Everton Are a Curious Case, but Ronald Koeman Has Pedigree to Revive the Toffees

A lot of football stats, which look to highlight how badly or brilliantly a team’s form has been, tend to try to maximise their impact by zooming in their focus to a period inside of a couple of arbitrary start and end points, so here’s one about Everton.

Between Boxing Day 2004 and Oct. 23, 2005, a period of nearly 10 months, David Moyes’ team lost 17 out of 27 league games, drawing three and winning just seven. It gave them a points-per-game average of just over 0.8, which over the course of a full season would have seen them gather few enough points to have been relegated in every Premier League season up to and including 2015/16.

The remarkable thing about Everton in this period—a period, remember, which was just 10 weeks shy of spanning a full season—is that they were not relegated, instead they qualified for the first time in their history for the Champions League. Statistics are a curious thing, but then so are Everton.

After Liverpool had finally fallen out of the race for fourth place with a defeat at Arsenal on the 2004/05 season’s penultimate weekend, the Toffees celebrated reaching the promised land by themselves collapsing 7-0 at Highbury, eventually finishing a scarcely credible 34 points behind the champions Chelsea.

Everton can’t be blamed for the wild polarisation of the top few teams from the rest at the middle of the last decade. The point is that popular history tends only to recite that Moyes’ team basked briefly in the rich sunlight of the top four, and not that they, and the teams they beat to get there, were actually average. They’d finished 17th the previous season and dropped back out of the top half again the following season.

It gets more difficult each season to define exactly where Everton’s level should be. The club have the weight of history on their side, and they can boast more seasons in the top flight than any other outfit and as many league titles as Manchester City and Chelsea combined. Yet they have seen clubs with smaller resources rise up from lower divisions and finish above them again and again since they last landed silverware.

Expectations may have slumped but frustrations have remained, making Ronald Koeman’s job one of the toughest but also the most confusing in the Premier League.

If anything has happened to suggest to Toffees fans their club are about to finally awaken a dormant sense of ambition, it is the appointment in Koeman, a manager whose pedigree matches their own.

That pedigree would have counted for nothing had the new season brought more of the shapelessness that turned Everton’s defence, and later the whole team, into a tottering bag of nerves during the second half of Roberto Martinez’s reign.

But, as was evident during Sunday’s 2-0 victory over West Ham United that brought an end to a run of six games without a win, this Everton side have more clique and verve than the team that finished last season in 11th.

Another gruesome stat from last term; from Nov. 1 onwards, Everton managed two Premier League wins against sides that finished outside of the bottom three. Two was also the number of victories they managed all season against teams finishing in the top 10.

Somewhere among this, you feel, lies the answer to what went wrong for Martinez after such a promising start to his reign.

After years spent overachieving on a small budget at Wigan Athletic, where he was coveted by his chairman Dave Whelan and by Latics fans, Everton was a colossal role for a manager who had spent his coaching career helping smaller clubs punch above their weight. In the end, the size of the task simply swallowed him up.

Three years after the last managerial switch at Goodison Park, another new boss had made a strong start, but there is an optimism around the club now that was missing back in 2013. This is in no small part down to the breeding of the man they have placed in charge.

Prior to arriving in England to manage Southampton in 2014, a list of Koeman’s previous employers in management is rich in European heritage; Ajax, where he won two Eredivisie titles; PSV, where he won a third; Valencia, where he claimed the Copa Del Rey. A year at Benfica failed to yield silverware but gave a crash course in dealing with grave expectations in a cauldron of passion and noise.

PAOLO COCCO/Getty Images

Skip back a decade or two, and Everton’s previous appointments had been made from more humble stock.

Moyes, Martinez’s predecessor, had won the old Second Division with Preston North End. Before that, Howard Kendall, Joe Royle and Mike Walker came clutching a handful of domestic accolades, but only Walter Smith had real form having won seven titles with Rangers and taken the 'Gers to the cusp of the Champions League final in 1993.

None of which is to say that the club made appointments that were inappropriate, rather that for the first time in years England’s fourth-most successful league side have a manager in charge with a track record that befits.

What muddies the waters of Koeman’s task now, however, will be how if at all he is able to marry the ever more distant-seeming past with the barren '90s and '00s and somehow build a future out of all the neuroses that swish around the blue side of Stanley Park.

The word on the terrace for a number of seasons now has been that Everton’s squad is stronger than it has been for a generation, and this season, that looks truer than ever. But it’s a mark of just how underwhelming some of the recent lineups at Goodison Park have been that Romelu Lukaku’s goal against West Ham on Sunday made him just the third Everton player in the Premier League era to reach 50 goals for the club.

Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images

Koeman bought well in the summer. Luring Ashley Williams and Yannick Bolasie from stable domestic rivals was significant, not only for the difference they’ve made on the pitch, but for what it means in terms of Everton’s pulling power within the Premier League.

That Koeman was persuaded to depart St Mary’s with Southampton on such an upward curve was another reminder of the potential at Goodison Park.

The congestion at the top of the Premier League has caused a strange environment. Of the six clubs with title hopes, packed in with just three points between them, two will be reconciling those ambitions with failure to even make the top four come May. Quite where that leaves sixth-placed Everton isn’t clear.

Football pundit Kevin Kilbane, a former Toffees player, struggled on Sunday when featuring on BBC's Match of the Day 2 to pinpoint what the Goodison faithful could reasonably expect from the season—eighth seems pessimistic given the strength of their start.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable that it will take time for Koeman to build a team in his image and get the best out of this appointment, but with such an impressive squad, European qualification should be in sight if early performances are a guide.

But it bears repeating; Everton are a curious thing. There is more still to come.