Abdoulaye Doucoure - Everton Complete Deal

[ScoRoss]

31 minutes ago, The Artful Dodger said:

Am I being thick, but how can a player agree terms before a fee is agreed? Isn't that tapping up?

It's how most transfers are agreed now. Most 'insiders' you see will report them agreeing personal terms with the player before any negotiation with the clubs over price. It might well be 'tapping up' as you described but, when every club is doing it, no one is going to cry foul over it.

[RandoEFC+]

On 19/08/2020 at 10:16, The Artful Dodger said:

Am I being thick, but how can a player agree terms before a fee is agreed? Isn't that tapping up?

Yeah I think teams seem to basically let the buyer talk to the player now if there's a chance of a deal being concluded.

Apparently Watford want $35m though which is too much.

[Stan]

Apparently Monaco have come in with a late offer...

[El Profesor]

I really like the midfield Everton is building.

 

 

[LFCMike]

 

[Cicero]

James, Gomes, and Doucoure on paper looks like a quality midfield three. 

[RandoEFC+]

It's good that we've managed to get all three of these signings down under £30m. They have to deliver though. With Gomes and Gbamin likely to stay this spells the end for Davies who will surely at least get loaned out. Delph can go back to Leeds, we only paid a small fee for him so we can just take the L and move on from that signing. Apparently there's interest in Sigurdsson but he's unlikely to leave due to his wages. Not the end of the world if he stays as he still at least offers something. Twitter informs me that Besic is still an Everton player to and all I have to say to that is LOL.

[LFCMike]

2 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

It's good that we've managed to get all three of these signings down under £30m. They have to deliver though. With Gomes and Gbamin likely to stay this spells the end for Davies who will surely at least get loaned out. Delph can go back to Leeds, we only paid a small fee for him so we can just take the L and move on from that signing. Apparently there's interest in Sigurdsson but he's unlikely to leave due to his wages. Not the end of the world if he stays as he still at least offers something. Twitter informs me that Besic is still an Everton player to and all I have to say to that is LOL.

Got to be taking some serious risks financially?

[RandoEFC+]

3 hours ago, LFCMike said:

Got to be taking some serious risks financially?

Yeah surely. One minute we're right on the brink of being in trouble with FFP, the next we're spending £70m on three players who are probably going straight into the top tier of our wage structure. I know they've pushed it back a year but that still assumes we'll make the extra money back. I don't know how, maybe Cazoo are paying more money than Sport Pesa, maybe there's a deal in the works to sell Sigurdsson or something that claws some of it back but most likely we've got some dodgy but technically not illegal money coming in from Usmanov if we need it to keep us technically on the right side of the law.

Honestly though, who even cares? Money isn't an object for someone like Moshiri, especially with help from Usmanov. The only issue is getting it onto Everton's books legally and after UEFA have completely bottled punishing PSG or Man City, is that even a concern? We'll probably just get away with it through borderline fraud which will be labelled as "creative book-keeping". It's not exactly savoury though. At least Moshiri is "soft dodgy" so you can sort of forget where his money comes from because he smiles in front of the cameras and his business is far enough away that you can play the ignorance is bliss card. Usmanov is a full blown gangster/organised crime/violating human rights in his home country tycoon and an ugly, wrinkled bastard to boot. Yet as long as the players cherry-picked from across the world that come to Everton (for no other reason than we can afford them) win matches occasionally, our fans won't give a shit about where that money came from just like those of Man City, Chelsea, PSG etc. don't care. Because elite level football isn't about loving your club for what it represents or admiring your players for showing the same passion on the pitch as you feel towards the badge. Not anymore. It's about throwing your scarf on and hoping your chosen team win so that you can go on Twitter and have bragging rights for a few days over a bunch of other cunts you've never met because the randomers that don't even speak English let alone know what Kirkdale is that are wearing your team's shirt beat the ones wearing that other team's shirt. Maybe it's fine that football still acts as a form of escapism but none of us can really say our clubs are what they were a generation ago and we get further away each year.

So probably less taking risks and more selling another little piece of the soul of the football club. Depressing but it's hard to come to any other conclusion when you take off the tinted specs and look at it objectively. The investment of our money has been so poor over the past 5 years that we genuinely don't deserve to eventually succeed because if and when we do, it won't be because Everton Football Club did anything better than our rivals other than having backers that could afford to just keep throwing money at the problem until some of it landed in the right place. The same goes for clubs like Arsenal, Man Utd, Chelsea to a lesser extent. Run like an absolute shambles for years (seriously, just step back for a moment and look at how much utterly horrific decision making and recruitment has gone on at Arsenal and Man Utd over the past 10 years and then digest the fact that they've barely suffered one jot from it) yet there's no consequences because they can just invest the money from their latest £700m a month sponsorship deal into Bruno Fernandes or Aubameyang to make sure they only lose 2-3 league positions if that even when they have the worst season that's feasibly possible. 

