RandoEFC

He's versatile, experienced, capable as a squad player I'm sure. The fact that he's 38 is largely irrelevant if he's fit enough to play a decent number of games because it's a free transfer on low-ish wages and a short-term contract, no worries about a lack of resale value. Still utterly depressing we should be looking for upgrades on Mykolenko, Keane, Maupay, etc. to drag ourselves clear of the pit of a league and this sort of deal is clearly the best we can do. Selling half the academy and not even being able to afford renewals for squad players like Davies and Begovic to scrape every penny together and this is the best we've got to get excited about. Honestly got to be the most joyless club to support in the country over the past 10 years regardless of us hanging in there in the top flight.

I don't expect much else but the fact we're having to turn to 38 year old journeymen to patch up the squad when we haven't spent a penny on a player this summer or even in January just goes to show what a desperate situation it is. I'm not complaining about his quality or experience. This is where Moshiri and Kenwright's stewardship has left us. Forgive me for not being overly excited about it though. Given that we've not still not spent a penny since selling Gordon for £40m+, Simms and Samuels-Smith for another £8m between them, released Mina, Coady, Begovic and Davies to free up some wage budget leaves you thinking we might be able to throw a few small fees about. This deal to me says we're not even going to be able to think about bringing in a left back to challenge or improve upon Mykolenko which is one of the weakest spots in the team and the squad. It doesn't bode well.

Ashley Young on a one year contract is the latest. Another relegation battle ahead I'm afraid.

Yes, he was one of our most solid players last season. Three years ago, when the expectation was to compete for the European spots, he was a weak link in a team containing players like Digne, Richarlison, James Rodriguez but he had his best season in a while last year and now that he's playing for a bottom six team he's actually not a weak link anymore. Our situation is so bleak right now that we're offering around our best youth prospects just to generate some cash flow in order to patch over the gaping holes in the first team. Ishe Samuels-Smith is about to join Chelsea for £4m. On the face of it, a good chunk of cash for a player who hasn't kicked a ball for the first team but it could easily look like we've had our pants pulled down in a few years' time if he comes good for them. With our financial situation, I don't understand these rumours that Dyche fancies trying to get Dele Alli up to speed this season. If he makes a certain number of appearances, we have to give Spurs £10m which is apparently a huge amount of cash for us. He isn't cut out for a Sean Dyche workhorse team either. I'm hoping the strategy is that because he's got a bit of a name, maybe the club will be able to picture him looking fit in training and generate some positive publicity to increase the chance of the Saudi mad men throwing some money at us for him.

Congratulations @Stan!

Are they? They're club employees mostly revealing information about how directives from above change from one day to the next because he changes his mind about stuff whenever the wind changes. There's plenty of examples of it. He went all out to appoint Rafa Benitez when none of the board wanted him including the Director of Football. Rafa was his man, yet Moshiri then went and signed El Ghazi on loan after Benitez said he didn't want him because his mate Kia Joorabchian told him to. He allowed himself to be filmed in an interview in January this year saying the words "we need a striker, we'll sign a striker" knowing full well he couldn't guarantee that. Lo and behold, we never signed one and that video can eternally be used as evidence that he'll make promises he can't keep or even just lie on camera. Also in January, he was running around London trying to convince Bielsa to come in and manage the least athletic and mobile squad in the Premier League while our actual footballing operation was trying to do proper recruitment up in Liverpool. The list goes on. He's a proper lunatic I'm afraid. In better news:

He's as close as you'll get in reality. By all accounts he'll be fully committed to one major decision, then suddenly wake up one morning and change his mind to the complete opposite with no rhyme or reason. Not a normal person at all by all accounts and absolutely mystifying that he's ever managed to make a billion quid.

No that was ages ago. He initially bought 49.9% but later on he put another £100m down and it became 94%. I think the initial 49% thing was so that Kenwright can say he didn't hand over full control of the club to some maniac without them having to prove they weren't a maniac for a year or two first. Sadly, Kenwright is a fucking idiot who couldn't see that Moshiri is indeed a massive maniac so he ended up becoming majority shareholder anyway.

Four clubs in for Gray apparently including Al-Hilal. I don't know if we can afford to be letting him go as he is one of our few players who are capable of moments of quality and grabbing a match-winner, but at the same time Dyche clearly doesn't fancy him much as his fitness levels aren't up there with what McNeil and Iwobi can deliver. Last year of his contract as well. If anyone is willing to pay a fee for him I think we'll be tempted to come to the table because even if it's only a few million, that actually makes a big difference for us in our current situation. If there is interest from Saudi Arabia, hopefully he'll go there because it'll probably enable us to fleece more money out of that buyer than any other.

