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Allan looked good early in his first season under Ancelotti, then had a couple of injuries and looked finished. Watching him last season was painful at times. Couldn't fault his effort, but his legs have gone and he would just be chasing shadows all game. With the signings we've made this season he was realistically down to about 6th or 7th choice. He might have been ok back in Italy, but none of the clubs who'd want him there could afford his wages. The Middle East was his only option without taking a huge paycut. Wish him well but it's great to get rid of his wages.

The home looks like a Wolves kit. Weirdly, they've got the right shade of orange on the away kit.

Did Guy Fieri design it?

Brutal

No bitterness because he's doing a puff PR piece to throw his hat in the ring for the Leicester job! Doesn't mean he isn't lying through his teeth that he "couldn't change things inside" at Everton because he's a red. He literally came in and won a power battle with the DOF and scrapped most of the medical, scouting and recruitment departments without any replacements lined up for the latter two. He was allowed to change far TOO much in a very short space of time. We had no senior recruitment staff for the January window and his medical people left us in the lurch when he got sacked. Kevin Thelwell seems to have done a good job since the summer of cleaning up his mess, appointing new staff and putting some proper structures back in place. Very easy for Rafa to blame his past on getting sacked, and not the run of 1 win in 14 or the way he conducts himself. I don't see him getting any more Premier League opportunities, because his diminishing returns on the pitch mean he's not worth all the hassle he causes behind the scenes. He should either drop down a level or retire, but his ego would probably struggle with either option.

Yeah, he's done a better job than he gets credit for I think. We're lacking goals and have been suffering from having no striker available in these opening games, but Lampard has at least made us much more solid and harder to beat than we were. They've quite clearly targeted getting the right 'type' of player in as well this summer - Coady, Tarkowski, McNeil etc. Not the most exciting but will give us a decent base to rebuild with. I thought we also played some good counter attacking stuff tonight and created the best chances despite Leeds possession. The VAR offside was extremely harsh as well.

I don't know what game the BBC were watching then, since Patterson played really well and got MOTM on BT

This opinion is so bad it's unreal. Lampard has worked wonders with him. He's probably been our best player since he took over and played him in the middle. Him, Onana and Gueye as a three should be really good.

Yes, no payment to Spurs until 20 EFC appearances (£10m at that point) Spurs have a sell-on fee, so maybe they will get a cut of any loan fee but that will be peanuts

No not yet, but reported that we are touting him around. He only has one year left on his contract. Marseille have been linked.

Yeah, Kenny. He's signed for Hertha Berlin on a free. Everyone is hoping Patterson is the starter next season. Coleman is well loved here and worth keeping around as a club captain but he's finished as a regular. It was £60m! Will fix that. You're spot on about Mina. He's the only one that can organise our defence and the stats show there's a massive difference to results when he plays. I think the club see Tarkowski as having the same organisation and leadership qualities, hopefully he can do the same job. I will miss Mina's word class shithousery though

Yeah I don't see us selling him to anyone. Financial pressure should be off with the Richarlison sale and other high earners' contracts expiring. Lampard seems to love him, so expecting him to be a big part of the team again next season. Would cause uproar with the fans if he was sold this early as well.

Aside from the creative accounting for Covid, the club have drastically reduced spending. The following all came off the wage bill in the last 12 months: James £200k Bernard £120k Sigurdsson £120k Richarlison £100k Digne £100k Delph £90k Tosun £60k Moise Kean £50k Kenny £30k VdB and El Ghazi's loans ended and we were covering all of their wages. Pretty sure VdB was on something ridiculous at Man Utd. Some decent fees in - about £60m for Richarlison and £25m for Digne. Juve have an obligation to buy Kean for £25m. We spent about £30m combined on Gray, Mykolenko and Patterson in that time. All of them on much lower wages than their predecessors. The only high earner to come in is Dele on £100k. He will end up costing us a £10m fee, but nothing as yet. I don't expect us to be big spenders in this window, probably make a small profit and keep the wage bill sensible. Tarkowski is apparently on around £80k but Mina (£120k) is likely to be sold.

I think they just matched his Spurs wages, so about £100k a week which is still less than the likes of Bernard were on (£120k!) and James (£200k) Alli has already paid for himself by getting a couple of assists towards the end of the season that kept us up and avoided financial meltdown. Anything else is a bonus. Shame for the player that he has this £30m payment hanging over him though.

