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Summary
The Friedkin Group is running Everton as a recapitalised, cost-disciplined asset to be made compliant and valuable, not resourced to compete. The window is fully consistent with that thesis.
Summary judgements
- Financially rational, sportingly threadbare. Everton committed approximately £74m gross on six permanents (two of them loan conversions), sold Ndiaye for £65m, and ended net-neutral to net-positive, but failed to sign a specialist right-back, a striker, or left-back cover, leaving Moyes with around 18 outfield players and Thierno Barry as the only recognised senior striker after Beto’s sale and the deadline-day collapse of the Folarin Balogun deal.
- The Ndiaye sale settles the ownership question. I previously modelled that a circa-£60m Ndiaye disposal moves Everton’s indicative 2026/27 Squad Cost Ratio from the high 80s to the high 60s, comfortably inside even the 70% UEFA threshold. Combined with reversing the £35m Harrison Armstrong sale on supporter-sentiment grounds, the picture is of an owner optimising a ratio and an asset, not a football team.
- Moyes is exposed; the recruitment function is structurally weak. Moyes, on a reported two-and-a-half-year deal from January 2025, said he needed up to nine or ten players, received a net of three genuine first-team additions, and called it the busiest window of his career.
- Everton has no Director of Football, operating a four-man “Football Leadership Team” under CEO Angus Kinnear: a governance model ill-suited to a regime requiring continuous in-season ratio management.
Key Findings
- Gross spend of approximately £74m (Moyes’s own figure); net spend near break-even to net-positive after deadline-day sales., Everton closed the window broadly net-neutral or net-positive, among the division’s lowest spenders. For context of scale, Deloitte recorded the prior (2025) summer as a record £3.0bn of Premier League gross spend, the window that ended with Liverpool’s £125m signing of Alexander Isak, and Sky Sports’ final tally for summer 2026 put Premier League clubs at a fresh record of £3.48bn.
- The incoming profile was a deliberate reduction in unit cost per squad slot. Six permanents for approximately £74m averages around £12m per slot: Hayden Hackney (£16.5m rising to circa £25m, Middlesbrough), Merlin Röhl (circa £19m, Freiburg, loan made permanent), Tyrique George (£20m-plus, Chelsea, loan made permanent), Christian Nørgaard (circa £7m, Arsenal), Brennan Johnson (straight swap for Dwight McNeil, cash-neutral) and Arthur Barratt (16, Chelsea academy, undisclosed). Ainsley Maitland-Niles (circa £4.2m / €5m, Lyon) was added on deadline day as a compromise right-back. Jack Grealish returned on a season-long loan from Manchester City with no loan fee, Everton paying a reported circa 90% of wages (75% per some outlets) and holding a £50m option.
- Outgoing business was wage-led and, late on, cash-generative. Ndiaye to Manchester City for a confirmed £65m, comprising £60m plus a further £5m in add-ons, on a five-year contract, was the single most consequential transaction. Beto joined Fiorentina (circa £15.4m / €18m), Tim Iroegbunam joined Hull City (reported £13m plus £9m in add-ons) and Nathan Patterson joined Torino (circa £860k / €1m plus a 30% sell-on). Idrissa Gueye (to Al Diriyah), Séamus Coleman and Tyler Onyango left on contract expiry; Adam Aznou went to Málaga on loan.
- Key positions were not addressed. Everton pursued and missed multiple right-backs, Guela Doué (two bids rejected by Strasbourg), Aaron Wan-Bissaka (joined Aston Villa), Daniel Muñoz and Kenny Tete (deal stalled), before settling for Maitland-Niles, who is not a specialist right-back. The Balogun signing (circa £40m from Monaco) collapsed on deadline night over a medical issue and the player’s change of heart; a fallback loan for Joshua Zirkzee was rejected by Manchester United. No striker arrived to replace Beto.
- The Armstrong reversal is the governance signal of the window. Everton reportedly agreed a £35m sale of 19-year-old academy midfielder Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest, then TFG reversed their prior approval following visible supporter opposition, with 1,200 travelling fans singing against the sale at Bournemouth. An academy graduate carries no book value, so £35m would have been pure profit, close to the most SCR-efficient transaction available to the club.
