Everton’s finances have been a well-documented disaster across the last few years, but Kevin Thelwell deserves praise for moving the club towards a more sustainable standpoint.
After all, he has sold with intelligence and replaced those outbound stars with cut-price alternatives, all the while ensuring the squad is more than good enough to keep competing.
However, with all the business he had been forced to do, he was bound to make an error or two.
It feels like this summer, opting to sell one particular star whilst retaining another stands out as his biggest blunder of the window.
Everton were forced to sell this summer
It was a well-known fact that, after years of financial turmoil, more sales would be needed to facilitate incomings.
After all, they were coming off the back of a torrid PSR-ravaged campaign where they had suffered through two separate deductions caused by their past misdeeds.
Thelwell wanted to bolster Sean Dyche‘s squad desperately in key areas, and so sacrificed Neal Maupay, Amadou Onana, Lewis Dobbin and Ben Godfrey to do so,
However, given how the season has started, perhaps it was the sale of the latter which has affected them more than most, even if he was never the most high-profile figure within the squad.
Ben Godfrey could have solved some of Everton’s defensive problems
It might seem ludicrous to suggest that Godfrey’s absence is contributing to their tough start to the season, but here are a few irrefutable facts about the £10m Atalanta star that would undoubtedly have helped them out.
After all, he has one thing that their current backline severely lacks: pace.
A defence of Seamus Coleman, James Tarkowski, Michael Keane and Vitaliy Mykolenko is one sorely lacking any speed at all, and so if the midfield ever pushes on or, as Saturday showed, loses its energy, they will be woefully exposed.
It’s not as easy as just saying that Godfrey would have prevented the three chances that AFC Bournemouth scored last weekend, but his electric pace certainly would have helped had he been deployed at centre-back or at either full-back to either stop the crosses or cut out the danger in behind.
His versatility is another thing they sorely miss, having featured all across the backline and earning praise from Carlo Ancelotti, who signed the defender during his spell at Goodison Park: ‘I think the best quality that Ben Godfrey has is the speed, he’s really fast and really aggressive with or without the ball.
‘He’s tactically good, he can play in all of the positions without any problems, he’s played two months at left-back. He’s always good.’
Perhaps, if they had to sacrifice one centre-back this summer, they might have been better served opting to sell Keane and finally cutting short his ill-fated tenure on Merseyside.
He is too similar to Tarkowski, and it has become abundantly clear when they play together that it just doesn’t work, with journalist Richard Buxton having branded him a ‘liability‘ back in 2022 – a label he has been unable to escape.
Ten goals shipped in just three Premier League games emphasises this.
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