Lucas Digne - leaves Everton for Aston Villa

[RandoEFC+]

I don't have a tweet or anything but of all of the interested parties in Lucas Digne, this is how things appear to stand:

Juventus - initial interest in him to replace ageing Alex Sandro but wanted to do a loan deal with an option to buy when Everton wanted cash up front or a loan with an obligation to buy.

Inter - have cooled their interest for similar reasons after Everton made it clear they aren't interested in loaning the player.

Chelsea - also seem to be interested in an initial loan deal with an option to buy, unsurprising following the news that first choice left back Ben Chilwell has been ruled out for the rest of the season. Apparently they haven't completely written this one off despite Everton insisting on a full transfer. Perhaps the Chelsea fans can add some more insight but if they could guarantee offloading Marcos Alonso in the summer in a deal that suits them, I think they could quite happily pay a fee for Digne now, make some money back off Alonso in the summer and go into next season with Digne and Chilwell competing over the left back slot.

Newcastle - not quite the glamorous move that Digne is after, I'm sure, but he would make quite a coup for Newcastle if they signed him and I'm sure he'd be compensated well. These last three clubs seem to be the ones that are the least put off by putting up a fee for a permanent deal this month. They're also probably the group of clubs least-favoured by the player.

West Ham - I was surprised to see their name mentioned but when you think about it a bit more, it does make sense. Aaron Cresswell is 32 and Moyes doesn't seem to fancy Arthur Masuaku that much, with Ben Johnson, primarily a right back, starting in the left back role ahead of him against Crystal Palace. West Ham can offer Lucas Digne the opportunity to play in the latter stages of the Europa League this season, and the prospect of further European adventures next season, and in footballing terms, would probably be his preferred destination of these bottom three clubs.

Aston Villa - Good sources on Twitter have touted Aston Villa as the fourth, un-named Premier League side to have an interest in Digne during this window. I think the interest isn't as far-developed as that of Chelsea, Newcastle and West Ham, but they're the other club in the mix. Matt Targett is Villa's regular left back and has averaged a couple of assists a season since they returned to the top flight, so they may be eyeing a move for Digne if they have any of that Jack Grealish money left to bolster their attacking output from this position.

 

To summarise, it doesn't look ideal for Digne as his ideal scenario of a move to a Champions League club appears incompatible with Everton's demands. With the club already on the brink with Financial Fair Play rules in the summer of 2021, and having now paid around £30m up front for the two deals they've done this window, it seems likely that a lump sum or at least an obligation to buy will be necessary for Everton to balance the books to some extent. Chelsea looks like Digne's best bet to enter the back end of his prime years in a team that can compete for serious honours, but they might be reluctant to invest significant funds in a player who at 28, isn't a huge amount younger than Marcos Alonso, who he seems likely to effectively replace in the squad. If West Ham are willing to cough up a reasonable fee for Digne this month, and there's no indication that talks are in any way advanced between the clubs, this is likely to be the happiest compromise to allow Digne to compete in Europe and Everton to pocket some much-needed cash. Everton will certainly be hoping that one of these clubs will do a deal for a permanent transfer during this window as a half-season loan will only reduce the value of a player who will be 29 years old at the start of next season, especially if his performances are of the same standard as they were for the Blues at the start of the season.

 

What I will complain about from a fans' perspective is that it is far too readily known that Digne is a) not in the manager's plans, b) has already been replaced, c) that the club essentially need there to be a transfer fee for their own financial reasons. All of this weakens our negotiating position and risks us ending up with someone like West Ham lowballing us with a £15m deal in the last few days of the window because they know we'd rather have that than accept a loan offer and have another player to shift off the books come the summer transfer window. With the money already spent on Patterson and Mykolenko (both of which were needed), I don't think the scenario of us loaning him out to a club like Chelsea and him coming back to a different manager at Everton that wants to utilise him again is one that can fall into place anymore.

[Cicero]

Alonso has 2 years remaining on his current contact on 100kpw. Not going to be easy offloading him and I don't think we will.

[Spike]

Not really into any of the Everton Barcelona rejects. I thought Andre Gomes was going to be one of the best midfielders in the world, I'm not a scout.

