With a defeat to Aston Villa on Saturday evening, Everton made it four losses from four to start 2024-25 – their worst start to a league season since the 1950s.
Having come through a challenging 2023-24 season with plenty of reasons to be cheerful, Everton would have hoped for a more positive start to the new campaign.
After enduring the stress of securing survival despite two points deductions for breaching Premier League financial rules, everyone at the club would have been optimistic that a better season was on the cards this time around.
Without those points deductions, after all, Everton would have finished 12th last season, just one point off the top half of the table. They also underperformed their expected goals to a worse extent than anyone else in the Premier League (40 goals from 54.9 xG), suggesting that with some better finishing, they might have been even higher up the table.
And yet, the beginning of 2024-25 has been dismal. Following Saturday’s 3-2 defeat at Aston Villa, Everton have made their worst-ever start to a Premier League campaign, and their worst start to a top-flight league season in 66 years.
Everton started the season with disappointing 3-0 and 4-0 defeats to Brighton and Tottenham, followed by an embarrassing – and potentially hugely damaging – capitulation against Bournemouth. In that game, Everton broke the Premier League record for the latest a team has led by two goals in a game they have gone on to lose, having led 2-0 in the 87th minute before conceding three late goals to lose 3-2.
Then, in Saturday’s early evening kick-off, Everton became only the second club in Premier League history to lose back-to-back matches after being two goals up in both, losing 3-2 at Villa Park.
Dwight McNeil and Dominic Calvert-Lewin had Everton 2-0 up in the first half, but an Ollie Watkins brace was added to by Jhon Durán’s stunning screamer. Everton might’ve salvaged a point but saw Calvert-Lewin denied by the crossbar.
Villa held on to the comeback victory thereafter, Durán’s strike condemning Sean Dyche’s side to a fourth successive loss.
The result confirmed Everton’s worst start to a season since 1958-59, when they lost their first six games. It is also only the third time in the club’s history that they’ve started a season by losing as many as their first four games (also five in 1926-27).
On both of the previous occasions that they’ve lost their first four games, they recovered from to avoid relegation, which should count as a decent omen for them, at least. However, in 1926-27, they finished in the top flight’s bottom three, but survived because only two teams were relegated in those days. They’ll need a bigger recovery this time around if they are to worm their way out of this situation.
Perhaps defeat to Aston Villa should have come as no surprise. Going back to the end of last season, Everton came into this game on a four-game losing streak – their longest such run in the Premier League since losing six in a row in October 2005.
They also have a dreadful record against Villa, against whom they are winless since the Villans’ return to the Premier League in 2019. Everton have now lost eight and drawn three of their 11 meetings in that time, scoring a pitiful five goals.
Everton are in real trouble, but they are not entirely without hope. In the Premier League era, 15 teams have previously begun a season with four losses, and just under half of them (seven of 15) have gone on to survive.
Rather more ominously, however, each of the last four teams to lose their opening four matches – Fulham and Sheffield United in 2020-21, Norwich City in 2021-22 and Luton in 2023-24 – have all been relegated.
Southampton are in a similar boat having also lost all four games this season, and both teams will need a stark and sudden improvement on the pitch to avoid the same fate as the four most recent teams to start a Premier League season so badly.
Everton face all three newly promoted sides in the space of their next six fixtures, so they have a few good opportunities coming up to pick up some valuable and much-needed points, and also to avoid extending their terrible start to 2024-25.
Enjoy this? Subscribe to our new football newsletter to receive exclusive weekly content. You should also follow our social accounts over on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.