Everton's Rollercoaster Season: From Hope to Despair
For much of last season, Everton’s story pointed only one way.
Up.
Jack Grealish arrived on loan and lit the place up. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall kept deciding tight games almost by himself. Thierno Barry and Beto, who had looked lost in the early weeks, suddenly remembered they were centre-forwards and started bullying defences.
A 3-0 dismantling of Chelsea on 21 March felt like a line in the sand. Everton were eighth, three points off the Champions League places, seven games to go. The Hill Dickinson Stadium, still trying to work out what kind of home it wanted to be, roared like the old Goodison on a big night.
Supporters dared to look at the table and think: why not?
Then the floor went from under them.
Everton did not win again. Not once. The longest winless run since David Moyes walked back through the door in 2025 arrived at the worst possible moment, shredding confidence and exposing just how thin this squad really is when the legs and minds start to fray.
The turning point came quietly enough. A 2-2 draw at Brentford on 11 April. Two dropped points that bled into something more serious. From that game to the end of the season, Everton’s form dropped them into the division’s bottom three over that stretch. Only Burnley and Wolves, both winless in the same period, matched their collapse.
For a club that had spent the winter talking about Europe rather than survival, the mood darkened fast.
A familiar finish, a very different feeling
Despite the skid, there was still a sliver of hope when Sunderland came to Merseyside for Everton’s final home game of 2025-26. Win, and the last day might still mean something.
In his programme notes, chief executive Angus Kinnear tried to capture the strange in-between. He described himself as “happily dissatisfied” with the campaign. It was an odd phrase at an odd time, and it curdled almost immediately as promoted Sunderland walked away with a 3-1 win.
Sunderland would ride that surge all the way to seventh and European football for the first time in 53 years. Hill Dickinson, by contrast, watched the air seep out of another Everton season.
For Moyes, the symmetry is cruel. Thirteenth in the Premier League in both of his campaigns since returning. On paper, a plateau. In reality, two very different journeys.
When he came back 18 months ago, Everton were one point above the relegation zone and suffocating under the weight of financial breaches, points deductions and an identity crisis. He dragged them to safety, 23 points clear of the bottom three, and restored a measure of order.
Last summer, backed by the Friedkin Group, Everton spent £97m – a club-record net outlay in a single window – and finished 13th again, with just one extra point to show for it.
To some, that is stagnation. To others, including former midfielder Leon Osman, it is something more solid.
“When David Moyes first came in, we flew out the blocks and had a great start,” Osman said. “That continued for well over a year before the first sort of low period, which was the end of last season. I still feel that we made progress last season, which is what we wanted, along with stability.”
In a club that has spent years staring at the trapdoor, mid-table can feel like a step forward, even when it looks static from the outside.
Moyes versus the market
Moyes, now 63, has never hidden his frustration with the financial arms race at the top end of the Premier League. Over the past five years, Everton rank 15th for net spend among current top-flight clubs. They are chasing teams with deeper pockets and fewer scars.
Yet the table offers uncomfortable counterpoints. Bournemouth spent less than anyone last summer, actually banking a profit of £81m on transfers, and still finished sixth. Brighton made £41m and ended up eighth. Both clubs have built slick recruitment machines and clear football identities. Everton are still trying to assemble theirs on the fly.
The move to Hill Dickinson Stadium was meant to reset the dial, to usher in a new era. Instead, it exposed another problem. Everton’s home points-per-game figure of 1.2 was the worst by any side starting life in a new Premier League stadium. Their away form, by contrast, ranked in the division’s top seven. The grand new ground felt more like a weight than a weapon.
Osman points to context. Bournemouth and Brighton, he argues, are simply “further along in their development” than an Everton side still adjusting to a new home and the residue of chaos. He also circles one moment that changed everything: Grealish’s injury in January.
With Grealish on the pitch, Everton won 45% of their games and collected 1.6 points per match. Without him, the win rate fell to 22%, the points to one per game. One player, one stress fracture in his foot, and a season’s balance shifted.
