Everton are caught between gloom and hope – Farhad Moshiri must ‘take a haircut’ and sell

Each failed takeover deal brings cataclysmic predictions but it feels business as usual under Sean Dyche’s smart management

Everton’s current predicament is a tale of two football clubs. About the worst of times under majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri amid the hope of the best of times when the team moves into a £500m new docklands home in 2025.
It is an age of foolishness via boardroom chaos, and an owner running the club so badly the team was deducted Premier League points on two occasions last season. Yet it is also an age of wisdom under manager Sean Dyche, organising the team so efficiently that the deduction of ten Premier League points did not prevent safety being secured with relative ease last season.
Then, Dyche’s spring of hope was the antidote to Moshiri’s winter of despair.
The extreme differences make Everton the most contradictory of institutions.
Moshiri’s struggle to sell the club seems to persistently threaten a season of darkness, but others see his growing desperation as a step closer to the light because eventually he will be compelled to agree a realistic sale price.
“Farhad must accept he will have to take a haircut,” is probably the most used phrase at Everton in the last few months, Moshiri understandably struggling to accept the inevitability of eventually walking away with personal losses of hundreds of millions.
Whatever Moshiri’s next move, the apocalyptic visions regularly prophesied since Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov was banned from continuing his investment have not materialised, despite brushes with relegation. 
Every failed takeover attempt brings more eruptions of fear — only for Everton’s Merseyside branch to go on the front foot to reassure us that the wounds are overhyped and temporary.
This summer summed up the contrast between the image of Everton as teetering on the brink in Moshiri world, only for those in Liverpool dealing with the debris sending a reassuring business as usual message.
In the immediate aftermath of the US-based Friedkin Group ending takeover negotiations, sources close to them were citing a debt level far exceeding initial assumptions, all while the club was signing a couple of players and vowing to hand highly-rated centre-back Jarrad Branthwaite a lucrative new deal to fend off interest from Manchester United. Hardly the response of a club frantically looking down the back of the sofa for stray pennies.
For those who have seen Everton finding funds from prospective owners to run from month to month and have no access to the accounts, it does not add up, especially given the number of creditors contributing to the business and stadium costs who will eventually want some bang for their buck, and until the transfer window closes no one will bet against another high profile sale.
The honest assessment, one shared by many within Everton, is that only Moshiri knows how perilous the club’s financial situation truly is, and whether repayment deadlines need satisfying within months or years.
All agree that Moshiri’s prolonged dalliance with 777 Partners last season has been exposed as horribly misguided. The working capital they provided while awaiting for a Premier League clearance which never came amounted to £200 million, a debt now absorbed by insurance firm A-Cap who are charging considerable interest and – based on the breakdown of the Friedkin talks – have no inclination to re-negotiate repayment terms. At least one other interested party which was considering bidding for Everton claimed to be spooked by Friedkin walking away.
It suggests the ownership issue will not be resolved soon or without glacial-paced negotiations with multiple vested interests, despite Crystal Palace co-owner John Textor being the latest to be granted exclusive talks to complete a takeover and Moshiri giving the impression there is a queue of ready and willing buyers.
At the training ground, they are accustomed to shrugging off the boardroom’s bad news. If Dyche ever pens an autobiography, it ought to be titled after one of his favourite sayings: 
“Control the controllables.”
Dyche, alongside Everton’s sporting director Kevin Thelwell, has so far proven himself to be the ideal manager in a time of seemingly permanent crisis. He has an unerring capacity to make the situation appear calmer than the ceaseless stories about buy-outs and profit and sustainability issues suggest. If he is tired of being the club spokesman on non-footballing issues, it only manifests itself in the aftermath of another successful survival quest when he justifiably appeals for his work to be judged in the context of the unique challenges faced. It was not any easier in pre-season and last week’s defeat to Brighton and Hove Albion did nothing to undermine the fatalistic view this campaign will be anything more than rinse and repeat.
Dyche and Thelwell forewarned as much last May. As predicted, was a significant sale when Amadou Onana moved to Aston Villa for £50 million, although the immediate reaction was more ‘ho-hum’ than consternation. Onana may prove a fine acquisition for Villa as his man-of-match debut last weekend suggested, but he was not a Goodison nor a Dyche favourite. It was greeted as good business more than a book-balancing exercise, even if it was both.
More importantly, Dyche and Thelwell have so far been able to resist moves for players they really want to keep – Branthwaite chief among them. The loan market proved useful last season and Everton have been proactive again, retaining Jack Harrison from Leeds United and signing Napoli’s Jesper Lindstrom. How good the signings so far are remains to be seen.
The mood darkens when the bad news off the pitch is mirrored by poor performances on it, which is bound to occasionally happen to a side which is built to punch above its weight by optimistically targeting mid-table. A clearer picture of what is realistic possible will emerge by the end of the transfer window.
Those within Moshiri’s inner circle – and no-one working on Merseyside seems to be part of that – know if the financial situation is such to make further sales necessary. Do the Merseyside branch of the operation trust him? What choice do they have?
The majority at the club are working on the assumption rumours of Everton’s impending financial demise have been greatly exaggerated, and whatever their private anxieties are, and they must have them, they are well-rehearsed in absorbing and dispatching that message with the efficiency of a Dyche set-piece routine.
They also know their fire-fighting is far from over and it is Moshiri’s running of the club which has set the agenda for the past eight years, not ‘media scaremongering’ or some imagined Premier League vendetta.
Until Moshiri sells, Everton’s multiple personality disorder will not be adequately treated.