[RandoEFC+]

Says he'll decide his next club soon but doesn't sound like they're queuing round the block if Newcastle is fully off the table, for whatever reason.

 

[Cicero]

I'd take Digne. Not sold on him defensively but I like what he offers going forward. PL proven and tailored for the LWB role. 

[Rick]

17 minutes ago, Cicero said:

I'd take Digne. Not sold on him defensively but I like what he offers going forward. PL proven and tailored for the LWB role. 

Is he that much of an upgrade on Alonso? When I’ve seen Digne against us he’s left a lot to be desired  at the back. 

[RandoEFC+]

LWB in a back five is the perfect role for him. He's up there with the best in terms of creativity from that part of the pitch. He's not bad defensively but he isn't elite which is why playing with three CBs is ideal for him as long as they're not of the Michael Keane/Mason Holgate standard and can actually free him up from having to do much defending.

[Cicero]

22 minutes ago, Rick said:

Is he that much of an upgrade on Alonso? 

Anyone that can run is an upgrade on Alonso. 

[Lucas]

41 minutes ago, Cicero said:

I'd take Digne. Not sold on him defensively but I like what he offers going forward. PL proven and tailored for the LWB role. 

Sounds like he ticks all the boxes for a Chelsea full back.

[Honey Honey]

 

[Stan]

I'd be mildly annoyed if we're not making enquiries for him, given our short squad at the moment and that he has to be a better option tha Bertrand on that left side. 

[Whiskey]

Digne is a fucking outstanding player, his stats from last season were some of the best in the league going forward. It's just that he's called Benitez out for the dinosaur that he is and is now being sold.

My club is dying, it's fucking horrible but well done to whoever signs Lucas as they'll be getting a top player - someone like Leicester would be boss (though think it'll be Chelsea).

[Devil]

He should stick it out, Rafa will be gone soon enough.

[Lucas]

1 hour ago, Devil said:

He should stick it out, Rafa will be gone soon enough.

Rafa aside, not insinuating he doesn't like it at Everton but this has created a brilliant 'get out' for him if he did want a better move.

It's not like they have progressed quite as much as he possibly thought when he joined. He might actually want to leave. It's not like he's come out and vowed to fight for his place unless I missed that.

[Whiskey]

1 hour ago, Devil said:

He should stick it out, Rafa will be gone soon enough.

Benitez will stay for the season, he has the full backing of the owner who is stubborn against the board who don't want (and didn't want) Benitez at the club.

[RandoEFC+]

17 minutes ago, Whiskey said:

Benitez will stay for the season, he has the full backing of the owner who is stubborn against the board who don't want (and didn't want) Benitez at the club.

The one small cause for optimism is that Moshiri once put all of his eggs in the Marco Silva basket but still pulled the plug when things weren't going well. As an aside, with hindsight I think we'd be in a better position today if we had given him more time because Brands/Silva is the only DoF/Coach structure we've ever had that's compatible with long term progress in modern football, although if he had to go, replacing Silva with another similar profile of manager would also have been preferable to ripping up the new footballing strategy for a manager like Ancelotti who ended up leaving us high and dry anyway. Back to the point, though, Moshiri at one point thought Marco Silva was the Messiah and it didn't stop him from sacking him when we hit a bad run of form (nowhere near as bad as we've been since September this season, it's worth mentioning). The same could be true with Benitez. Moshiri doesn't act in a rational or predictable way a lot of the time.

[LFCMike]

 

[RandoEFC+]

49 minutes ago, LFCMike said:

 

 and why does he want to leave Rafa? Is it because under your management, the possibility of him playing European football or achieving his ambitions in any way at Everton is more remote now than it has been in his career? Or is it because you dropped him for questioning tactics that have yielded one win in about 20 years?

Paellardyce.

[RandoEFC+]

Spot the difference between how Thomas Tuchel handled the Lukaku saga and how Benitez handled the Digne saga, and then take a wild guess as to which one won the Champions League last season and which one had just finished in the bottom half of the Chinese Super League.

