Token EffortEverton · 2026/27

Everton · 2026/27 · Matchday Three · 6 September 2026

Matchday Three: Manchester United (h)

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

A week that opened with an open letter demanding competence and closed with a right-back who had been at the club for five days curling the latest goal the new ground has ever seen into the top corner. In between: a supporters' group downing its flags, the Financial Times reporting that the owners are looking for someone to share the bill, and a manager admitting he has never spoken to the man whose name is on it. The fifth instalment of the serial: a point against Manchester United that felt, to everyone in the ground, like something more.

The Week Before

The Deadline Day Special ended with Moyes silent and the club's supporters not. By Wednesday morning the formal bodies had spoken. The Everton Fans' Forum published an open letter that read less like a fan group's complaint than a select committee's preliminary findings: "We were told there was a clear strategy. We were told the recruitment structure had changed. We were told lessons had been learned from the mistakes of previous years. Yet, once again, Everton have found themselves scrambling in the final days and hours of a transfer window." Its demands were "competence, preparation and accountability," its question "Where is the planning? Where is the preparation? Where is the accountability when the plan fails?" and its warning, the line the Echo took for its headline, that supporters' patience "should not be mistaken for acceptance." The 1878s, the volunteers who make the tifos and the flag displays and had just been promised fifty pence from every discounted pint sold at the ground, announced they were standing down "for the foreseeable future," calling the state of the squad "full-on gross negligence" and adding, with a candour the club's own statements have lacked all summer, that they would have filled the ground with flags saying exactly what they thought, but the rules on wording don't allow it. The Fan Advisory Board wanted answers too. The People's Forum, which has seen a great many statements, greeted this one with a raised eyebrow rather than a raised fist: taking your flags home, one poster observed, is not a hunger strike, and another reminded the board that the chief executive is "Angus flipping Kinnear, not Dr Evil." That is the mood of a support that has been through worse and knows the difference between a protest and a sulk.

Thursday made the sulk look prescient. The Financial Times reported that The Friedkin Group, less than two years after paying something over £400m for the club, is working with advisers on a process that could see new investors buy a significant stake; a source described the Premier League as "an arms race," which is one way to describe the £3.48bn the division had just spent while Everton ended the window as a net seller. The Echo added that senior staff at the club were unaware of any such process, which is either reassuring or the opposite. Christian Purslow, who has run Liverpool, Aston Villa and Chelsea's commercial arm, speaking on the Football Boardroom podcast alongside Henry Winter, delivered the week's most damaging comparison: Roma, the Friedkins' other club, had "a great window," kept the midfielder Chelsea wanted because their coach said so, and are title contenders; Everton had "two million quid net spend," a "Championship player as their marquee signing" and "a glaring hole at centre-forward." The Friedkins, he said, "are running the risk of giving the impression" that Everton are second in the pecking order, and "there is no fanbase where that is going to be less welcome." Alan Shearer, for Betfair, called the window "embarrassing," said Moyes "might have been fuming," and that Everton would need "a lot of luck" to reach January but would not go down, which on this forum counts as a compliment. And Alan Stubbs, on a podcast, said the thing about Harrison Armstrong that everyone had been avoiding saying: "He could be Everton's answer to Steven Gerrard, which is a big statement, but that's the potential." The Echo's Chris Beesley, meanwhile, filled in the account of how the Armstrong sale nearly happened: a Telegraph report that Forest were told Everton needed a big sale, the Echo's own understanding that Kinnear notified the owners of the bid and it was green-lit "without manager David Moyes being informed," and a personal intervention by Dan Friedkin, after the Vitality away end had done its work, that pulled the plug. Everton, by the Echo's count, have had a local player in the first-team squad every season since 1888. That is what was nearly sold.