If anything good does happen I'll enjoy it but nowhere near as much as I would have done ten years ago. It's a genuine possibility for me that I could lose most of my interest in Everton and "elite" football over the next few years. The more I get back into playing grassroots football myself and follow the first season of FC Isle of Man in the 10th tier, the more I realise how much Premier League football just doesn't capture the essence of actual football as it should be in the slightest anymore. Almost every drip of it is totally contrived apart from those few precious moments where something exceptional happens or somebody causes a massive upset.

Turned into a bit of a rant but I don't regret any of it.

[LFCMadLad]

8 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

Yeah surely. One minute we're right on the brink of being in trouble with FFP, the next we're spending £70m on three players who are probably going straight into the top tier of our wage structure. I know they've pushed it back a year but that still assumes we'll make the extra money back. I don't know how, maybe Cazoo are paying more money than Sport Pesa, maybe there's a deal in the works to sell Sigurdsson or something that claws some of it back but most likely we've got some dodgy but technically not illegal money coming in from Usmanov if we need it to keep us technically on the right side of the law.

Honestly though, who even cares? Money isn't an object for someone like Moshiri, especially with help from Usmanov. The only issue is getting it onto Everton's books legally and after UEFA have completely bottled punishing PSG or Man City, is that even a concern? We'll probably just get away with it through borderline fraud which will be labelled as "creative book-keeping". It's not exactly savoury though. At least Moshiri is "soft dodgy" so you can sort of forget where his money comes from because he smiles in front of the cameras and his business is far enough away that you can play the ignorance is bliss card. Usmanov is a full blown gangster/organised crime/violating human rights in his home country tycoon and an ugly, wrinkled bastard to boot. Yet as long as the players cherry-picked from across the world that come to Everton (for no other reason than we can afford them) win matches occasionally, our fans won't give a shit about where that money came from just like those of Man City, Chelsea, PSG etc. don't care. Because elite level football isn't about loving your club for what it represents or admiring your players for showing the same passion on the pitch as you feel towards the badge. Not anymore. It's about throwing your scarf on and hoping your chosen team win so that you can go on Twitter and have bragging rights for a few days over a bunch of other cunts you've never met because the randomers that don't even speak English let alone know what Kirkdale is that are wearing your team's shirt beat the ones wearing that other team's shirt. Maybe it's fine that football still acts as a form of escapism but none of us can really say our clubs are what they were a generation ago and we get further away each year.

So probably less taking risks and more selling another little piece of the soul of the football club. Depressing but it's hard to come to any other conclusion when you take off the tinted specs and look at it objectively. The investment of our money has been so poor over the past 5 years that we genuinely don't deserve to eventually succeed because if and when we do, it won't be because Everton Football Club did anything better than our rivals other than having backers that could afford to just keep throwing money at the problem until some of it landed in the right place. The same goes for clubs like Arsenal, Man Utd, Chelsea to a lesser extent. Run like an absolute shambles for years (seriously, just step back for a moment and look at how much utterly horrific decision making and recruitment has gone on at Arsenal and Man Utd over the past 10 years and then digest the fact that they've barely suffered one jot from it) yet there's no consequences because they can just invest the money from their latest £700m a month sponsorship deal into Bruno Fernandes or Aubameyang to make sure they only lose 2-3 league positions if that even when they have the worst season that's feasibly possible. 

If anything good does happen I'll enjoy it but nowhere near as much as I would have done ten years ago. It's a genuine possibility for me that I could lose most of my interest in Everton and "elite" football over the next few years. The more I get back into playing grassroots football myself and follow the first season of FC Isle of Man in the 10th tier, the more I realise how much Premier League football just doesn't capture the essence of actual football as it should be in the slightest anymore. Almost every drip of it is totally contrived apart from those few precious moments where something exceptional happens or somebody causes a massive upset.

Turned into a bit of a rant but I don't regret any of it.

Fantastic post!!

[Smiley Culture]

Doucoure, bearing in mind he was at a relegated side, was far better in all departments than Gomes and Davies statistically last season, which really shows his value and how poor Davies and Gomes were. 

