Being a fan from the bottom up, the end
Everton survives, but the future is scarier than Sunday's match
Coming into the final day of the English Premier League season, Everton needed to do one simple thing to guarantee their survival: a win at home over AFC Bournemouth. They could have advanced with a draw with if the two following teams: Leicester City and Leeds United both did not win. The could have advanced with a loss if Leicester and Leeds both lost. I was open to any combination that would just get Everton above the line in the standings that indicates relegation.
If you’re not familiar with some soccer conventions, nearly every league that uses promotion and relegation and also awards its championship to the first place team in the standings plays all of its matches on the final day at the same time. This is to prevent any chicanery where teams could tank matches in order to screw over a different opponent.1
Manchester City had already wrapped up the championship and the four Champions League spots were settled, so NBC gave the Everton-Bournemouth game the featured status. Rebecca Lowe was dispatched to Liverpool. Peter Drury, who usually only calls the big matches, was on site at Goodison Park.
Bournemouth had avoided relegation after a disastrous start that included a 9-0 loss to Liverpool that dropped them to 1-3 on the season and being outscored 16-2. Manager Scott Parker said the team was so bad that there would be more 9-0 defeats. Parker was quickly fired and replaced by Gary O’Neil, who turned around the team and made them respectable and even avenged the Liverpool debacle with a 1-0 win in the reverse fixture.
Everton came out firing and had numerous shots on goal, but nothing connected, which was pretty normal for Everton, which had scored more than one goal at home in only one match this season.
Leeds quickly fell behind in its match at home to Spurs and never threatened and were headed for relegation. The only other place to check was Leicester, where the Foxes were taking on West Ham, a team that wasn’t inclined to go all out as it had a European final (albeit the third level one, the Europa Conference League) coming up soon.
Leicester City had famously won the championship in 2015 in one of the biggest upsets in professional sports. Two years ago, Leicester won the FA Cup. And this year, Leicester was completely terrible.
But Leicester wasn’t terrible on Sunday. In the 38th minute of their match, Harvey Barnes scored to give Leicester the lead. And, if the results at that time were the same at the end, Leicester was staying up and Everton was going down.
The matches went to halftime. Everton and Bournemouth were scoreless. Leicester led 1-0. Tim Howard, a former Everton goalie, said during the halftime show that Everton needed the next goal. He said the team could score one. And just one. And where that one goal would come from was hard to see.
Then 12 minutes into the second half this happened:
Abdoulaye Doucoure, my favorite Malian midfielder ever, launched what is called in the game “a wonder strike.” Goals are not frequently scored from that far out. It was also not how anyone expected Everton to score against Bournemouth, who were considered to be poor at defending set plays (free kicks and corner kicks).
It was the second time Everton got a surprising goal from distance during the season. Michael Keane earned Everton a draw against Spurs with a shot from even further out. It was the only goal that Keane scored all season.
All Everton had to do now was hang on for another 33 minutes. Which was actually 43 minutes as the referee added 10 minutes to the game for injuries and other delays.2 It was a long 43 minutes, but Bournemouth really had just one good chance during the match and Everton won 1-0. And they were safe.
For now.
The future for Everton remains troubled. The team is facing sanctions from the English Football Association (the organization that oversees the sport in England, there is a comparable group in just about every nation. The UK has four because in football terms: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all separate nations.) for violations of Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules. Without getting into gory details, Everton is being charged with incurring too much debt. FFP is designed to keep a team from being owned by some eccentric billionaire or sovereign wealth fund who spends wildly and runs up huge debts in order to get all the best players. Manchester City, effectively owned by the United Arab Emirates, is facing similar charges.
The team has another problem: personnel. The team is not good. If it were good, it would not have finished in 17th place. The team has no consistent scoring threat. The putative scoring threat is Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who was injured most of the season and scored just two goals. The team’s leading scorer was Dwight McNeil with seven goals. Finding someone to score is not cheap. But Everton doesn’t have a lot of money to spend.
Also, the team may be sold in the offseason, although it would likely be described as a “distressed asset” as it has a lot of debt (see two paragraphs above) and is also trying to build a new stadium to replace the historic, but aging ungracefully Goodison Park. Two American private equity firms are considered the top contenders. Presumably, a new owner would clean house. And that may mean yet another manager, replacing the current one, Sean Dyche, who was able to drag Everton over the line, but rarely has gotten his teams to do much more than that. But it would be nice to see to the semblance of continuity in the dugout.
The new season starts on August 12. There is not a lot of time to rebuild this Everton squad into anything resembling a team that is not going to spend another season fighting to avoid relegation. The three new teams joining the Premier League: Burnley, Sheffield United, and Luton Town, are all well-run and probably better capitalized.
And I will likely be writing something like this again in late May of 2024.
If you want to read up on this, read about “The Disgrace of Gijon.” Or a 1978 World Cup match between Argentina and Peru which lacks an interesting nickname.
Since the World Cup, officials throughout the world have been instructed to add more injury time at the end of halves to reflect how much time teams waste on substitutions and goal celebrations.
The fact that Everton stays up was never in doubt. Scotland and England are separate countries and not just for football purposes.