- Financial foundations are transformed. TFG’s restructuring converted Moshiri’s £450.75m loan to equity, injected £233.4m of new equity (later cash injections taking total equity to circa £386m by mid-2026), settled the circa £200m Rights and Media Funding facility and the circa £200m 777/A-CAP exposure, and completed a £350m JP Morgan-led stadium refinancing. Per independent analysis of the FY2024/25 accounts, the recurring wage-to-revenue ratio improved from 83.8% to 77.3% (recurring wage bill down £4.6m to £152.1m against record turnover of £196.7m), and player amortisation near-halved from £64.6m to £50.9m.
Confirmed permanent incomings
| Player | Age | Position | From | Reported fee | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hayden Hackney | 23 | CM/DM | Middlesbrough | £16.5m rising to c.£25m | Championship Player of the Season 2025/26; PFA Championship Players’ Player of the Year |
| Merlin Röhl | — | CM | Freiburg | c.£19m | Loan made permanent under pre-agreed obligation; deployed at right-back early season |
| Tyrique George | — | Winger | Chelsea | £20m+ | Loan made permanent; long-term contract; England youth international |
| Christian Nørgaard | — | DM | Arsenal | c.£7m | Gueye replacement; joined injured, Moyes pessimistic on return date |
| Brennan Johnson | 25 | Winger | Crystal Palace | Swap for McNeil | No cash fee disclosed |
| Arthur Barratt | 16 | Midfield | Chelsea academy | Undisclosed | Long-term development signing |
| Ainsley Maitland-Niles | 29 | RB/MF | Lyon | c.£4.2m / €5m | Three-year deal plus option; deadline-day right-back compromise |
Loan in: Jack Grealish (Manchester City, season-long, no loan fee, circa 90% of wages reported, 75% per some outlets, with a £50m option to buy).
Confirmed outgoings
| Player | To | Basis | Reported terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iliman Ndiaye | Manchester City | Permanent | £65m confirmed (£60m + £5m add-ons); five-year deal |
| Beto | Fiorentina | Permanent | c.£15.4m / €18m (club: undisclosed) |
| Tim Iroegbunam | Hull City | Permanent | c.£13m + £9m add-ons (club: undisclosed); bought from Villa c.£9m in 2024 |
| Nathan Patterson | Torino | Permanent | c.£860k / €1m + 30% sell-on; cost c.£12m from Rangers in 2022 |
| Dwight McNeil | Crystal Palace | Swap | Swap for Johnson; no cash |
| Idrissa Gueye | Al Diriyah | Contract expiry | Free; senior wage removed |
| Séamus Coleman | Released | Contract expiry | Free; long-serving captain |
| Tyler Onyango | Released | Contract expiry | Marginal |
| Adam Aznou | Málaga | Loan | Left-back sent out for game time |
Pursued and not completed
Folarin Balogun (Monaco, circa £40m, collapsed on deadline day over a medical issue and the player’s change of heart);
Joshua Zirkzee (Manchester United, circa £10m loan package rejected);
Kenny Tete (Fulham, deal stalled);
Guela Doué (Strasbourg, two bids rejected);
Aaron Wan-Bissaka (joined Aston Villa);
Daniel Muñoz (Crystal Palace);
Jonathan Rowe (Bologna, circa £30m bid rejected);
Richarlison (Tottenham, circa £35m return discussed, did not proceed);
Djed Spence; Kyle Walker (disputed); Zian Flemming (cooled).
Net spend and accounting treatment
Everton’s approximately £74m gross committed outlay comprises modest cash fees (Hackney, Röhl, George, Nørgaard, Maitland-Niles), a cash-neutral swap (Johnson for McNeil) and an undisclosed academy fee (Barratt). Against that, deadline-day sales generated roughly £93m-plus of gross receipts, Ndiaye £65m, Beto circa £15.4m, Iroegbunam circa £13m initial, Patterson circa £0.85m, pushing the window to net-neutral or net-positive.
On the five-year measure from 2022/23, Everton’s cumulative net spend of circa €94m ranks among the division’s lowest, consistent with the club’s status as one of the Premier League’s most restrained net spenders.