[Dr. Gonzo]

19 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

The investment of our money has been so poor over the past 5 years that we genuinely don't deserve to eventually succeed because if and when we do, it won't be because Everton Football Club did anything better than our rivals other than having backers that could afford to just keep throwing money at the problem until some of it landed in the right place. 

Hasn't this sort of always been the case? Yeah there's instances of clubs that are well run getting success... but in part it's because they did make investments that did pay off.

Alright, I should probably preface everything I'm about to say with... I'm not necessarily referring to you when I talk about "Everton fans" - just some of the stuff matches a lot of what Everton fans I know irl have said. And as someone who grew up around a lot of Everton fans... I've sort of got a lot to say about Everton, ambition, and the state of the club (which includes the pessimism/negativity that is just so ubiquitous with Everton fans nowadays).

I can understand the negativity and pessimism from Everton fans, particularly after enduring the season they just endured while their local rivals had one of the best sides their fans have ever seen literally just run away with the league. I imagine dealing with years of shit investment while seeing your neighbors reap the rewards of good investment is particularly frustrating. Particularly as it was not that long ago that Liverpool and Everton didn't seem so far apart in their fortunes.

And I can sort of understand the frustration of your recent history involving a manager coming in, selling off your most potent attacker to a side that wouldn't use him properly and had him looking a bit... dogshite, all to make your midfield incredibly unbalanced and ineffective. And then you had Silva come in and try to fix that and... all he could really do was bring in Richarlison and tell him "hey you be brilliant, because your teammates are shite and you'll need to carry him" - which is nice because Richarlison looks class... but also shit because it doesn't actually address the problem.

And I can definitely understand being concerned that with all the money involved at Everton, and having two decently rated managers and all of their scouts/coaches come in... and it takes a genuine World Class manager in Ancelotti coming in to tell the club "hey... err... this midfield is totally shite and I need to rebuild it ASAP." Scouts/the football director should have stepped in and told Koemann "the side you're looking to build doesn't make sense... even on paper." Silva should have seen how unbalanced the midfield was and made signings that demonstrated he was capable of turning it around and bringing some balance to that squad.

But it's a good thing you're at least looking to rebuild the area of the pitch Everton are most lacking, when you compare the squad to the ambitions the owners hope the squad to meet up to... you're going to need a much better midfield if the club's looking for Europa League football... much less CL football. 

Honestly, I think a big part of what killed the soul of Everton came well before Moshiri and his money ever did. I think it happened sometime during the Kenwright era, because in the 90s I remember Everton fans thinking and acting like they were a big club. Because they are a big club. A relegation scrap was, rightly, considered well beneath Everton. I remember they had two shit seasons, coming 17th and 15th... and then they came roaring back with a "wait a second, we're fucking Everton" and then came 6th.

But then Everton finished right above the relegation spots again the season after... and I don't know if it just broke the fanbase or not. But that's when all the Everton fans I know started to act like their club were minnows in the league now. And maybe that's what years of being in relegation scraps does to a fanbase, regardless of their size, but after that the expectation... it was all so reduced. The ambition... well... I honestly haven't felt like Everton had the ambition to kick on as a club in a good long while until Moshiri came in. Even in the Moyes era... ambition was always a bit tempered and it seemed as though once Moyes moved onto United a lot of Everton fans thought "well, he's taken us as far as we can go" like their ambition had a ceiling.

Does the soul feel a bit missing from Everton now? Sure, maybe, but tbh I've felt like the soul has been missing from the top flight of the English game for a very, very long time now. Does that mean Everton have no soul or no connection with the fans? Fuck no it doesn't.

I've got mixed feelings about Everton doing better, because obviously... as a Liverpool fan... a part of me thinks it's funny that Everton have been sort of a "banter club" for us - even during our "shit years" while we were waiting to get our title. And another part of me thinks about my friends/family who are Evertonians (the poor fuckers) who it seemed like every week... like they weren't watching their football side, but watching a loved one get brutally tortured each week... I'm pretty sure that's not great for their mental health and I don't want my friends/cousins being sent into a serious depression over the fact that Marcel Brands is an overrated dickhead that couldn't say no to Ronald Koeman.

And since so much of the country hate Merseysiders, a very big part of me, would very much like to see Everton and Liverpool as two of the best teams in England again. Two clubs that hate each other, united by the fact that everyone else in England hate their fans. I can almost taste their tears.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is... but hey mate, I get that there's been a lot of frustration for Everton over our lifetimes - at least now the midfield you're looking to have going into the season actually is one that looks pretty decent on paper. Chin up fella. And if it does all go to shit, well... hey... at least you've got Isle of Man FC and some football that's not anywhere near as tainted as our top flight has been since the fucking 90s.

