The Toffees majority shareholder says the club made a key mistake after John Stones, Romelu Lukaku and Ross Barkley left Goodison Park.
Everton majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri has admitted that the club struggled to replace John Stones, Ross Barkley and Romelu Lukaku following their departures from Goodison Park.
Speaking at the club’s annual general meeting, he also said his time at the club so far saw him experience “bad luck” and “poor judgement”, but is confident that, thanks to positive transfer business in the summer, the Toffees are now heading in the right direction.
Everton currently sit 11th in the Premier League table, with seven wins, six draws and eight defeats this term under Marco Silva, and while Moshiri admitted the current ranking is “not good enough”, he suggested that the Portuguese will be given time.
Stones left the Merseyside outfit for Manchester City in the summer of 2016, while Lukaku joined Manchester United in July 2017 and Barkley went to Chelsea in January 2018, with all three players having enjoyed successful stints for the Toffees.
Moshiri stated that, despite the club banking large sums of money for the three players, they didn’t initially source players of the same quality because, for that to have happened, the wages they would have had to pay an incoming player would have been much higher than what the trio were on.
“The difficulty we’ve experienced is we lost three of our best players: John Stones, Ross Barkley and Romelu,” Moshiri is quoted by the Liverpool Echo as saying.
“They were young and on low wages and for us to lose Stones, you get £45m but he was on low wages. To replace him with a defender of that quality you need to pay him £200,000 a week. We didn’t do that.”
Learning from the past but looking ahead to the future, he added: “I think we’ve learnt, we’ve had bad luck, we’ve had poor judgement but I feel the business we did in the summer shows that we are in the right direction.”
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