From PSR to Squad Cost Ratio
SCR is squad costs, player and head-coach wages, plus player-registration amortisation and impairment, plus agents’ fees, divided by adjusted revenue. The Green Threshold is 85% for non-UEFA clubs and 70% for UEFA clubs; the Red Threshold is 115%. Everton did not qualify for Europe and therefore face the 85% threshold.
| Under PSR, the profit on an academy or homegrown sale, sale price less residual book value, fell straight into the loss calculation, making such sales the most efficient compliance instrument available. Under SCR, that profit only dilutes into the denominator, while removing a high-wage, high-amortisation player from the numerator now delivers the greater benefit.Everton’s wage-led outgoing business, Gueye and Coleman on expiry, McNeil by swap, is precisely rational under this logic. |
Indicative SCR modelling
My own indicative modelling, built on the last audited cost base and expressly not a forecast, placed Everton’s 2026/27 numerator at circa £207m against a denominator of circa £245m, giving a no-material-sale SCR in the high 80s, above the Green Threshold and consuming multi-year allowance in year one. That modelling held that a disposal at circa £60m against a low residual book value moves the indicative ratio from the high 80s to the high 60s, comfortably inside even the 70% UEFA threshold.
Everton took that sale, at £65m. On the model’s assumptions, that moves the club comfortably inside even the UEFA threshold and preserves its full multi-year allowance.
The audited position
| FY2024/25 (year to 30 June 2025) | Figure | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Turnover | £196.7m | Record |
| Total club wages | £152.1m | Down £4.6m (recurring) |
| Wage-to-revenue (recurring) | 77.3% | Improved from 83.8% |
| Player amortisation | £50.9m | Down from £64.6m |
| Profit on player trading | £31.3m | — |
| Headline pre-tax loss | £8.6m | From £53.2m |
| Underlying pre-tax loss | c.£57.8m | Excluding £49.2m intragroup gain |
The headline loss is flattered by a £49.2m intragroup gain on the sale of the women’s team and Goodison Park Stadium Ltd to parent Roundhouse Capital. That gain is worth nothing under SCR, which excludes asset-disposal gains, or under UEFA rules.
The Armstrong non-sale forfeited circa £35m of pure profit that would have been an unqualified addition to the SCR denominator. Its reversal establishes that this ownership will subordinate ratio optimisation to supporter sentiment in identifiable cases.
Squad assessment, stronger or weaker?
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Position by position
- Striker; weakened. Beto sold; Balogun collapsed; Zirkzee rejected. Thierno Barry (23) is the sole recognised senior number nine, supported by the converted winger Tyrique George. A strikeforce that scored only 18 goals in 2025/26, within a team total of 47 league goals, joint sixth-lowest, lost significant output. Ndiaye (the club’s top scorer), Beto and Gueye together represented 17 goals leaving the club.
- Right-back; not solved. The specialist right-back Moyes sought publicly for over a year did not arrive. Maitland-Niles (a midfielder by origin) and Röhl (a central midfielder) have been used there. Patterson and Coleman both left.
- Left-back; weakened. Aznou loaned out, leaving Vitaliy Mykolenko with no specialist backup.
- Central midfield; strengthened. Hackney (Championship Player of the Season) plus Nørgaard (though he joined injured), alongside Röhl, James Garner, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Charly Alcaraz and the retained Armstrong.
- Wide and attacking areas; mixed. Johnson adds directness and pace; George adds carrying threat. Grealish’s loan is a genuine quality addition but is a wide creator, not a fix for the striker or full-back gaps.
- Age profile and resale; improved. The English-qualified sub-24 profile (Johnson, Hackney, George, Barratt, Armstrong) builds homegrown compliance and appreciating assets, asset warehousing consistent with the ownership model. Core assets Jarrad Branthwaite (circa €45m, contract to 2030) and Jordan Pickford (circa €14m, to 2029) were retained.
The gap between the squad Moyes asked for and the squad he received is the defining sporting fact of the window.