To come out with comments like that now about "what am I supposed to do about it" as if he's not the one who engineered this entire scenario with his awful tactics, misuse of our players, stubbornness and non-existent man management is actually incredible. The deliberate disingenuousness genuinely reminds me of Donald Trump in that he's pretending to have an argument about opinions when we're actually dealing in facts.

He's not kidding anyone. Our fans have seen Digne be professional, give 100% on the pitch and fully commit to our football club for multiple years and never make any noises about grand plans for the future even when it's been obvious that we were performing at a level below that which he could have played at. When an unpopular manager comes along, falls out with a player like that and drives him out of the club in the next transfer window, while the club isn't performing to a remotely acceptable level on the pitch, at least have the decency not to come out and make out as if you're not the problem.

Fuck me. He's genuinely lucky that he used to manage Liverpool because he can allow the braindead pundits and media to put that slant on the reasons that he's so unpopular with our fanbase. I'm genuinely trying to think of one area in which he's better than our other recent managers, and they have mostly been absolutely useless. Some of his summer signings have been quite good, that's about it. Otherwise he is taking us backward in every department and now he has the cheek to come out and pretend he's got nothing to do with one of the biggest scars he'll leave behind on our club when Moshiri finally caves and boots him out, which we all know he will eventually have to.

[Rick]

17 minutes ago, RondónEFC said:

 and why does he want to leave Rafa? Is it because under your management, the possibility of him playing European football or achieving his ambitions in any way at Everton is more remote now than it has been in his career? Or is it because you dropped him for questioning tactics that have yielded one win in about 20 years?

Paellardyce.

I’m not saying that Rafa isn’t a stubborn man, he absolutely can be, but why is Digne getting off completely Scott free from your fan base?

If it was early in Ancelotti’s reign last season that you’d heard a player had questioned him in front of the rest of the team then you would all be saying the player deserved to be punished. Rafa has clearly punished Digne by leaving him out, but there is more to it than that now. Rafa said about a fortnight ago that Digne was available for selection, so is there not the possibility that the player has completely downed tools and has been coasting towards January to get out? 
 

And now Rafa reveals that Digne has said he doesn’t want to play for you anymore, you end up going at Rafa again. The bias against him in this scenario is bizarre. Regardless of the player, if they question the manager in front of the squad then they deserve some form of discipline. 
 

Rafa has shown with Newcastle that he can get a tune out of players and get them performing above their ability. He was given, what, £2m in the summer to spend on your team that finished 10th? And you’re expecting Europe? You’ve had Calvert Lewin & Richarlson out for yonks, Digne acting a tool, and nobody but Coleman to use at RB. Your back line needed investment and Rafa got fuck all to do it. I don’t rate any of your back line apart from Godfrey and Digne going forward. You’ve went in on your transfer business for years now, how it’s been nothing short of a disaster. Yet, as Soon as Rafa walks through the door the expectations of him are to outperform who? West Ham & Leicester? Come on, be realistic. If you had Calvert Lewin & Richarlson this season you would not be sat 15th. 

[RandoEFC+]

It's very telling that only Liverpool fans have anything positive to say about Rafa. It really goes to show which side of the argument is being influenced by their emotional views on the manager from his past...

8 minutes ago, Rick said:

I’m not saying that Rafa isn’t a stubborn man, he absolutely can be, but why is Digne getting off completely Scott free from your fan base?

If it was early in Ancelotti’s reign last season that you’d heard a player had questioned him in front of the rest of the team then you would all be saying the player deserved to be punished.

If being the key word here. This didn't happen because, although Ancelotti's brand of football last season could be just as ugly on the eye as what we've seen this season, we at least picked up results. It worked, we were in and out of the top four for most of the first half of the season and even 2nd around Boxing Day. We are currently 15th with one win since September. Do you really need me to explain the difference here as to why Ancelotti would have been backed by the fanbase and not Benitez?

10 minutes ago, Rick said:

Rafa has clearly punished Digne by leaving him out, but there is more to it than that now. Rafa said about a fortnight ago that Digne was available for selection, so is there not the possibility that the player has completely downed tools and has been coasting towards January to get out?

