Moyes Has Never Spoken to Friedkin. The Sentence Says Everything Everton Won't.
David Moyes has revealed he has never spoken directly to Everton owner Dan Friedkin. The silence, more than the failed transfers, is the real story of Everton's window.
Moyes Has Never Spoken to Friedkin. The Sentence Says Everything Everton Won't.
There is a particular kind of damage that only silence can do to a football club, and David Moyes has just described it, plainly and on the record. According to the BBC, the Everton manager has never spoken directly to Dan Friedkin, the American businessman who completed his takeover and has been the principal owner at Goodison Park for the better part of two years. Moyes made the admission in the wake of a transfer window he described, without ornament, as a series of blows.
It is the sort of line that, once printed, cannot really be unsaid. Managers are routinely asked, in the long shadow of a deadline, whether they feel supported. They tend to talk around it, or they reach for the sort of corporate loyalty that says nothing at all. Moyes, by contrast, simply told the truth of his working life at Goodison: there is a man who owns the club, and there is a man who manages it, and they have not yet found a telephone number between them.
The football consequences of that are easier to catalogue than the structural ones. Everton went into the summer needing a centre-back, needing a forward, and needing, in places, the kind of depth that turns a precarious mid-table finish into a less precarious one. According to the BBC, Moyes described the window as a series of "transfer blows" — his phrase, on the record, for a summer in which the club failed to land the targets he and his staff had identified. He did not name them. The report did not name them either. What he did name was the feeling: that the work he and his staff had put in over the summer had not been matched by the room above them.
That feeling, more than any fee or any failed bid, is the story of Everton's window.
To understand why, it helps to remember what Moyes's return to Goodison was supposed to be. He came back as a steady hand, a man who had already taken the club through one of the more turbulent transitions in their recent history. Friedkin's takeover, completed the year after, was framed — in the clubs' own careful language, and in the wider reporting around the deal — as the beginning of a more stable era. A period in which the churn of ownership and the perpetual scramble for funds would be replaced by something resembling a long-term plan. The Friedkin Group, the family office behind the purchase, had made its name in entertainment and hospitality. The pitch to supporters was straightforward: the new owners had the capital, the patience, and the appetite to build.
Moyes's comments, on the evidence of the BBC's reporting, suggest that pitch and the day-to-day reality have drifted a long way apart.
It is worth being careful with what we don't know. We don't know why Moyes and Friedkin have never spoken. It may be that the relationship is mediated through executives at the club, as is the case at several Premier League sides. It may be that one or both parties has tried, and the other has not. It may simply be that two busy men, separated by an ocean and a calendar, have not found a way to have a conversation. None of those explanations is, on its own, a crisis. The problem is that the manager of a football club should not be the one explaining any of this to the public. The owner, or someone close to the owner, should be. Instead, the silence is being read aloud by the man who has to set the team out on a Saturday.
In the meantime, the football carries on. Everton opened their season with a result that did nothing to settle the mood around the club, and the early table is, as ever, an unreliable witness to anything that will matter in March. What it does not do is buy Moyes the one thing he appears to have wanted from the summer: a squad that looks like it was put together with him, and not at him.
What makes the silence particularly pointed is that Moyes is not, by reputation, a man who complains in public. He is awkward in front of microphones, careful with his adjectives, prone to the small politenesses of a press conference rather than the grand gestures. When he chooses to say something sharp, it tends to be because the situation has forced his hand. That is the register the BBC's reporting captures here. It is not a manager performing grievance. It is a manager, under direct questioning, telling a simple truth about who he talks to and who he does not.
Everton, for their part, have not, on the evidence of the available reporting, denied the substance of Moyes's account. There has been no on-the-record rebuttal, no careful counter-briefing, no carefully staged photograph of the two men together. The club's silence is, in its own way, a confirmation of the shape of things.
That is the part that should give supporters pause. The new owners were sold, in part, on the basis that the steady hand at the top would finally be matched by a steady hand at the bottom of the building. Two windows on, the manager is talking to anyone who will listen about a transfer list that did not land and an owner he has never heard from. That is not, by itself, a relegation fight or a resignation story. It is something more uncomfortable, because it is the kind of story that, if it is not corrected soon, becomes both of those things at once.
For Moyes, the practical work continues. There are games to be set up, a squad to be coaxed, and the slow, unglamorous business of turning what he has into something that works. He will do that, as he has always done it, with the limited tools in front of him. What he should not have to do, and what no manager should have to do, is explain to the country that he does not know what his own owner sounds like.