The Friedkin ownership thesis
| The evidence firmly supports the proposition that The Friedkin Group is prioritising financial robustness and non-reliance on shareholder funding over on-pitch success. Every material decision since December 2024 has reduced Everton’s cost of running or increased its asset value. Almost none has increased short-term competitive capacity. |
Capital and debt
Moshiri’s £450.75m shareholder loan was converted to equity, with a capital reduction cleansing accumulated losses. £233.4m of new equity was injected at £174.66 per share. The circa 10%-plus Rights and Media Funding facility and the circa £200m 777/A-CAP exposure were settled, and a £350m JP Morgan-led refinancing, reported oversubscribed, completed in March 2025. Cumulative equity injections reached circa £386m by mid-2026, with a further £38m share issue (221,954 shares at £175) in July 2026 to fund the Burnley compensation award, and a £13.8m issue (79,000 shares at £175) dated 27 July 2026 to bolster the transfer kitty.
Stadium and commercial
Hill Dickinson Stadium (52,888 capacity, circa £750–800m cost) opened in August 2025, lifting average league attendance to circa 52,132 from circa 39,000 and delivering a widely estimated circa £40m annual revenue uplift. Naming rights are worth circa £10m a year; the Castore kit deal circa £20m (against circa £8m previously); and CMC Markets front-of-shirt plus Stake sleeve circa £25m combined for 2026/27.
Contingent liabilities
The Burnley commission of 10 June 2026 ordered £26m in damages plus £9.1m interest, with further interest potentially taking the total close to £40m, against Burnley’s original £51.7m claim. Everton are appealing, describing the ruling as fundamentally flawed in both law and fact. The Leeds claim was settled on undisclosed terms; Leicester, Forest and Southampton did not proceed.
Public framing
CEO Angus Kinnear defined the objective as banishing the triple threats of financial instability, relegation risk and regulatory sanction, three defensive axes, none of them competitive. He described the budget as hoping for the maximum spend of what the club is allowed to spend.
The Roma control case
In the same window Roma spent heavily: a reported net spend of roughly €113m (expenditure circa €160.85m against income circa €47.5m), signing Malen permanently plus Santiago Castro, Koulierakis, Mora, Molina and others, on a reported circa €100m budget after returning to the Champions League.
This cuts against a naive “TFG never spends” reading, and reinforces the underlying model. TFG will invest where a club has qualified for the Champions League and has a UEFA settlement to service, that is, where investment protects and compounds enterprise value.
Everton, mid-table and non-European, does not clear that bar. TFG has also deliberately avoided intragroup Roma–Everton transfers: Pursuit Sports, launched 16 July 2025, is framed as centralised back-office and data provision, not a player pipeline, which is both a reputational and a regulatory choice.
Counter-arguments, weighed
The circa £386m of equity and the July cash injections are real commitments, and TFG could inject more and remain SCR-compliant. The honest conclusion is nonetheless firm: TFG has made Everton safe and valuable; it has not, on this window’s evidence, resourced Everton to challenge.
David Moyes’s Position
Moyes returned in January 2025 on a reported two-and-a-half-year contract. During the window he stated he needed quite a few players, having earlier indicated a requirement for up to nine or ten, and called it the busiest window of his career. After the United States tour he said that, having signed three, Everton were still in need of maybe five or six players.
He also put the spend at circa £74m and adopted standard vendor language on Ndiaye, that the club were certainly not in a hurry to sell their best players, a posture the club then contradicted by selling him for £65m.
- Contractual: secure into 2027.
- Tactical: handed a squad with a striker vacuum, no specialist right-back and no left-back cover.
- Political: he has protected himself by publicly and repeatedly stating the squad is unfinished, ensuring accountability for the shortfall attaches to recruitment and ownership rather than to him. His remark that supporters aren’t always wrong, on the Armstrong reversal, aligned him with the fanbase against the board.
Early season and projection
Results have flattered the underlying position: a 2–0 opening win over Crystal Palace (Dewsbury-Hall and Barry, Everton’s first opening-day win in five years, with Pickford decisive), a 1–1 draw at Bournemouth rescued by a Tarkowski equaliser in the 91st minute, and a 4–0 Carabao Cup win at Preston. The Bournemouth performance, trailing 1–0 into stoppage time, illustrates the thin margins.
