), but also number one in the Premier League for tackles and blocks. And yet for all these indicators of resistance they also keep throwing away leads. There are gaping holes in the team. Dyche can’t do his Dyche thing – good in both boxes, midfield a hell-zone – with players who tire chasing the ball.
Is it any surprise this has happened? This current Everton has been hurled together through the fever dream of the last few years. Money has been hosed in then clawed back, to the tune of £100m profit on transfer fees in Dyche’s own time. Survival has been an exercise in minimalism, in a way that is both pragmatic and also very funny.
Dyche’s Everton have won 23 games, mainly against a small pool of handpicked opponents. Nine per cent of all his victories at Everton have come against Doncaster. League survival basically boils down to eight wins against Burnley, Brentford and Bournemouth. Last season’s escape was based on five in six from November into December when the right parts aligned. He can find this energy again. Crystal Palace this weekend and a jazzed-up home crowd looks like an opportunity.
Beyond that, it seems clear Dyche himself is unlikely to be part of the clear blue future. Most likely he sees his contract out and is replaced in the summer by a 27-year-old kitesurfing Austrian in a gingham blazer and jodhpurs. All of which raises the wider question of wither Dyche and Dyche-ism now?
Quite simply, he is just a Good Football Man. There is a habit among managers to see a season in the Premier League as a personal branding opportunity, a showpiece for a style, for your own fan appeal. Dyche will work himself into a hole trying to keep you there by any means, will do a job as opposed to a job interview. The attitude, the shapes, the energy will be right. Nothing will fall apart. This is what he brought to Everton in the crisis years, a place that really could have begun to drift into the realm of the unwell.
At the very least he deserves to be acknowledged as a key part of the life raft. Perhaps in the bright new waterside future we might even find a Dyche Bar, a Dyche footbridge, a Dyche popcorn concession. And, in time, a little fond nostalgia for those moments of living dangerously. – Guardian