“David Moyes is an intense manager and by the end of the season, a small squad couldn’t quite last,” Osman said. The numbers back him up. Tired legs, tired ideas, and too few options to refresh either.
Still, Osman sees a platform rather than a dead end. “Changes take time. No one is thinking about relegation which shows you what Moyes has done. He’s got 12 months remaining and I’d expect him to see that out.”
Grealish, Ndiaye and the transfer tightrope
That final year of Moyes’ contract opens with familiar questions: who stays, who goes, and who actually plays?
Under Farhad Moshiri, Everton became a warning rather than a model. Eight players signed for £20m or more left for nothing. Talent leaked away, value evaporated, and the squad grew old and unbalanced.
The Friedkin Group’s first big window tried to correct that. Nine players arrived, many of them young, many of them expensive. The idea was clear enough: build a core that could grow together. The execution is still a work in progress.
Grealish and Dewsbury-Hall have justified the investment. Others have barely started. Tyler Dibling, a £35m winger from Southampton, started only six league games. Left-back Adam Aznou, plucked from Bayern Munich, is still waiting for his Premier League debut.
Barry, at 23, offered a glimpse of what he might become. No player in the league won more aerial duels in his first top-flight campaign, yet his finishing wavered. Merlin Rohl, 24, barely featured until May, then impressed over four starts as if to ask why he had waited so long.
This summer, the headline is familiar: Grealish again. BBC Radio Merseyside reporter Giulia Bould says the influential playmaker is set to re-sign on loan towards the end of the window as he continues his rehabilitation. His wages, around £200,000 a week, remain a serious consideration for a club still trying to repair its books.
Osman is clear on the dilemma. “I’d welcome Grealish back but only at a price that suits Everton,” he said. The romance of a returning star cannot override the arithmetic.
At the same time, Iliman Ndiaye is being linked with a move to Saudi Arabia. For Osman, that is a more painful prospect.
“Ndiaye, I’d hate to lose him. There may come a point that the price is right and Everton can reinvest in two or three players but I think they should do everything they can to keep him.”
Lose elite quality and fail to reinvest properly, and Everton know where that road leads. They have walked it too often.
Youth, trust and a shrinking core
Moyes worked with the smallest core of players in the league last season. He used only 22 footballers in the Premier League – fewer than any other manager – and made 128 substitutions, at least six fewer than any rival. When he found a team he trusted, he stuck with it, almost to a fault.
At the same time, Everton have pushed a significant chunk of their recruitment budget into development players. The gap between policy and practice is becoming hard to ignore.
This summer, central midfielder Hayden Hackney, 24, arrived from Middlesbrough for £16.5m. Tyrique George, 20, joined permanently from Chelsea for £18m after a loan spell. Both fit the youth-first brief. The club are also heavily linked with Celtic defender Alistair Johnston to fix a long-standing problem at right-back, while 32-year-old Arsenal midfielder Christian Norgaard is reportedly close, a nod to the need for experience.
The numbers underline the shift. The average age of signings in Moyes’ second spell is under 24, with three players aged 20 or younger. Yet players aged 21 or under totalled only 1,088 minutes in the league last season. That ranked Everton 17th in the division for youth involvement.
The departures of Seamus Coleman and Idrissa Gueye strip more than 600 Premier League appearances out of the dressing room. That explains the interest in Norgaard, but it also sharpens the focus on the youngsters. They are no longer just prospects. They are cover, competition and, in some cases, the only alternatives.
Complicating matters further, key midfielder James Garner will miss the start of the season after groin surgery. Suddenly, the manager who leans on experience may have to trust the very players he has been easing in with such caution.
“They need to show they’re capable and deserve to play,” Osman said. The challenge is clear. “I’m hoping that a year in, understanding the demands that are required, players like Dibling and George will make that progression and then suddenly our squad looks more trustworthy.”
Everton stand at a familiar crossroads: one eye on Europe, one eye on the balance sheet, and a manager entering the final year of his deal with a squad that still feels half-finished. The question now is not whether they can look up again.
It is whether, this time, they can stay there.