Digne was supposed to be available for the Chelsea game but then fell ill the day before. Benitez was very careful to say "he says that he's ill" in the press conference. You want to posit a conspiracy theory about him pretending to be ill to get out of that game then please extend it to explain why he was there on Sunday against Brighton, sat on the bench, warming up on the sideline, clearly ready to play, and the manager chose to go with Seamus Coleman at left wing back for the whole 90 minutes instead?

13 minutes ago, Rick said:

And now Rafa reveals that Digne has said he doesn’t want to play for you anymore, you end up going at Rafa again. The bias against him in this scenario is bizarre. Regardless of the player, if they question the manager in front of the squad then they deserve some form of discipline.

The bias in this scenario is bizarre, but not the bias that you're referring to. Benitez is failing the club in every department. Go ahead and list three things that are positive about his management of Everton this season, or point to a successful future with him at the helm. I'll wait. There is sympathy for Digne in the fanbase. You're talking about a very good player who has given us some of his best years, like I said without once agitating for a move to a bigger club or a Champions League side. Take the manager out of it and there are plenty of reasons for Digne to want to leave the club anyway, because he's clearly better than playing in the bottom half of the Premier League. I'm pissed off at Benitez because he's made himself the decisive factor in one of our best players wanting to leave.

Of course a player that does that warrants some sort of discipline but I'll refer you to the Tuchel-Lukaku incident again. Tuchel disciplined Lukaku by leaving him out of the fixture against Liverpool but publicly spoke about talking to the player and building bridges again. A week later, both parties have publicly moved on from the row, Tuchel is now able to bring an important player back into the fold without losing any of his authority of the manager. Digne's apparent training ground bust-up with Benitez is less of a disciplinary issue than what Lukaku did, giving an unauthorised interview to a foreign media outlet in what I think we can agree was an explicit attempt to try and engineer a move away from the club. How does Benitez respond? He makes it adversarial and tries to control the narrative. When Digne misses a game through illness, he says in the press conference "he says he is sick" instead of "he's unavailable because he's sick", a completely unnecessary attempt to call the player's integrity into question in front of the media. He brings the player back into the match day squad and then plays a bang out of form Seamus Coleman in his position for 90 minutes just to show that he's in charge.

23 minutes ago, Rick said:

Rafa has shown with Newcastle that he can get a tune out of players and get them performing above their ability. He was given, what, £2m in the summer to spend on your team that finished 10th? And you’re expecting Europe? You’ve had Calvert Lewin & Richarlson out for yonks, Digne acting a tool, and nobody but Coleman to use at RB. Your back line needed investment and Rafa got fuck all to do it. I don’t rate any of your back line apart from Godfrey and Digne going forward. You’ve went in on your transfer business for years now, how it’s been nothing short of a disaster. Yet, as Soon as Rafa walks through the door the expectations of him are to outperform who? West Ham & Leicester? Come on, be realistic. If you had Calvert Lewin & Richarlson this season you would not be sat 15th. 

This squad, even with the injuries we've had, is better than 15th. Obviously missing Calvert-Lewin and Richarlison are not the manager's fault. I never said that I expected Europe, you've just made that up to make me sound unreasonable because your head's gone over me criticising with factual evidence a manager you like from ages ago. Newcastle performed a bit above expectations when he was the manager, it's true, but that's because he spends so much time in his press conferences talking about all of the things that are out of his control and convinces the media and people who aren't experts on the club he's managing like their actual fans are that he's performing above expectations. After he left Newcastle, did they go crashing out of the Premier League? No (not yet at least). It's been pointed out plenty of times that Steve Bruce actually had a very similar record to Benitez up to this season. The rest is just narrative. He's the expert of making his circumstances sound a lot worse than they are. This could happen to any manager of our team and our squad, sure. Except it hasn't. Our current run of form is the worst we've had in the Premier League era. One win since September.

Why are you mentioning West Ham and Leicester? Again, to make out like I'm being ridiculous. In the last three months, we've lost to QPR, Crystal Palace, Wolves, Brighton, West Ham, Brentford and Watford, and there's a very good chance we'll be adding Hull City to that list tomorrow.