Kenwright is a seemingly unflushable turd but I do believe that he's only been kept as an interim and the board has been cleansed of all of his appointments and replaced with the new investors. He'll be gone within the year I expect. Moshiri is the bigger problem now. It's gone under the radar with the Kenwright headline but he's actually put himself on the board too. We just have to hope that the incoming MSP guys and the other two local blokes who joined the board last week can be the adults in the room and steer the ship in a less shit direction.

MSP requested a clean sweep of the board as a part of their investment in the club. Maybe Moshiri has managed to persuade them to keep Kenwright for a year or something. Either way, the old goat isn't long for the boardroom and with these new appointments I don't think his role will be anything more than ceremonial while he remains. He still should have been gone years ago but I'll try not to get wound up about him staying longer (until the inevitable reports about him interfering with transfers and day-to-day running start leaking out again).

Yeah see we have some common ground here but in your shoes I'd still be more willing to acknowledge that yeah regardless of the ins and outs, this improvement wouldn't have happened without investment from some pretty unsavoury people. You can say that and still agree with the rest and acknowledge that it has been achieved so far by smart recruitment and strategic decision making rather than pouring billions into the squad.

Just being realistic. Man City, PSG and Newcastle's owners have coped just fine and the proportion of "proper" principled fans with links to the roots of the club in those fanbases is a lot larger than the likes of Liverpool and Man Utd who have ten bazillion global social media fans to fall back on even if a substantial number of the local and/or match-going core were to take the hump. We all might feel strongly about our football clubs but most people follow the sport so that they can watch it as a hobby every weekend and 99% of their interaction with the sport and their clubs isn't affected by the board room or the ownership. Sometimes that percentage comes down if a club's competitiveness is spiralling out of control due to incompetent ownership but generally, people go to the ground or switch on the television, get invested in the football for 2 hours and then go about their lives for another week. The number of people who care SO MUCH about their football club that they'll go out in even more of their spare time and organise or attend protests against the ownership which doesn't really affect their matchday experience is absolutely microscopic sadly.

Well that's fair enough. I was about to say "it's easy to say that when it's hypothetical" but I forgot that you have family links to that part of the world. You'd still be in a tiny minority though and not enough people would wash their hands of the club to make up even a small percentage of the fanbase.

The problem is any fanbase would be pretty much the same no matter how much you want to believe otherwise that your club or fanbase is 'special' or more morally upstanding. You can only deal with individuals one at a time rather than criticising a full fanbase for it. Social media and the horrid football "banter pages" and shit Paddy Power memes have created an environment where your team having the bragging rights just right now is more important than acknowledging that the reasons they have them are a bit dodgy. I'd deem Everton to be a football club with a fanbase that have genuine morals and wouldn't just roll over to have their tummies tickled if the club was bought by a dictator or something, but Alisher Usmanov, a known dodgy bastard and Putin affiliate, was involved with us in the background for a while until he was sanctioned and there was no shortage of Evertonians on Twitter calling for him to sponsor the new stadium or whatever to cause a Man City-esque cash injection to the club that subverted FFP. And that's another problem in itself, as soon as one club does what City have done with their financial "peculiarities", got away with it and been rewarded with trebles and domination of the English game, why should any other fanbase feel bad about doing the same thing? It just gives any fan such an easy excuse to say 'well our club might be doing this but look over there'. You might like to think Liverpool fans would be different and you'd hound out any Saudi or Emirati owners but as soon as they bought you Mbappe or something you'd get enough people on social media saying "it's not ideal but this is what we need to stay competitive" and "I don't care what happens off the pitch, I just support this football team" and "City and Newcastle have done this so why should we feel bad about it" and then you all get tarred with the same brush of defending the corrupt owners or regime. I don't know many Newcastle fans so I can't judge what sort of proportion of their fanbase is doing these mental gymnastics to convince themselves and others that the Saudis aren't as unpleasant as they are. Some people put a lot of effort into it though and anyone incapable of condemning them should be challenged on an individual basis.

Was reading this on Twitter as well. Seems to smell funny.