Friday was the press conference this serial has been waiting for since eleven o'clock on Tuesday night, and Moyes, who had every reason to come out swinging, came out with his hands in his pockets. "Disappointed we didn't do more business, things did not go our way in the end," he told the Echo. "In football, you have to live with disappointments and move on. In this case, we will." Sales had been necessary: "I don't do the financials here, it's not me who does it. But I think what you're saying is right, I think we were looking to get some money in." On Ndiaye: "I've lost Wayne Rooney to Manchester United, I've lost Joleon Lescott and Jack Rodwell to Man City over the years. On this occasion unfortunately we lost Illy and we didn't want to lose Illy because we liked Illy a lot." On Balogun, an exercise in closing a door: "It wasn't anybody's fault. It happens in football a lot. The player had a problem in his medical and that was simply it. There's no other story behind it." On the timing, a rare concession: "We had made bids for several players on bank holiday Monday and it would be hard to believe the outcome got to where it was. Lots of things just didn't fall in line but we probably shouldn't have been as late as that." On the squad he has been left with, eighteen senior outfield players: "I've never wanted a huge squad, I've always preferred it when the squad is tighter, but maybe not as tight as this." And then the two answers that made the week's headlines. On the stake sale: "I've had no conversations with them, and certainly not on any investment. That's beyond my jurisdiction … If you want success, then you all need to be aligned. I think we've got new owners in who are still finding their way at the club." On the owner himself: he has never spoken to Dan Friedkin, not once since January 2025. "My real contact is Angus. Angus is the one who I would go to see. Rishi is the next one and then the head of the Friedkin family in America. I don't really get any direct conversations with them." A reported Chelsea bid for James Garner was dismissed as "completely untrue." Why stay? "Everton's different, I wouldn't have come back for anybody but Everton … People saw the face of Evertonians last week and it can be really powerful. I would expect them to be really powerful now. But powerful for the team, powerful for the players. What we're going to need from them is extra because we're short." He called it "a little bit of a bump in the road," and promised "no excuses." The Echo's Joe Thomas, who asked most of the questions, called the performance "remarkably restrained" and wrote a column whose headline was its argument: the days of an Everton manager having to front up for chaos at the club "should have been over." The forum had predicted a straight bat and split on whether it wanted one. "Why would I enjoy that?" asked one poster of a relegation struggle with eighteen players; another pointed out that the only people disappointed by the restraint were the ones hoping he'd get himself sacked.

By Sunday morning Beesley had reached the conclusion the whole week was pointing at, in a column arguing that the window "suggests Dan Friedkin lacks appetite for Everton": sources in Houston, he wrote, had been hinting since the summer that the stadium was the attraction and the club a modest interest; Kinnear had said on 19 August that "this window again, I think we will spend more than most of our competitors, the owners are very keen to back us"; Guela Doué, the right-back Moyes actually wanted, went to Leverkusen for a fee the Echo put at £25.72m while Everton spent £4m on a player whose fee would not have bought Andrei Kanchelskis in 1995. And a fact worth keeping for the balance sheet: last season's average crowd of 52,121 was the biggest in the club's history, beating the 1962/63 title season. The team news was a study in caution. Röhl kept his place at right-back for a fifth game, Johnson took Ndiaye's flank, and both deadline-day signings started on the bench, Grealish having played less than an hour of football since the stress fracture that ended his first loan spell and Maitland-Niles having had, in Moyes's phrase, "a couple of days." The Echo's two Everton writers had picked opposite teams: Thomas would have started both newcomers, Beesley neither, and Beesley won. Seventeen-year-old Braiden Graham was the striking cover on the bench. A forum thread was titled Rohl right back experiment will do well to last until half time. United came with Michael Carrick, permanent head coach since May, a 5–2 win over Ipswich in which Bruno Fernandes scored a hat-trick, and the memory of losing 2–0 at Hull on the opening day. The two clubs had split last season's meetings 1–0 each: Dewsbury-Hall's winner at Old Trafford in November, and Benjamin Šeško's, off the bench, at Hill Dickinson in February, which this serial had somehow forgotten when it wrote last week that the two had yet to meet at the new ground. The board's pre-match position was "spoon to a gunfight if Barry goes down," and its best joke, borrowed from elsewhere, that Everton now have more stadiums than strikers.

The Match: Everton 2–2 Manchester United

The ground, by the Echo's description, brought "anger and unity" and made a hostile noise from the first whistle; the biggest roar before it was for Armstrong's name. The Guardian's report noticed what was missing rather than what was there: a stadium "shorn of the tifos and flag displays" after the 1878s stood down, and yet, for all the week's letters and podcasts, "no visible or audible shows of dissent against the Friedkin Group inside the ground" — the protest, when it came to it, stayed outside. The football took a while to catch up. Maguire needed treatment for a bloodied nose inside three minutes after meeting Barry, and on eight Fernandes volleyed Mbeumo's knock-down against the crossbar, the twenty-fourth time United have hit the woodwork since the start of last season, more than any side in the division. Barry went down between Martínez and Mainoo looking for a penalty the home end wanted and nobody else did; the BBC's Simon Stone called it "a clear dive" and thought him lucky to escape a card, which is a striker's version of a positive contribution. Dalot dragged George back without a booking, and Moyes would have things to say about that afterwards; Armstrong, thirteen minutes in, did get booked, for "needlessly dragging Bruno Fernandes round the neck," and spent the rest of the afternoon playing on a warning. The pattern of the half was Rashford against Röhl, and it was not a fair fight: on 22 minutes he got to the byline and cut back for Cunha, who steered wide, and Röhl was skipped past often enough to make the point, again, that he is not a right-back. Johnson was booked on 34 for chopping down Cunha as he set off for the box, a foul Stone thought "probably worth it." Then, on 43 minutes, the same Röhl produced the cross of the game, whipped in from the right, and Barry drifted off Maguire's shoulder, met it cleanly, and headed it over from close range. Branthwaite, a minute later, headed a corner at Lammens. And in stoppage time at the end of the half, with Fernandes releasing Cunha and Rashford lining up a shot, Branthwaite came across with a tackle so well timed he celebrated it in his own box, then got up and blocked Fernandes's follow-up for good measure. Goalless, and flat by every account — generously so, where Everton's final third was concerned.

