Sean Dyche knows the most important part of his job is winning games.
And he knows that, while Everton just about survived relegation over the past two seasons, the club has faced such peril because it has not won enough matches over that period.
He intends to fix that.
Dyche is a realist and his understanding of the basic principles of football will underpin his first summer at Goodison Park. At the root of everything is the need to find ways to win Premier League football matches. It is not a case of winning at any cost - for all the resilience he added to Everton he also created a side that created more chances and scored more goals upon his arrival. But substance will come before style and that belief will shape his approach to the summer, from the transfer window to the pre-season preparations.
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Dyche is a manager who burns at the assumptions often made about him, conclusions based on the near-decade in which he transformed the fortunes of Burnley. He has little time for suggestions he does not want to play fashionable football or that he cannot coach it. His argument is that it is his job to find the most effective route to success from the circumstances in which he is operating. At Burnley that was having access to a limited budget to survive in the richest league in the world.
At Everton he is at a more demanding club, with a more prestigious heritage and a fanbase that is desperately hoping for progress after several years of moving backwards even with the hundreds of millions of majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri. In time - should he survive long enough - he will likely have access to greater resources than he had at Turf Moor. Having secured survival he may even start to decorate his Finch Farm office. But for this summer at least, ahead of what is anticipated to be the last full season before the move to the Liverpool waterfront, his budget looks set to be constrained.
Speaking after the final day win against Bournemouth, the narrow victory that confirmed he had succeeded in his first goal of leading the club to safety, Dyche suggested he was unaware of how much money he would have available and whether he would need to sell some of the club’s assets in order to fund an urgently-needed squad rebuild. He is now on holiday but should know the answer to some of those questions now and the decision not to trigger the option to buy Conor Coady for a fee of around £4.5m, the looming departure of Asmir Begovic after the two parties failed to reach an agreement, and the move to offer Tom Davies a new deal - are all indicative of a club having to manage what money it does have cautiously.
Put simply, this will be a summer of low risk, sticking to what is known and where the resources that are available will be focused on the key problem areas.
Dyche has not shied away from highlighting the extent of the problems Everton need to conquer - using the post-Bournemouth press conference to amplify his belief the club is underperforming and that he has inherited a long-term situation that can only be fixed with time, patience and essentially common sense.
“I've tried to be realistic since I've been here but the problem with realism is not many people want it because it sounds boring”, Dyche said. “But at the end of the day it is time for that. There was a time when this club went from: 'Let's just do everything.' But there is a time for realism, that's what I've learned... We need to click it back together, realign it, and get the fans connected to what we are as a team, to what I am as a manager. And then there will be another day when a fashionista can come in and we'll have a beautiful product but what we need now is actually a rawness, a heartbeat that the Evertonians can grip to.”
In a summer in which there is much that Dyche could look at, he will focus on what he can achieve as a priority. Two of his catchphrases will define his approach - “alignment” and “controlling the controllable”. Dyche will continue his work on the psychology of the dressing room - he has spoken of a squad that was too emotionally turbulent upon his arrival and his initial moves of seeking player views via a questionnaire, and banning snoods and hats from training were part of a twin-approach to breed trust and professionalism.
Most of all he will seek to create a squad that understands its shared goals and how best to achieve them and to build on the “relentless” mentality he began to create following his arrival. This was essential to the run that saw Everton finish the season with four unbeaten away games, including a 99th minute equaliser against Wolves, and it will be a factor in deciding who the club targets in the transfer market, with personality a crucial aspect.
Dyche has alluded to the need for a cultural reset throughout his tenure and previously said: “It is not a quick fix. It's not just ‘buy a player, hurrah it's all solved'. They've tried that in the past, it's not that easy. You have to build a belief in a new culture. If you ask five die-hard Evertonians what the club stood for they would probably give me five different answers. The club has to realign. There was a time when it was 'earthy, hard-working. give a lot to the shirt, pride'. I'm not quite sure they are as obvious now.”
This does not mean that Dyche will not seek to play attractive football. On the pitch the most immediate change upon his arrival was the rise in Everton’s xG (expected goals) and an increase in the number of touches by his players in the opposition box. His side still struggled to score goals but Dyche’s 18 games in charge were a far cry from some of the frustrating performances of earlier in the season in which Everton struggled to offer an attacking threat - one low point being back-to-back trips to Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United in which not a single shot on target was mustered across 180 difficult minutes. That Dyche was able to achieve improvements in those key metrics was impressive, particularly with the absence of his one trusted senior striker, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, for much of the run-in.
“There has to be some key core values - what do you do to try and give you the best chance of winning because whatever people say, that is what it is about: You have got to try and win," Dyche told the Training Ground Guru podcast following his departure from Burnley. He added: “You have got to do what you have got to do. As regards styles, what suits your players? What gets the outcome? You can play amazing football and win every week or win loads of games, every manager wants to do that. Trust me. Every coach and manager wants to do that. It is just that sometimes you have got to look at it pragmatically.”
Dyche’s starting point for next season will be finding the formula best-suited to the players at his disposal. If he can get Everton winning games then eventually he might take the club to a position where he is under less pressure and has more resources to develop tactically, but he has got to build a solid foundation first.
