It is no secret that Marcel Brands and Farhad Moshiri didn’t always see eye-to-eye at Everton. Especially when it came to recruiting players and coaches, with both men harbouring very different views about the direction The Toffees should be heading.
And, in hindsight, perhaps Everton would have been better served putting more faith in the former PSV Eindhoven chief. Marcel Brands arrived amid lofty expectations but departed in 2021, his impact limited and his talents wasted under a chairman appeared determined to turn Everton into his very own, real life Football Manager project.
Brands, who had proven himself as a top-level director and a fine builder of a club over in the Netherlands, was overruled by Moshiri when he made the desperately-unpopular decision to bring in Rafa Benitez – Liverpool icon Rafa Benitez – as Everton’s new head coach in 2021.
And considering the name Brands put forward two years prior – while also recommending the likes of Denzel Dumfries and Liverpool’s Luis Diaz to the Merseysiders – one wonders how differently things would have turned out for Everton had Moshiri taken the Dutchman’s advice.
Marcel Brands wanted Everton to hire Arsenal manager
“I moved heaven and earth to bring Arteta to Everton,” Brands now tells the De Beslissers van FC Afkicken podcast, speaking to the former Toffees skipper when he was still working as an assistant to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City.
“I spent the entire evening at his house. And I saw him as the ideal man for us. I immediately saw a top coach.”
Arteta, of course, would eventually take over at another of his former club’s Arsenal. Flash forward to the present day, and Arteta has Arsenal sitting top of the Premier League, dreaming of a first title in two decades.
Benitez, meanwhile, lasted only a few months at Goodison Park, his ill-fated and ill-thought-out appointment setting the club on their way to an alarming slide down the table.
Mikel Arteta could have transformed Toffees
“I played with Erik ten Hag, with Alfred Schreuder and with Peter Bosz. You see a lot of (people destined to become) coaches,” Brands adds.
“I only heard positive things (about Arteta). Also within the club, at Everton. Then I was at his house to sound him out and I got so excited. (Arteta was) so well prepared and that passion came out everywhere; his mouth, his nose and his ears.
“I thought; ‘this is the coach, but for the long term’.”
Brands wasn’t wrong. He rarely is. Brands remains an excellent judge of character and potential, as emphasised by the fact that PSV – during his second spell at the club – are now ten points clear at the top of Eredivisie as Everton struggle at the opposite end of the Premier League.
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