The second half was 61 seconds old when it stopped being flat. Mainoo found Mbeumo with a precise cross-field pass, and Mbeumo cut inside across the edge of the box, past Mykolenko and George, neither of whom got close enough to be blamed by name in the official record though the Echo blamed both, and curled it into the far corner. "Pretty shabby," was Moyes's word for it. For a while the game belonged to United and to Rashford: on the hour he beat both centre-halves and backheeled to Cunha six yards out, and Tarkowski's sliding challenge took the ball off Cunha's toe cleanly enough for Paul Howard's VAR check to take a look and agree. Lee Hendrie on Sky called it "outstanding defending," and the afternoon turned on it. Minutes later the captain launched a long ball straight to Lammens and drew groans from the crowd and, in Stone's phrase, "a stream of invective from his manager." Shaw was booked for ploughing into Röhl, Röhl was booked for hauling down Rashford, and on 66 minutes Moyes turned to Grealish. The away end sang "City reject." The home end did the opposite, and the game changed. He demanded the ball, kept it, ran at Dalot until Dalot pulled him back and was finally booked, and gave the crowd something to lift. Dewsbury-Hall, on his birthday, kept finding space and kept hitting tame shots at Lammens. United responded on 70 by taking off Rashford and Cunha for Dorgu and Šeško, and the Echo's live blog noted that "the side is so short on numbers they cannot strengthen at this stage in the same way others can." Then came the two minutes that the same blog said "summed up this past week": on 75 Moyes took off Röhl for Hackney and moved Garner, who had been flagging and had a hernia operation in the summer, to right-back; within a minute Garner went down, cramp being the hopeful diagnosis; and on 77 Maitland-Niles came on to play right-back after all, as Sky's cameras found Angus Kinnear in the stand looking, in the Echo's word, "glum." Why the two substitutions had not simply been made the other way round is a fair question that history will not bother to ask.

Because on 83 minutes Hackney, who has now come off the bench in successive league games and changed both, drove forward, lost the ball, won it back, and slid it to George, who had moved to the right when Grealish arrived. From a tight angle near the byline — "a ridiculously tight angle," in the Guardian's report, which called the finish unstoppable — he put his laces through it and beat Lammens at the near post, into the roof of the net: his first Everton goal, in his fifteenth appearance and from his sixteenth shot, and at 20 years and 214 days the club's youngest league scorer since Branthwaite in December 2021. Carrick immediately took off Dalot, a second yellow waiting to happen, and Mainoo. Five minutes later United had the lead back. Fernandes ran at Maitland-Niles, Shaw overlapped and hung up a cross from the left, and Šeško, who had done exactly this in February, got between Tarkowski and Mykolenko and headed it past Pickford's fingertips from seven yards. The Echo's blog called it "a catalogue of errors": Branthwaite had left Tarkowski two men to mark, Tarkowski got caught under the ball, Pickford got a hand to it and no more. Two minutes to go, a United side that had been here before, and a home crowd that had been here more often. Five were added. George went for the near post again and Lammens saved, though the flag was up. Grealish teed up Hackney, who blazed over. Dewsbury-Hall won a corner; Hackney swung it in; United cleared it to the edge of the box, where it fell to a 29-year-old with fifteen career goals who had signed for £4.2m on Tuesday as the emergency answer to an eighteen-month question. Maitland-Niles hit it first time from the best part of thirty yards, with virtually the final kick of the match by the Guardian's reckoning, and it curled into the top corner while Lammens, in Moyes's account, "couldn't even move" — "rooted to the spot," the Guardian agreed. The clock read 95:11, the latest goal ever scored at Hill Dickinson; he was the first player to score on his Everton debut since Richarlison against Wolves in August 2018, the first Englishman since Andrew Johnson in 2006, and it was his second Premier League goal in 110 appearances, the first since December 2018, for Arsenal, against Liverpool. Sky's numbers say Everton had the better of the game, eighteen shots to fourteen and six on target to three, and that Barry accumulated more expected goals than anyone on the pitch without landing one of them on target. When the whistle went, the Echo reported, thousands stayed in their seats to sing.

