Everton icon Wayne Rooney feels that the Premier League club are still paying for a host of poorly thought-out signings with a trio who set the club back around £75 million coming to mind.
While few could question Farhad Moshiri’s ambition, as Chelsea fans will tell you there is quite the difference between intelligent, considered recruitment and a kid in a candy store approach to the transfer market which leaves you nauseous, cash-strapped and full of regret.
Moshiri’s Everton tenure can perhaps be summed up best by their baffling accumulation of number tens during the summer of 2017.
The Toffees invested around £75 million on three players – Gylfi Sigurdsson, Davy Klaassen and Nikola Vlasic – who would all have considered themselves most effective in a central attacking midfield position. And that’s without mentioning Wayne Rooney, who returned to Goodison Park that summer having spent the previous few seasons in a deeper role at Manchester United.
Everton still paying for Moshiri’s baffling recruitment
“We signed Gylfi Sigurdsson, Davy Klaassen and Nikola Vlasic. We signed a lot of number tens,” Rooney recalls, speaking to TNT Sport in the build-up to Saturday’s lunchtime kick off away at another of his former employers, Manchester United.
“A lot of those signings were strange, and the club is paying for that now.”
Everton have been left in a dire financial position by the reckless, thoughtless spending of the Moshiri era. Sean Dyche’s side were docked ten points (reduced to six on appeal) after being found in breach of the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules, a setback the club could have done without following a number of years spent scurrying away from relegation at the eleventh hour.
Wayne Rooney critical of Toffees deals
Klaassen and Vlasic, meanwhile, started just ten Premier League games between them at an Everton side who’s squad construction was so bizarre, so lopsided, that it made Ronald Koeman’s job nigh-on impossible prior to his inevitable departure a few months into that 2017/18 campaign.
Klaassen is now at Serie A champions elect Inter Milan. Vlasic, meanwhile, thrived at CSKA Moscow after leaving Merseyside and now also finds himself in Italy – with Torino – after a brief spell at West Ham United.
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