As for the criticisms of the squad, I largely agree, but you could say the same about pretty much every team outside the top 6-8 sides so it doesn't qualify for me as a justification for us being sat in 15th having lost to all of those average-poor sides in a row.

At what point will you lot accept that the manager is culpable for these results, at least in part? That's not even the meat of it either. We've had pretty bad patches in recent years (not quite this bad) but at least Koeman and Silva and Allardyce were just churning out bad results and performances. Benitez is being given licence to fall out with players, backroom staff and even board members left, right and centre and then being backed as the man who's going to make it worthwhile and sort it all out in the long run when there's even less evidence that he's capable of that than there was under previous managers.

I could just about stomach being 15th, put it down to the injuries and adopt a mentality of just getting through the season because in spite of what I've said, I don't think there's a realistic chance he takes us down (not that it's remotely acceptable that that's where the bar stands for a club like ours regardless of how poor our recruitment has been). What worries me most of all is the direction of traffic around him, and how he's having more influence in the long-term decisions the club is making when I think he's the absolute last person I'd trust in this day and age to direct any football club to eventual success. And that's why I want him gone yesterday.

[Tar-Mairon]

It's bizarre.

I mean, yes, he hasn't been treated the best by the media in the past. He actually did quite a good job at Newcastle and it was Bruce's mates in the media who couldn't accept that Newcastle fans loved him (generally). Objectively, he had a lot less to work with than Bruce did so the job he did there was objectively better. Some pundits have an obvious hatred of him that goes beyond what he is actually doing.  

However, he deserves to be called out when he does do a bad job and at Everton, he's doing a bad job. This is clear.

He was a never a good man manager even when he was winning things - his strengths were his tactical acumen and win-at-all-costs mentality. He could be cold, aloof and distant because his strengths balanced out the weaknesses. 

He's lost that. He now accepts mediocrity and looks to be tactically all over the place. No, the injuries aren't his fault but he should be getting much more of a tune out of Everton than this. 

It's when this happens, that his way of dealing with people comes into sharp focus as it can be forgiven when he's winning. But he's not winning. The fans can't stand him. He knows the pundits in the media can't wait to leap on him.

It's then that you kill the noise. You don't, particularly when your most infamous moment in football occurred in a press conference meltdown ("fact" is still quoted in mockery after his name) have a total meltdown against one of your own players, embarrassingly bring up the name of a club legend in a transparent attempt to show you "get the club" five times to give fuel to your critics or, as has been said, take digs at the integrity of your players. 

For someone who prides himself on being cool and rational, he completely flips under any kind of actual pressure. He wasn't under it at Newcastle so he thrived but he is here and he isn't thriving.

He's taken jobs at the two clubs who he clearly should have stayed away from because he would never be accepted unless he performed miracles - Everton and Chelsea. That's not an attack on their fans, it's just you don't want some managers at your club. I could never accept George Graham at Spurs and he won a trophy for us. 

[RandoEFC+]

23 minutes ago, Tar-Mairon said:

He knows the pundits in the media can't wait to leap on him.

I agree with most of your post but not this. I felt that the media narrative was largely that he performed well at Newcastle and that he was the one thing keeping them afloat in the face of Ashley's tyranny. I might misremember of course.

Present day, though, I feel that he's getting a pretty easy ride from the national media and TV pundits for someone getting the results he's been getting at Everton for most of this season. The vultures were circling for Martinez, Koeman and Silva at this point.

[Cicero]

Seems Everton are only looking to sell. They will only contemplate a loan with obligation to buy. Seems as there are two PL clubs not named Chelsea interested and are willing to pay his valuation. I imagine West Ham and Newcastle. 

Chelsea's 1st option is to recall Emerson, which Lyon rejected. They do not want to purchase any LB permanently until the summer window. Chelsea are working with a potential loan and option to buy with Barcelona for Sergino Dest. 

 

 

[Rick]

@RondónEFC I’m not going to bother quoting all that. I don’t know your club, and clearly I haven’t looked into the full workings. You laying it all out like that makes it pretty clear there are shortcomings in his management at your club. I went down a path I didn’t want to be on in this discussion, so I officially rescind my points