I don't expect people to abandon their football club out of principle because then you sort of let the dodgy owners win by allowing them to have sole ownership of the institution. However, I do think most decent fans could reasonably A) condemn dodgy shit done by their owners or people who are blatantly affiliated to them and B) not pretend that their success, if they get it, actually has anything to do with their football club being good when in reality it has everything to do with the massive influx of money and getting lucky enough to couple that with a non-lunatic calling the shots. It's really easy actually to still support your football team and condemn certain actions of dodgy owners even if they're the people you have to thank for a little bit more bragging rights over other fans. Newcastle aren't going to descend back into mid-table obscurity and occasional relegation battles if their fans admit that their owners are bad eggs.

Some reports said 48 hours for Kenwright so today's the day. Other reports said he is only staying until at least one new director is appointed because you legally have to have at least one board member at all times as a limited company, so if that's true we might have to wait a bit longer. Listening to The Bobble the other day about how the "Liverpool branch" (the CEO, Director of Football, etc.) and the "London branch" (Moshiri and Kenwright) have been so disjointed over the past few years was an eye-opener but not surprising. They've made Everton a laughing stock in footballing circles. Incoming are MSP (who requested a complete clean slate at boardroom level) and two local business men and Evertonians whose names I forget off the top of my head. We'll see how they do but you have to imagine they can't be any worse.

Yet another first-timer enters the Hall of Fame as @Stan takes his first Last Man Standing victory at this season's final round in the Netherlands. @nudge is also officially crowned the champion of this season's Last Man Standing League, with an all-time record points tally of 39. Congratulations to both!

Here is the final table for 2022-23 Second place in the Eredivisie round sees @nudge complete a clean sweep of top three finishes and round off a dominant season at the top of the standings - congratulations! @Dan's 2 points in the final round are just enough to keep 2nd place ahead of @Stan, who rockets up the standings to finish on the podium having given us just the second double-figured score of the season in the final round. At the other end, @Rucksackfranzose scored 90% of his season tally in the final round to drag himself off the bottom of the table and leave @CaaC (John) as the lowest scorer of those who entered every round. It was also a quiet season for two-time champion @Viva la FCB. Thanks to everyone who took part this season - see you in August!

Still the big fish left to go but as long as he does then it's hallefuckinglujah.

Never in doubt was it? Djokovic will win Wimbledon as well if he's not injured. I just hope Murray has a decent few weeks on the grass. He won a Challenger-tier event in Surbiton last week. I think he's playing Nottingham this week, presumably Queen's Club and then Wimbledon after skipping all of the clay court events. Surprisingly, he is back up in the top 50 in the world now, although he clearly isn't going to reach an elite level again. I think he probably wants some sort of last hurrah, even if it's a Wimbledon QF or something, before retiring "on his own terms".

We're now getting sued by Carlo Ancelotti's lawyers because of something to do with "general commercial contracts and agreements". No idea whether that's a big deal or not. I worried when I saw the headline that it was going to say we owed him and/or his backroom team a bunch of money for wages or something. Regardless, more evidence of malpractice and a lack of professional competence from the people running the football club. Moshiri will have deservedly lost hundreds of millions by the time he disassociates himself from Everton. I think it'll be a minor miracle if we get through this phase in our history without dealing with some sort of points penalty or transfer ban or something. It's one thing after another. There's already talk of us needing to cash in on Onana this summer. I just don't understand how much longer it can continue. Two summers ago we only spent £1.5m in the transfer window. Then we sold Digne and Rodriguez to fund the Mykolenko and Patterson signings. Last summer we had to sell Richarlison for £60m and still had to do structured deals to be able to bring in McNeil, Onana and Maupay. In January, we sold Gordon for £40m and didn't even make a loan signing. We also got the £30m for Moise Kean off Juventus at some point this season. All the while they've slowly chipped away at what was a bloated wage bill. This now must be because Moshiri has had his assets frozen because he's been sanctioned and we have no money rather than it being about FFP. I know there was Covid but if we were able to blag our way past the profit and sustainability rules 2-3 years ago when our spending was in a much worse position, I don't see how we can be in more trouble for it now in light of how we've behaved in the transfer market. I suspect this Ancelotti thing probably isn't significant financially in the grand scheme of things but it's still bad headlines and presumably further money lost by the club because of what sounds like breach of contract. Unprofessional and incompetent, and it'll be the fans who end up shouldering the consequences when they're eventually supporting a Championship club.

He'd play for Barcelona for free remember!

Lol bye