Everton are rare beacon of stability but is that really enough? | OneFootball

When we were doing the Mood Rankings last week we got to Everton and realised they were the one Premier League club to which we’d given not a second’s thought throughout the summer.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be nice, the quiet. And it could all work massively in their favour. There is something to be said for being the steady, known quantity in what is a transitional season for so many clubs that it amounts to a transitional season for the Premier League itself.

Until they popped up to do a genuine madness alongside Crystal Palace and complete an actual almost-never-spotted swap deal that sends Dwight McNeil south and brings Brennan Johnson to the Hill Dickinson, they really hadn’t done anything to catch the attention in a summer when almost everyone else has been busy going various shades of mental.

It really shouldn’t be the case that ‘Haven’t changed their manager, preferring instead to stick with the one they appointed over 18 months ago!’ marks you as an outlier, but that is the point we’ve now reached in a Premier League gone nuts.

David Moyes is, absurdly, the seventh longest-serving incumbent among the 20 Premier League clubs this season. Among clubs who’ve been in the Premier League that whole time he climbs to fourth behind only Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery and Fabian Hurzeler.

A low-key summer doesn’t mean a bad one. We’re dizzyingly unsure who’s got the best out of that swap deal that has finally thrust Everton back into the wider conscience. But the fun thing about it is that for both Palace and Everton it feels like ‘Well, it can’t really be worse than what we had’.

The rest of Everton’s business looks fairly canny to us. Christian Norgaard could figure on all manner of top bargain lists, while last season’s loans for Tyrique George and Merlin Rohl have been made permanent.

The best of the lot, though, could be the snaffling of Hayden Hackney from Middlesbrough for a fee that makes him almost entirely risk-free.

There’s some solid recent support for the merits of the Championship-Premier League pipeline for young English midfielders. We’re not saying Hackney is another Adam Wharton or Alex Scott, but we’re definitely not saying he isn’t. He was one of the best players anywhere in the second tier last season and deserves his chance.

So it’s impressive stuff. But quietly impressive stuff. No-nonsense stuff. And it all begs the question of what success actually looks like for Everton this season.

Is it as simple as just another ultimately boring season like 25/26? That felt acceptable, initially because there are obvious on-field complications that come from making the move to a new stadium but in the end because of how very far from boring the season became for certain clubs at or above the Everton level.

We’re really not sure simply existing will cut it for another season. It does feel like we’re whirling round the Everton cycle quite rapidly towards the point where they start to crave something more. To yearn again for excitement.

We understand it. We don’t even disagree with it. But we worry about it. Because the thing with Everton is that what generally happens when they grow understandably weary of the quiet is that the eventual noise is usually of entirely the wrong sort.

It’s usually of the very noisy and very unpleasant relegation fight sort. Of the smug Ollie Holt columns about being careful what you wish for sort.

We have a sneaking suspicion that Moyes could be a live outsider in this season’s Sack Race. He probably won’t win because one of the several thousand Premier League clubs with a new manager is going to make a terrible start and hammer the panic button, but we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see ennui take hold of the club if it starts to look like another dull mid-table-safety season.

We always try to avoid admonishing fans for wanting more. It’s absolutely correct that mere Premier League survival shouldn’t (always) be enough for Everton. But when it’s Everton we do always worry for them.