[RandoEFC+]

14 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Hasn't this sort of always been the case? Yeah there's instances of clubs that are well run getting success... but in part it's because they did make investments that did pay off.

It's more about spending within your means though. The "wrongness" is everywhere. Like I mentioned it's basically impossible for clubs like Arsenal and Man Utd to be ejected from that top six group no matter how many bad decisions they make. They have loads of money because they happened to be good at the right time and managed to establish a sort of monopoly. Yes Blackburn, Chelsea, Man City did it in a slightly different way and we've started going down that route. All clubs make good and bad investments but because of a combination of the established order and the luck factor of whether you can convince bastards with bottomless pockets to get in bed with you, basically the only two ways to be successful are to already be successful or to get lucky and suddenly obtain unlimited money. You get the occasional instances of Liverpool and Spurs finding genuine success through making a lot more good investments and appointments than bad ones but even those two sides enjoy those big underlying advantages of status and infrastructure that allow them to keep their noses in front of the rest of the non-elite clubs even when they're being idiots.

It's not even really specifically about Everton. Yes, our perpetual failure and general cursedness has left me without much optimism, and yes knowing that any success we get now is purely based off how much money we've got and not about being smart or building a good culture in the club like we did under Moyes, where we consistently held onto the coat tails of the elite clubs despite having less than half the wage and transfer budgets, because we got our scouting right, we got our recruitment right and we got the culture right.

There's just an overwhelming feeling of none of it actually being real anymore. I know we never won a trophy under Moyes but back then when we'd beat a big side or qualify for Europe it actually meant something because you knew how many good decisions it took and how much commitment our generally inferior players had to show to overcome the financial and structural disadvantages we had as a club. Maybe that's spoiled it for me but if we were to finish 4th next season or win the FA Cup, I'll obviously be pleased but it's just like, so what? We'll have got there because of the money we keep spending and us eventually getting it right by the law of averages. 

It goes beyond Everton anyway. I said it all earlier but football clubs at the top level just aren't real anymore and the widespread acceptance of diving, refereeing drama, deadline day, players and managers acting like school children, unfunny morons running fan "banter" pages on social media, the abuse and racism at games and on social media. People want it to be more of a soap opera than a sport now and they've got their wish. The last pillars of what used to make English football especially good are now falling one by one. Elite clubs exempt from the League Cup, youth teams playing in whatever they call the LDV Vans Trophy these days, FA Cup replays gone, they almost managed to squeeze the five substitutes rule under the door as well as if they haven't set enough projects in action to further tilt the scales towards the established order. 

I'll always support Everton, I know it's irrational for all of the reasons stated, it'll still ruin my weekend when we lose a game we shouldn't lose (less so than in the past because currently I just expect that to happen from the off) and I'll still be happy when we win and succeed but you compare a Premier League club to the new FC Isle of Man team, which is made up purely of people who have played amateur football on this island for years and brings everyone in the community under one banner. The people that commit to supporting the team over here won't be popping onto social media or TF365 to analyse the game every five minutes to try and look clever and insightful, won't be retweeting banter pages that have a pop at their rivals when the opportunity arises, won't be looking up opposition players and referees so they can tweet abuse at them, they'll just go for a drink with their mates after the game and enjoy their Saturday. So far removed from the Premier League nowadays it's unreal.

[Stan]

 

 

[RandoEFC+]

This one's done as well now. £20-25m fee.

No gaping holes in the squad left now. Our midfield options now read Allan, Doucoure, Gomes, Delph, Davies, Sigurdsson, Rodriguez, depending on whether we go back to a 4-4-2 or my preferred 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1. Hopefully we can fuck Delph off to Burnley or Leeds and find Davies a decent loan. If anyone will give us a respectable fee for Sigurdsson then I'd accept it as well because Rodriguez and Iwobi can both play in a number 10 role if we're going to use one. Can't really afford to get rid of all three of them though.

We look more balanced now with our first and second choices...

Pickford (Lossl)

Coleman (Kenny)

Holgate (Tomori?)

Keane (Mina)

Digne (Nkounkou)

Allan (Delph)

Doucoure (Davies)

Gomes (Sigurdsson)

Rodriguez (Walcott)

Richarlison (Iwobi/Bernard)

Calvert-Lewin (Kean)

 

Still plenty of room for improvement. If Pickford has another shite season, goalkeeper needs to be one of our next priorities.

[Stan]