Ball rips into failed Everton recruitment
There’s no denying that the recruitment at Goodison Park in recent years hasn’t been good enough, and Everton have really suffered as a result.
The Blues have spent a fair bit of money recently, but they haven’t done so wisely. There has been huge amounts wasted on average-to-good players, players brought in for superstar money.
Its a problem that has really held the Toffees back in recent years, and it’s something that former defender Michael Ball feels they need to fix as soon as possible.
“You look at other clubs, they find these little gems. Watford found Richarlison. Why can’t we find him first so it doesn’t cost us £50m?,” he wrote in his Liverpool Echo column.
“We know we’re not going to be title-contenders but we need to be looking that way. The recruitment side from all ages has to be improved.
“While you’re not winning titles, these players might leave for other teams, like Romelu Lukaku, we gave him the stepping stone, but we made a lot of money for it. Then we spent it the wrong way and that’s the frustrating thing.
“Every time we’re involved in a transfer it’s costing us £30m and they haven’t been good enough for us and haven’t hit the heights. Richarlison is doing fantastic for us but Gylfi Sigurdsson, we won’t get anywhere near his transfer fee when he leaves.”
Is Ball spot on, here?
Pretty much, yes. Like he says, the problem wasn’t that they spent all of the Lukaku money, but how they spent it. Players like Davy Klaassen, Sandro Ramirez and Morgan Schneiderlin crashed and burned.
The club need to do a better job of recruiting, there’s no two ways about it. Unfortunately, like Ball says, they can’t really count on getting much money from Sigurdsson’s potential sale.
That’s what happens when you invest poorly, though, and the Toffees are very much counting the cost of that now.
In other Everton news, owner Farhad Moshiri reportedly told a failed summer signing that he would soon be wearing a Toffees shirt.