With 47 league goals last season and the attack weakened, a realistic projection is another lower-half, thirteenth-type finish absent a strong January. The risk to Moyes rises sharply if injuries expose the lack of depth. Ownership’s inaction at his priority positions signals that his sporting requests are subordinate to the ratio, a misalignment that becomes acute if results slide.
Recruitment function and executive assessment
Everton abolished the Director of Football role in favour of a four-man Football Leadership Team: Nick Cox (technical director), James Smith (director of scouting and recruitment), Chris Howarth (football strategy and analytics, with TFG acquiring his Insight Sport consultancy) and Nick Hammond (head of player trading), the last a former Reading DoF, West Brom technical director and Celtic head of football operations who previously consulted for Kinnear at Leeds. The manager works directly with the CEO and ownership.
| The SCR regime requires continuous, in-season management of a single ratio, a compliance test on 1 March, with SSR liquidity and equity tests each 7 July. That demands a single accountable owner of the squad-cost line who can trade against it in real time.
A CEO has a broader remit; a manager has a structural interest in a larger squad. Kinnear’s “maximum spend of what we are allowed” framing is a budget-consumption posture, not a ratio-management one. |
Outcomes: mixed to poor
The 2025/26 class; circa £111m gross: Dibling up to £42m, Dewsbury-Hall £25m, Barry £27m, Aznou £8m, delivered few hits. Dewsbury-Hall and the Grealish loan were successes; Dibling, Barry, Aznou and Röhl underwhelmed initially.
On selling, Everton negotiated well: Ndiaye at £65m from a £15m purchase, Iroegbunam at circa £13m-plus from circa £9m. On buying at need, the function failed, repeated right-back misses over a year, a striker vacuum, and a chaotic deadline day that left everything late. Against peer benchmarks (Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest), all of whom have built repeatable value-creation models, Everton’s process looks reactive and, in the phrase used by supporters, scattergun.
On the CEO
Kinnear’s career record, Arsenal commercial director at the Emirates move, West Ham managing director at the Olympic Stadium, eight years as Leeds CEO through promotion, relegation and re-promotion, is strong on stadium transition and commercial delivery, precisely the phase Everton is in.
But the recruitment structure he has overseen since arriving at Everton has not yet demonstrated value creation on the buy side.
Summary
Accountability for the sporting shortfall of this window sits squarely with the executive and ownership, not the manager.
In summary, despite our status as ever present members of the Premier League, and despite the significant reconstruction of Everton’s finances we are
- (i) Nowhere near being competitive at the top end of the Premier League financially
- (ii) We cannot retain talent that wishes to perform at the highest levels (Champions League,
- (iii) Cannot attract talent with those aspirations,
- (iv) We do not have a recruitment structure that can meet even the limited expectations of our manager.
- (v) Perhaps most dammingly, have an ownership that does not share the higher ambitions of our fan base, does not seek competitive improvement but seeks cost reduction and a shareholder-centric view of creating value whilst minimising future capital commitments
The Friedkins must publish their competitive objective.
The gap between banishing the triple threats and supporter expectation is untenable and for them a reputational liability. TFG must state whether 2026/27 is explicitly a foundational/consolidation year, or consistent with their future running of the club.
Practically they must re-examine their recruitment methodology. In my opinion they must appoint a single accountable sporting executive who owns the squad-cost line. The four-man committee is unsuited to continuous ratio management. A Director of Football, or a clearly empowered Hammond, with explicit authority over in-season trading against the 1 March test should be installed before the January window.
As an act of good faith and future intent, ring-fence the Ndiaye proceeds for January and treat the striker vacancy as a first-order risk. The single highest-leverage action is to convert the SCR headroom the Ndiaye sale created into a genuine number nine in January.
Evertonians are used to disappointment, we are used to being underwhelmed, we are used to owners not having the ambition, talent or resources to match our expectations of our wonderful, amazing club. The Friedkins still have an opportunity to turn that 50 year cycle around. Communication in the very first instance, followed by a very clear plan on how we regain our competitive position, how we become a trophy winning club, worthy of our fan base and our wonderful city, a city that despite the above can still boast Everton as the senior club in the city.