Post-Match

Moyes did not smile on his way to the officials, and did not pretend to have wanted a draw. "For periods we played well. I thought Man Utd played better than they have done in their other games," he told Sky. "The first goal we concede is shabby. But I thought if anyone was going to go on and win the game after we equalise it would be us. I set out to win." And: "For us, to give the crowd moments, it was a big moment. But I wanted to win and I thought we were capable of winning. I need to win my home games." To Match of the Day, on whether he had settled for a point: "It looked as if it wasn't going to be the case. We opened up a bit at the end as well, and Manchester United were countering. We had a couple of good defensive moments to stop them from making it three, but overall, we deserved to get that second goal, and it was an unbelievable goal as well." On the newcomer: "He's only been in a couple days really. Haven't had much training time with him, but now we do know what he can do from outside the box." To the Echo, on George: "I don't know who was made man of the match, but he was very close. He did an awful lot of good things … Dalot should have been booked, I found it quite difficult that wasn't the case. But he is a young winger, just beginning to make his way in the Premier League, and we've had lots of them, and he'll need a bit of time to develop. There'll be weeks when it doesn't go well, there will be weeks like today." On Grealish, whose fitness this serial has flagged as a storyline of its own: "Jack has had no minutes … He's not played for six and a half months. So we're starting to get Jack into a level where we think that he's ready to play and play longer … I think he'll be someone who the crowd here loves." And on the squad, a variation on Friday's theme: "Sometimes when you've got less players, it means everyone has to be ready. Players on the fringes are going to have to show why they deserve to be involved. When you've got a small squad you have to find a way to make it work." Would the result calm the supporters? "I don't think they will be calm by that because they still know the size of the squad we got. Sometimes it gives players an opportunity to show what they can do. Sometimes, having too many players in the camp gives you problems behind the scenes, squads are too big, and players moan because they aren't in it." That last sentence is a manager making the best of a hand he did not deal, and everyone in the room knew it.

Maitland-Niles, to Sky, was a man who had been at the club for five days and had already worked out the script: "It felt like a win. We dug deep and managed to get a point in the end. The crowd were with us and we were fighting to the end and that's why you get those results." On the goal: "It's amazing, everyone wants to start off like that and thankfully I did. The ball fell to me on the edge of the box, I put my foot through it and it ended up in the top corner which I'm happy about." And a promise: "I came in to work hard. It's a team full of hard workers so I fit right in. I'm going to show I can fit right in and pull my weight and give as much as everyone else, if not more." Carrick, to the Manchester Evening News, had the demeanour of a man who had lost: "We're disappointed, bitterly disappointed to be in the position we were in the game twice, so close to the end … it feels like a defeat." On six goals conceded in three games, two of them to shots from distance: "Sometimes they fly in the top corner, and more often than not, they probably don't. So there's a little bit of that. But we obviously can't ignore it." And, asked whether four points from Hull, Ipswich and a depleted Everton was a poor start: "We haven't started the season that bad, to be honest … We were that close to coming away with three points today. That's football, little moments that we can deal with a bit better, but we'll be fine." Jamie Carragher, on Sky's coverage, had described Everton's window as "disastrous," which by the end of the afternoon looked like the day's least controversial opinion.

The Fans' Verdict

The People's Forum went into the week in the condition this serial described on Wednesday, somewhere between exhausted and furious, and it should be recorded that the week's institutional protests did not move it much. The board that watched the 1878s stand down had, most of it, been going to the match since before the 1878s were born, and it reacted to a statement about flags with the amused impatience of people who remember when the protest was a man with a banner on Goodison Road. There was no satisfaction poll this week, and the barometer this serial has carried since August, 4.92 out of ten in pre-season, has to be read this week from the tone rather than the number. The tone about Moyes was, for a third consecutive week, forgiving: the presser was received as the straight bat everyone had predicted, half the board frustrated that he would not say what it was thinking, the other half pointing out that a manager who says what he is thinking about his owners tends not to be a manager for long. Kinnear remained the target, though a parody account posting in his voice that he had been "unhappily satisfied" by the window suggests the anger has begun to curdle into comedy, which on this board is usually the stage before acceptance. The pre-match expectation was not high. "Trust the process," wrote someone, in a tone that needs no explaining. "We're like the little fat kid at the school disco," wrote someone else, of a club chasing late loans. And Grealish, whose return this serial had thought would be the week's one clean pleasure, was greeted by a cynical minority with the theory that he had come back so as not to have to move house.

