Token EffortEverton · 2026/27

Everton · 2026/27 Season Preview · 16 August 2026

Season preview: Year two on the dock

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Hill Dickinson has its sell-outs, the Friedkins have their project, and the midfield has finally been rebuilt. What Everton don't have, seven days before Crystal Palace arrive: a right-back, a proven striker, or a manager under contract beyond May. A preview from the press record and the people who watched every friendly.

Where the Club Stands

Two summers into the Friedkin era, the argument about Everton has inverted. For a decade the question was whether the institution could survive the football; now the institution — stadium sold out every week, ownership stable inside the Pursuit Sports structure, Goodison's redevelopment finally underway — is waiting for the football to justify it. Finishing 13th two seasons running — 49 points last term — is order restored, not progress made. The dressing room isn't shy about naming the target: "to get Europe," as Tyrique George put it this month, relaying the message straight from Moyes's team talks.

The summer's work says midfield was the diagnosis. Nearly £60m guaranteed — over £70m with add-ons — went on Hayden Hackney (£16.5m plus £8m from Middlesbrough), Tyrique George's loan made permanent (£18m plus £6m from Chelsea), Merlin Röhl (£17m — an obligation to buy from Freiburg that survival triggered) and Christian Nørgaard (£7m from Arsenal, only completed on 5 August), with Brennan Johnson arriving in a straight swap that sent Dwight McNeil to Crystal Palace. Out went Gueye's departed legs, Coleman's testimonial years, and — probably, £16m bid pending his hamstring — Tim Iroegbunam to Hull. It's coherent recruitment. It just isn't finished: no right-back, no striker, and Jack Grealish's expected loan return now in doubt with City pulling him back into their own pre-season.

Last Season: The 49-Point Grind

The strangest fact of 2025/26 sits in the middle of that row: Everton were a better away side than a home one. Eight league defeats at Hill Dickinson in its first season — more than they suffered on the road — behind a home goal difference of minus one. The ground itself was a triumph of logistics and a work-in-progress as a fortress: sold out every week at a club-record average, but repeatedly described as colder than Goodison, with early-season crush problems at Sandhills station and a pre-match DJ scrapped after fan backlash following the season's home nadir, a 0–3 to Tottenham in October. The worst afternoons were heavy — that Spurs game, a 1–4 at Newcastle in November — and the best were genuinely good: 3–0 over Nottingham Forest in December, 3–0 over Chelsea in March, the springtime evidence that this squad can dismantle a top-half team when the front line functions.

Which it mostly didn't. The £110.8m summer of 2025 — Dibling £35m, Barry £26m, Dewsbury-Hall £25m, Alcaraz £13m, Aznou £7.8m, Travers £4m — returned one unqualified hit (Dewsbury-Hall, arguably the team's best player by spring) and a lot of deferred promise. Barry managed 8 league goals in his difficult debut year; the top scorer was Beto with nine, a statistic that functions as the entire case for the prosecution — 47 goals from a team whose defence (50 conceded) was perfectly respectable mid-table currency. The cups offered no relief: Mansfield beaten in the Carabao before a 0–2 exit at Wolves, and an FA Cup third-round elimination after a 1–1 draw — both competitions finished by early January. The season's final act was a footnote in someone else's story: a 1–0 defeat at Tottenham on 24 May that completed De Zerbi's great escape.

The season's lesson is also this preview's frame. Moyes's Everton were hard to beat, easy to draw with, and short of goals — and the margin between 13th and the top half was hiding in plain sight at home. Turn 6W–5D–8L at Hill Dickinson into an ordinary home record and the arithmetic of a 55–58 point season takes care of itself. That, more than any tactical revolution, is what the midfield rebuild and the striker search are for.

Pre-Season: The Ledger

Three wins, two draws, two defeats — and read as a curve, the right shape: dismal in late July, a corner turned in Hamburg, one genuine shambles in Stuttgart, then the two best performances in the final week against the two best sides faced. The Lille game — the send-off fixture at Hill Dickinson — distilled the whole summer. The first half had "interchanging, incisive passing and dare I say it, pace," in one match-goer's words; Dewsbury-Hall dictated everything and won the penalty Ndiaye converted; then the hour-mark substitutions dissolved the structure, Keane and Aznou got their wires crossed, and Haraldsson scrambled in a stoppage-time leveller only after Travers had made a fantastic save to prevent worse. Dominance, waste, a soft goal conceded: the 2025/26 pattern in miniature.