We've done plenty of bad business in recent years that can be laughed at, without people having to make stuff like this up for likes. Richarlison cost us £35m plus £15m in performance based add-ons up to £50m. Safe to say none of the team based ones were hit, since we have been largely rubbish since. The 10% sell on fee is for any profit over £40m. Spurs have bought him for £55m plus £5m of realistically achievable add-ons by latest reports. We have got slightly less than he's worth because our negotiating position was hampered by yesterday's FFP deadline, but it's not the worst deal in the circumstances. He will be a big miss for us though. He is weirdly underrated by other teams fans, probably because of bitter gobshites like Jamie Carragher spouting off about him all the time. Suppose I need a new avatar now

So basically he is £10m. Made 11 appearances last season and you can guarantee that the club won't let him be selected for 69 games over the next two seasons to avoid the £30m payment.

ManDoon - no offence but I don't think you know enough about Everton to be wading in like this RE: Brands - he had a mixed record of signings but there were some good ones like Digne, Richarlison, Mina, Godfrey, Doucoure, Branthwaite, Nkounkou and Gomes (before Son crocked him at least). It's well known that Moshiri made the managerial appointments and that some of the signings weren't by Brands. James and Allan were demanded by Ancelotti for instance. Iwobi was a deadline day Moshiri panic buy of a player represented by one of his super agent 'mates' after failing to sign Zaha. El Ghazi is apparently another Moshiri signing from an agent he has links with. The general point about Brands is that Benitez charged in like a bull in a china shop instead of trying to work together and provide a bit of stability for the club. It is not the way to go about things and has left us with no continuity now that Benitez has been sacked. Newcastle are supposed to be going down the DOF route from what I've read, so I don't see how that could work with Rafa. RE: Dobbin - going off about this seems a bit odd, but I assume you haven't seen how bad Rondon is these days. Dobbin has scored 1 goal in 3 games as a wide forward in the U23's this season, yes. I watched the U23 game he scored in vs Brighton and he was a cut above everybody else on the pitch. He's showed flashes in limited PL time and set youth goal scoring records when he used to play as a central striker. I'm not saying he is the finished article or is going to be world class, but he can offer a hell of a lot more than the corpse of Rondon. Simms would be the more like for like replacement for Rondon as a target man. Check out some of the goals he scored for Blackpool last year. It's only League One but there were some belters. RE: the crowd reaction - I've got a season ticket at Goodison, have you? I said he got a fair crack after the appointment. Those banners were pre-appointment and yeah, were out of order. When I turned up to the first game of the season I wondered whether they would even formally introduce him to the crowd and if so, feared for the reaction a bit. They introduced him to warm applause. He only lost the crowd much later due to his own shit performance.