Then the match, and the board did what it does, which is live every minute of it in one-line posts and reverse its position every ten. The first-half thread was about Röhl, and it was not kind; the thread predicting the experiment would not last until half-time was, in the end, only half an hour out. The Mbeumo goal was "awful defending" and "stand off and pay the price." The Garner substitution produced bewilderment in real time, and the George goal produced the word "Radzinski-esque," which is the highest register this board has for a shot hit early and hard. Šeško's header was Pickford's fault and then, on reflection, everyone's. And Maitland-Niles's goal produced the day's real feeling, which was disbelief with the volume turned up: "the new Seamus Coleman," wrote someone who knows the weight of that comparison, and a recurring joke about the club's several dozen preferred right-backs was retired on the spot. The man-of-the-match vote split between George, for the goal and for making Dalot's afternoon a misery, and Hackney, who "is the creative player we need in midfield" and has now come off the bench in successive league games and changed both; there was a general, slightly astonished agreement that "substitutes all worked well for us, well done DM," a sentence this board has not typed about a Moyes bench in living memory. Armstrong, the week's cause célèbre, got a measured reception, a thread wondering aloud whether he is yet a creator or a destroyer and a long run of shellfish puns about his being "unshellfish" and "out-musseled," which is what affection looks like here. By the evening a thread had appeared titled Calm down, another posted "Can everyone stop enjoying the moment please," and a third summed the whole afternoon up in the board's own dialect: "Neat and tidy. Competitive. Can't shoot for shit." Nobody was talking about relegation any more, and one poster who had been said the talk was "OTT." That is as close to optimism as the People's Forum gets in September, and it was earned.

Themes Carried Forward

The Moyes barometer has now risen three weeks running, and this week it rose on the football rather than the politics: three substitutions, three contributions, a point rescued from a game his side had twice fallen behind in, and a manager saying "I need to win my home games" rather than reaching for the excuses he promised on Friday not to make. The Guardian's reading of the afternoon — that "weaker in number need not translate to weaker in spirit" — is the one the club will want printed, and the one this serial will hold it to when the squad's number actually tells. The ownership theme, which entered the serial on deadline day as a question about Kinnear, has moved up a floor. A stake-sale process reported by the Financial Times, a manager who has never spoken to the owner, a chief executive on camera looking glum as his right-back came on, and a columnist in the city's paper concluding that the owner "lacks appetite" are, taken together, the biggest storyline this serial has carried, and the one the next club statement will be read against. Armstrong stays, played 90 minutes, got a 7 from the Echo and a booking for his trouble, and now has a Steven Gerrard comparison to live with; the contract offer this serial expected has not yet appeared. Tyrique George has done in one afternoon what a summer's speculation about wingers never did, which is make the right wing his own: a 9 from Beesley, and Moyes's warning that "there'll be weeks when it doesn't go well" is the sound of a manager protecting a player he intends to keep picking. Hackney's two cameos are now a selection argument. Grealish's fitness remains the storyline it was: half an hour, an audible lift when he touched the ball, and a manager counting his minutes out loud. Maitland-Niles has answered the right-back question with a goal rather than a performance, since Shaw's cross for Šeško went past him, and the honest reading is that Everton have a wonderful moment and still do not know what they have signed. Röhl, freed from right-back by the arrival of a right-back, was not freed on Sunday, and a fifth game out of position was his worst.

The one-striker autumn bit for the first time. Barry got a 5 from the Echo, missed the first half's only real chance from six yards, went down looking for a penalty, and finished with the highest expected goals on the pitch and nothing on target; both of Everton's goals came from wide players, and Sky's report made the point that the squad "does not lack scorers," which is a kind way of saying it lacks a scorer. Garner's cramp is a fitness note and a squad-depth warning in one. Nørgaard, signed on 5 August, was not in the matchday squad and has still not played a minute, a month on. Dibling, the £35m signing of last summer, was an unused substitute again, and Alcaraz with him. Mykolenko has no understudy at all, which will stop being a footnote the first time he limps. Keane, kept over West Ham's objection, watched from the bench. Carried on: the striker enquiries reported in the free-agent market, which this serial will believe when a name signs. Closed: the "first meeting at the new ground" this serial promised last week, which had in fact already happened in February and been lost 1–0 to the same substitute. And the prediction ledger, which had Everton eleventh and Hull City relegated, notes that Everton are eighth and unbeaten, that Hull are third, and that Hull's £22m midfielder played no part in either.

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