Everton have made a terrible start to 2024-25, but what exactly are the issues that manager Sean Dyche needs to address?
It’s early days in the new season, but the signs at Everton so far aren’t great.
Bottom of the table after three losses from three games, Saturday’s embarrassment against Bournemouth was the nadir of Sean Dyche’s reign. After leading 2-0 until the 87th minute, Everton went on to break the Premier League record for the latest a team has led by 2+ goals in a game they have lost, with Bournemouth scoring three times to secure a shock 3-2 win at Goodison Park.
It was an unimaginable collapse from the position Everton had found themselves in with so little of the game to go at home against a team with whom they would have finished level on points last season were it not for their eight-point deduction. It was also, perhaps most concerningly, a million miles from the kind of defensively solid performance a manager like Dyche is meant to guarantee as a minimum.
It was – surely – a one-off, and Dyche will make sure nothing like that happens again, but there is no avoiding the fact Everton have had defensive issues in all three games this season. Saturday’s capitulation followed 3-0 and 4-0 defeats to Brighton and Tottenham in their opening two games. That is a worrying new development.
Everton’s biggest problem last season was at the other end of the pitch – namely with finishing off chances. They underperformed compared to their expected goals to a worse degree than any other team in the top flight, scoring 40 goals from 54.9 xG (-14.9). With a collective siege mentality after being given a points deduction almost seeming to help the players pull in the same direction, they played well enough and created lots of chances – they just missed far too many of them.
We’re obviously only able to use a small sample size this season, but given it’s a continuation of what they did last term, it’s worth noting that they are still underperforming compared to their expected goals in 2024-25, with the fourth-worst record in the Premier League (-1.4 – two goals from 3.4 xG). The problem is that, on top of poor finishing this season, they are also creating fewer chances, with their xG per 90 down at 1.13 this term from 1.44 last season.
Also, as was the case last season, there is still an overreliance on set-pieces – a consistent feature of a Sean Dyche team. This season, 40.4% of Everton’s expected goals have been generated from dead-ball situations – the third-highest proportion in the Premier League behind Ipswich (who have played Manchester City and Liverpool) and Nottingham Forest.
Everton also look like one of Dyche’s teams in that they look to get the ball forward quickly and there isn’t much focus on keeping hold of it. Only Newcastle (44.5%) have played a higher proportion of their passes forwards in the Premier League this season than Everton (43.4%), and only Ipswich (37.1%) – who, it must be said once again, have played City and Liverpool – have a lower average possession share than Everton (38.2%). Only Newcastle (937) have attempted fewer passes than them (944).
There are significant aspects of the game in which they aren’t like Dyche’s Burnley, though. They defend on the front foot much more than one might expect of a typical Dyche team; his Burnley side had great success playing with a low block, and while Everton are happy to drop deep when the opposition have comfortable possession, they also press as much as many of the best and most possession-dominant sides in the league.
They rank fourth in the Premier League this season for pressures (592), and third for pressures in the final (227) third, behind only Liverpool and Manchester United.
They are also second for high turnovers (defined as winning the ball within 40 metres of the opposition goal line), with 29 (9.7 per game), and they ranked for fifth for high turnovers last season, too, with 366 (9.6 per game), behind only City, Spurs, Liverpool and Arsenal.
They were, however, third-from-bottom last season for the number of those high turnovers that led to a goal, with four, and they are yet to score from a single one of their 29 this season. With that in mind, it’s worth asking whether Everton are pressing well enough to justify this approach.
The real concern comes at the other end of the pitch, where Dyche normally does his best work but Everton have been poor this term. They have conceded more goals (10) than any other side in the Premier League this season, while only Ipswich (who have pla… you get the point) and West Ham have allowed their opponents a higher expected goals total than Everton (6.2 xG). Those numbers suggest they have been too open this season, perhaps as a result of their attempts to press high so often.
The most glaring aspect from Everton’s perspective, though, is the quality of the chances they are allowing their opponents. Only (you guessed it) Ipswich have conceded higher quality shots on average this season than Everton, with the average xG of each shot Ipswich have faced 0.17 xG – marginally worse than Everton, at 0.16 xG per shot. In other words, 16% of the shots Everton have faced would be expected to result in goals.
In fact, though, 25% of them have found their way into the net. So, they are conceding high-quality chances and conceding goals more easily than they should, too.
Goalkeeper Jordan Pickford has had a particularly poor start to the season, gifting Son Heung-min a goal in the defeat at Tottenham and conceding 10 goals from 7.5 expected goals on target, suggesting he has conceded 2.5 goals more than he should have. Last season, he prevented 5.7 goals with his shot-stopping, so Everton could do with him getting back to something like his form from 2023-24.
It all just looked far too easy for Bournemouth late on at Goodison Park last weekend – both in terms of creating clear-cut chances but also in finishing them off. In that sense, Everton have never looked less like a Dyche team.
The manager arguably could have done more to ensure the collapse didn’t happen. In his post-match interview, he said he could see it coming, saying: “After the first goal I could smell it in the air. Not necessarily not winning, but I could smell it. I thought ‘this isn’t right.’”
And yet he made only two substitutions – one in the 83rd minute (at 2-0) and one in the 88th (at 2-1). The players looked tired, were being beaten to every duel and just couldn’t keep hold of the ball. So surely they would have benefitted from the presence of 1.97m Jake O’Brien in central defence or the talented James Garner to bring some assurance in midfield? No manager has used fewer subs in the Premier League this season than Dyche (nine), and his team felt the impact of that at the weekend.
The good news for Dyche is that fixing a leaky defence is his bread and butter: solving that issue should in theory be something that he knows how to do. And what’s more, for the first 87 minutes against Bournemouth, Everton looked like a functional team with the ball, too, so he clearly has something to work with.
But the priority now has to be shoring things up at the back to prevent Pickford being exposed so easily. Everton should, in theory, have the best manager in the Premier League to do just that, so there is reason to believe they could turn a corner.
In the space of their next seven games, they face all three promoted clubs plus winnable games against Fulham and Crystal Palace. They can’t waste any time in making sure there is a vast improvement.
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