Hi all. Long time, no post! To give an Everton perspective on Benitez - although there are some wider problems with the ownership, it's impossible to overstate what an incredibly bad job Rafa did here and how much damage he's been allowed to cause to the structure of the club in such a short time. Although the fans were against his appointment, he got a very fair crack of the whip once he was actually in the job. The fans being against him was overblown by the media. It's only after a horrendous run of results and performances that the crowd turned on him. DOF - instead of trying to work with Marcel Brands, he made it his mission from day one to oust him, starting by cutting him out of all summer recruitment. This culminated in Brands resigning from the board and leaving the club during the season. Scouting - after ousting Brands, he fired the chief scout and head recruitment person that had been appointed by him. As far as I know, they have not been replaced, with Rafa just doing his own thing in the January window. This means that after sacking Benitez we basically don't have a recruitment department. Medical - he fired Danny Donachie, the long serving head of medical, who was very popular with the players, citing too many set backs in injury recovery. After appointing his own people, DCL promptly had an injury set back that kept him out for over a month longer and Yerry Mina broke down 15 mins into his first game back. Presumably his medical people will all go with him and we'll have to bring back Donachie et al or hire new staff. Coaching - for me, the one upside of the appointment was that he had a reputation for being a great coach who had his teams organised, well drilled and disciplined, especially defensively. What we actually got was a complete shambles. The defence has been all over the place from the first game of the season until Saturday's nadir at Norwich. There was never any shape to the team and they regularly looked lost on the pitch. Tactics - I knew from his time at Liverpool and yourselves that Benitez was quite negative, but he really took it beyond a joke here. I can't think of a single game this season where, no matter how poor the opposition, we didn't start the game by conceding all impetus to them even at home. I think he recently set some sort of record for consecutive games conceding the first goal. Formations - he often played a negative 5 at the back system, including against lower league opposition in the cup. The main failing however, was a weird insistence on playing a two man central midfield week in, week out, which got overrun by opposition midfield threes every time and lost us game after game. I don't think midfield pairs work generally in football these days, but especially not when Doucoure aside, there's a severe lack of pace available in central midfield (Allan, Davies, Gomes). Him apparently seeing Sean Longstaff as the answer to this was terrifying. Results - 1 win and 6 points in his last 13 says it all. Ok the squad isn't great, but it's nowhere near 1 in 13 bad. Last season, we finished top half and could still qualify for Europe on the final day. Mike Walker is widely regarded as the worst EFC manager of all time but before his sacking, he managed 1 win and 7 points in 13 games. Benitez also went out of the cup to QPR and suffered the heaviest home derby defeat for 40 years when he played his suicidal midfield two against Liverpool's three. Injuries - this was Rafa's constant excuse, and true enough, at one point we had a few key players out at the same time. However, apart from DCL, there were spells were he had pretty much everybody else available and we saw no improvement. The squad was fully fit vs Norwich and he served up the worst result of the season. Rondon - fair enough, sign him on a free due to limited summer budget/FFP and working with him successfully in the past. But once it became very clear that the guy was overweight, unfit and couldn't run or even win a header anymore, just admit your mistake and drop him. Starting him was literally like playing 10 vs 11 every week. Do not persist with the guy for the entire season to the point where he becomes a lightning rod for fan frustration and starts getting booed onto the pitch by his own supporters. Youth - the club have got two good young strikers, Lewis Dobbin and Ellis Simms (who impressed on loan at Blackpool last season). He refused to give them a chance ahead of Rondon in DCL's absence until the recent Chelsea game, when he was forced to play them and young centre back Jarrad Branthwaite due to Covid. They all acquitted themselves very well in a battling performance to steal a draw, Branthwaite scoring the winner. They've not had a look in since. Dobbin is out of contract at the end of the season and has a host of clubs after him. Sacking Benitez will hopefully convince him to sign a new deal, because he was a cert to leave otherwise. Left Back - aside from the well documented petty fallout with Digne, he also sent away our only other recognised left back Niels Nkounkou on loan to Belgium before the season started. This kid looked like a great prospect playing in the cups under Ancelotti last season, especially attacking-wise. With Digne frozen out, we had to play a centre back (Godfrey) and a finished right back (Coleman) out of position. When the January window opened he spent £20m on Mykolenko to replace Digne and in the two games so far vs Hull and Norwich, he looks absolutely miles off being a Premier League level player. A total mess entirely of Benitez's own making. Right Back - the club have been desperate to replace Coleman for a couple of years and Rafa finally signs a good prospect in Nathan Patterson for £12m this month. Well done! However since then, Coleman and Jonjoe Kenny have started the games and even when dragged off for playing horribly, Benitez still wouldn't put Patterson in, instead moving Godfrey there. Pretty bizarre stuff. Work Environment - since the sacking, it's been said that the atmosphere at the training ground has been horrendous all season and that the majority of players are relieved to see him go. Notable that only Andros Townsend (who obviously had a pre-existing relationship with him) has made a social media post about Benitez since the news broke. Things I would give him credit for: Demari Gray - one of the shining lights this season and an absolute bargain at £1.7m. Seems to have unlocked his potential. Struggling to think of anything else positive. In my opinion, Benitez is very much yesterday's man and is finished at the top level. Throw in the fact that he could start a fight in an empty room and no Premier League club should touch him with a barge pole. Eddie Howe has been linked with the Everton job a lot over the years and I've never been keen on him tbh, but I'd have swapped him for Benitez in a heartbeat. I think your fans need to take off the rose tinted specs with Benitez, look at the reality of his performance at Everton (and China before that) and forget about the idea of him coming back to save the day. You're much better off sticking with Howe.

Gaz knows his stuff

We'll definitely make an effort for Wan-Bissaka but next to no chance we sign Van Aanholt. Shaw was just named our player of the year. Which says it all about Man Utd. West Ham is probably the only other side in the top half Shaw would get a game for. Nah not having that at all. Mendy (when he's fit), Robertson and probably Danny Rose aye. He'd get on for all the rest. Arsenal tend not to play a left back but he's much better than Monreal in any case. Alonso is trash as a conventional left back. He made a bad mistake at the end of this season but in general Shaw is solid as a rock. One of the few players I'll defend at us. Digne and Chilwell are better than everyone you mentioned bar Robertson. Kolasinac is Arsenal's no?

Even with the transfer ban being upheld? Seems odd. I hope it's true and we can get Zouma permanently though.

We'll definitely make an effort for Wan-Bissaka but next to no chance we sign Van Aanholt. Shaw was just named our player of the year. Which says it all about Man Utd. West Ham is probably the only other side in the top half Shaw would get a game for.

Primary and secondary

Bolasie was pretty crap for us before that bad injury. Shocking buy by Walsh. We could have got Zaha for roughly the same money back then.