Everton rose as a model of Premier League upward mobility, regularly finishing in single-digit positions from 2005 through 2019. Since 2019 the club has slipped into frequent relegation scares and struggled to even achieve safe midtable stability. The 2020-21 season under Carlo Ancelotti produced notably attractive football, aided by James Rodríguez and Dominic Calvert-Lewin. David Moyes returned in January and steadied the team, delivering a comfortable midtable finish. With Moyes back and potential roster investments on the horizon, the immediate objective is to restore entertaining, attacking performances and reestablish Everton as a consistent upper-midtable contender.
Once the paragon of Premier League upward mobility, the standard to which every ambitious but not megarich English club aspired, the Toffees haven't finished in the single-digit places in the league since doing so almost every single year from 2005 to 2019. Since then, the club has more often flirted with relegation than the European places. Even boring but safe midtable finishes, the kind that used to be the club's floor, have been hard to come by in recent times.
Hell, it's been a solid five seasons-you have to go back to that special, and in retrospect scarcely believable, 2020-21 campaign, when Carlo Ancelotti (!) brought in James Rodríguez (!!) and, coupled with a healthy (!!!) Dominic Calvert-Lewin, had the team playing some of the prettiest soccer in England-since Everton has been capable of simply providing a reliably entertaining spectacle on any given weekend.
The promise of the return of David Moyes, the manager responsible for building Everton into that exemplar of upward mobility all those years ago, was that something like the good old days might return with him. Granted, the megarich clubs have only grown richer and more numerous since Moyes's glory days, and the competition for the annual European-spots dark horse is also much more fierce now than it was then, so nobody should've expected any top-four miracles right away.
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