The Squad, Honestly Assessed

The spine is top-half. Pickford back from the World Cup, Tarkowski and a fit-again Branthwaite — through his "final fitness test" against Lille after hamstring surgery — and in front of them a midfield that has gone from Everton's thinnest department to its deepest. Hackney is the summer's consensus success: "a real midfield general," "wants the ball all the time," dropping into the back four to build play — the forum couldn't find a dissenter across three separate matchdays. Dewsbury-Hall was man of the match in the finale and arguably of the whole pre-season. Harrison Armstrong's energy has forced him into the reckoning, and Nørgaard — "smart signing that for £7m," if 33 in the spring — hasn't even debuted yet, having signed only on 5 August. Garner's groin surgery means the rebuilt department starts the season without last year's best midfielder, which tells you how needed the rebuild was.

The corners are the problem. The right-back search has become the defining saga of Everton's summer — a chronicle of almosts: Walker rejected early, Wan-Bissaka drifting to Villa, Johnston's move dead on a fee gap and then an injury, Spence to Inter, Muñoz available at a bargain £20–25m but reportedly not to Moyes's taste as a converted wing-back. Barcelona's 20-year-old Héctor Fort — reportedly available for £12.8m — is the frontrunner as the window enters its final fortnight, with fresh reports also nudging Muñoz back into likelihood. Meanwhile Röhl — a central midfielder who "has never started a competitive game at right-back," as one incredulous thread title noted — was the experiment there against Lille, with centre-back Jake O'Brien the fallback. Röhl himself has been one of the signings of the summer ("poetry in motion, a class act"); playing him at full-back is the squad-building failure wearing a brave face.

And then the striker. Thierno Barry has claimed the shirt by default and by declaration — "I didn't have a good season, so now it feels like revenge. I want to show everybody who I am" — and his pre-season carried real evidence: goals against Dundee and Newcastle, better link play, a lovely back-heel assist. It also carried a 4/10 against Lille in which he "didn't look like scoring." Beto's summer was worse; the board that watches every match has largely closed the file ("he's where our attacks go to die"), with only isolated defence. The wishlist — Yılmaz of Galatasaray, terms reportedly agreed but the fee unresolved with Spurs circling; Evan Ferguson on loan, if you trust his fitness; Delap at a "demented" £50m — is still a wishlist with fifteen days left.

Moyes, the Contract, and the Temperature

Moyes enters the final year of his deal with talks — floated in March, waved away by him in April ("there is no need to start any talks now") — still not concluded. The club wanted evidence of top-half trajectory before extending; the manager, on the evidence of a summer in which he skipped press duties in Germany entirely, is keeping his own counsel.

The support is genuinely split, and honesty demands both halves. There were fans giving Moyes the finger at Stoke, a thread literally titled "sleepwalking until Moyes is sacked," and a live argument about whether his caution is what's really blocking the right-back — though the board's most thoughtful post on that subject pointed out nobody outside the building can know whether his vetoes are costing good players or filtering dross. Against that: the patient camp points to order restored, the best young core in years (George, Dibling, Armstrong, Branthwaite), and pre-season finishing on its two best performances. The truest reading is that most Evertonians aren't angry — they're braced. "Seems like Groundhog Day," as one season-preview thread opened. The fan predictions cluster tightly: 10th to 14th, relegation fear essentially absent, top-half belief strictly conditional on the window's last fortnight.

The Opener: Crystal Palace (h), 22 August

The fixture writes its own subplots: Dwight McNeil back at Hill Dickinson in Palace red and blue within a fortnight of the swap, Brennan Johnson — 5/10 on his cameo debut, "flashes of promise" and loose touches — with the immediate chance to answer a fanbase split between "the pace we desperately need" and "Walcott all over again." Palace arrive as Conference League winners but a diminished one: Glasner, Guéhi and Lacroix all gone, Pierre Sage's first competitive match in English football. It is, frankly, the kind of opener a team with top-half intentions has to win.

Verdict

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