As Everton manager, after Bournemouth, he explained: “I want to play good, attractive, winning football but it has to start with something. There have been signs this team will work, fight and give everything. Don't think Pep Guardiola's side just play beautiful football, they work, they defend, play hard, as well as being ultra-top footballers.”
Everton’s summer transfer plans were hampered by the late confirmation of the club’s Premier League status. For a second consecutive summer the club has conceded a significant headstart to the teams it is trying to catch. The primary focus will be on forwards. A second season of injury frustration for Calvert-Lewin left Everton struggling to score goals with Neal Maupay the only new striker added in the wake of the sale of Richarlison. There is a consensus this move has not worked so far, though Maupay did arrive five games into the campaign, having had a limited pre-season and into a side ill-suited to playing to his strengths.
While Calvert-Lewin has started his summer break by seeking specialist fitness help in Germany, it is clear he needs support and Everton need other options going forward - as was the case in January when key club personnel from then-manager Lampard to Moshiri suggested strikers would be sought only for none to arrive. Director of football Kevin Thelwell and his recruitment team have essentially now had 12 months to come up with options to strengthen an attack that has struggled for some time.
Another key area of focus is at full-back, particularly left-back. Dyche was left trying to secure Everton’s survival without a single fit first team full-back against Bournemouth. On the right, Seamus Coleman and Nathan Patterson have both suffered persistent injury problems while on the left Dyche sees Ben Godfrey as a potential competitor for Vitalii Mykolenko but Godfrey too has endured a difficult time with injury. The sale of young left back Niels Nkounkou after Saint Etienne triggered a clause to buy him following his loan means finding an option on the left of the defence is important.
At centre back the decisions to allow Coady and Yerry Mina to leave pave the way for James Tarkowski and Michael Keane to get first option on forming a partnership, while the returning Jarrad Branthwaite is liked by Dyche and will be given the opportunity to impress, though he does have suitors after his successful loan spell at PSV Eindhoven.
The decision to offer Davies a new contract points to a desire to avoid tying up limited funds in searching for squad players and for the coaching team to stick to players they know. Whether he accepts the deal remains to be seen and in his mind will be the likelihood he will start as the fifth choice central midfielder unless one of the European-qualified clubs interested in Amadou Onana is tempted into making a sizeable offer for his services. Also key will be what happens to the returning trio of Andre Gomes, Jean-Philippe Gbamin and Dele Alli. All three central midfielders remain under contract and are on significant wages and so finding a solution to their situations will be a key task for Thelwell this summer.
Another area of interest will be the use of academy players, with further loan opportunities likely to be sought for some of the brightest prospects. Tom Cannon excelled at Preston North End in the second half of the campaign and his short-term future will partly be influenced by what Everton can achieve in the club’s hunt for new forwards. As reported by the ECHO as early as March, Preston would love to have Cannon back. Sunderland retain an interest in Ellis Simms after he enjoyed a good loan spell with the Championship club before being brought back to Merseyside in January to support the first team.
Other prospects such as Stanley Mills and Reece Welch may be given their first loan moves - Welch having been due to join MK Dons on the final day of the January window before that deal fell through. Lewis Warrington was kept at Everton until the last day of the summer transfer window as Lampard weighed up his options and is another promising player whose short term future may be dependent on what happens to other players in and around the first team squad.
A key factor in the thinking of any academy prospect on the cusp of the senior side will be the lack of pressure-free minutes Everton have been able to offer players across recent seasons, while Dyche is open about his reluctance to make substitutions unless he believes they are absolutely necessary. Dyche does hold an interest in player development and was key to the rise to Premier League football of Dwight McNeil, but any opportunity to offer experience to academy prospects will be tempered by the need for results.
From a wider perspective, Dyche has discussed with academy staff some of the core values he believes should run through the Finch Farm setup but has acknowledged he will not have the same influence at Everton as he did at Burnley, where the infrastructure of the club grew through the success he inspired. He told the ECHO in April: “The way most Premier League clubs are structured now you can’t oversee all that. Burnley was different. It was a very small situation that grew, so in the early days of that I was involved in putting the people in place in the academy - not necessarily running the academy but being in the interview process and meeting key figures of the academy as it grew. But then it was time that I stepped away and the people that were put in place ran it. It’s different here, it’s up and running, it has got a lot of depth to it, it’s got a lot of good people working in it.”
For Dyche, the primary goal is building a competitive and resilient Premier League team. Once he has achieved that he can think about longer term strategic issues and push up the threshold of what constitutes success. For the time being, he wants no-one to be under the illusion that Everton is a club that does not need change, and that finding a way to ‘align’ it and then build on that for progress will not be easy. And it will take time.
He said: “It's a big club, make no mistake. Big history, big club but we are not performing like a big club. We have to find a way of changing that. This is two seasons now. I've played my little part in two seasons of this but there is a massive amount of change to build to a new dawn, a new future, a bigger future if you like. I think the Evertonians, as remarkable as they have been, have to remember that. This is a bigger project than just: 'Oh well, it's all right now.’ It's not, because there is a lot of work required as this [fighting relegation] has been going on for two years. I don't have magic dust, I can only make things happen I think are believable. There is massive amounts of work to be done, not just from me but from everyone at the club.”
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