Like Everton’s recent history when it comes to trying to keep their best players, Ronald Koeman was repeating himself.
“Football is a business,” he said over and over again in reaction to the growing possibility that either Romelu Lukaku or Ross Barkley, or even both, could leave the club this summer.
No one was prepared to dispute the point, it has been a long time since anyone could with any degree of seriousness, but by reducing the situation to finance and ambition Koeman was inadvertently strengthening the case for both to continue considering their options at the very least.
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Since the arrival of Farhad Moshiri as majority shareholder, Everton have been in a better position than at any time in the last 30 years to offer competitive wages at the same time as raising hopes that the success that has eluded them for most of that period could finally arrive. In doing so, they have gone from being a club which has either trod water or punched above its financial weight to one which Koeman is able to claim is best placed to challenge the dominance of “the big six.” Progress has unquestionably been made.
Players, though, rarely buy into the idea of jam tomorrow, not when there is plentiful jam available elsewhere today. If they want more money, there are clubs, most notably Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain in Lukaku’s case, who can pay more than Everton. If they want trophies or Champions League football, there are any number of clubs with a proven record on both fronts which Everton are currently unable to match. If football is reduced to a business rather than a calling or a sense of belonging, the opportunities and rewards available elsewhere to Lukaku and, to a lesser extent, Barkley are likely to be more lucrative than they are at Everton.
This is a situation that Koeman has to deal with but it is one that he inherited rather than created. In terms of both history and scale, Everton remain one of English football’s biggest clubs but for far too long the standards they have set on the pitch have failed to live up to either measure and as a result they have become a club that players find easy to leave. Lukaku knew that when he joined from Chelsea, stating his ambition in his first interview with an admission that he hoped to emulate other players who had secured moves to bigger clubs after a spell at Goodison Park.
In that respect, his latest interview in which he questioned Everton’s ambition, admitted to being frustrated by their transfer strategy and reiterated his desire to win trophies should surprise no-one who has followed the forward’s career closely, even if Koeman was frustrated by his willingness to go public on such matters.
“Of course I am not happy about that interview,” the Everton manager said.
“I spoke with Rom this morning and I know it is difficult but if you are a player prepare yourself to score goals and we know he is one of the best and the rest needs to be done by the manager and the board.”
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In a traditional football sense, Koeman has every right to be disappointed but from the perspective which sees the game merely as a vehicle for business he has much less. By speaking out about his own situation, Lukaku achieved two objectives – he loosened his ties with his current employer and alerted potential employers to his possible availability.
He also subverted the usual relationship between player and club by creating a situation in which the latter must prove itself to the former and not vice versa if there is to be any chance of him staying at Everton beyond this season. Koeman’s willingness to do that is already clear, as is Moshiri’s, but neither is able to provide guarantees. This is where Everton’s position, like Liverpool’s with Luis Suarez and Tottenham Hotspur’s with Gareth Bale, is at its weakest.
“Every player likes to play for titles, in the Champions League: that is a normal ambition.” Koeman said.
“What we need to do and like to do is show everyone that if there is one club outside of the big six to make the next step then it is Everton.
“I think everyone sees now the difference between this season and last season and I think it is impossible to do this in one transfer window, in one season. It takes time. That is a message for everybody.”
That it does take time is the problem, though. Players are rarely willing to wait in the hope that at some unspecified date in the future they will be part of a successful team, particularly if the success they yearn for is available elsewhere. There have been periods in Everton’s history, none more so than during the 1960s when they were known as “The Mersey Millionaires” and in the mid-1980s when Howard Kendall brought glory back to the club, when they were the hunters, depriving rivals of their best players, but they have been the hunted for longer than is comfortable for a club of such stature.
Plans for a new stadium at Bramley Moore dock on Liverpool’s waterfront are as welcome as they are overdue but even if they are realised they do not fit in with the short-term timescale of top footballers who want everything today because they know that they can have everything today. Koeman knows that better than most having left Ajax to join PSV Eindhoven and then Barcelona because of his own ambition, the very same driving force that propelled him to Everton from Southampton.
“That is human nature,” he said in the knowledge that his own career path gave him little option to say anything else. But he will also be aware that if it was human nature for him, it is also human nature for Lukaku. “I am not so afraid about his situation because the players as more than two years on his contract,” Koeman added. “Everyone knows what can happen in football but you need to respect your contract.”
That Lukaku has two years remaining on his current deal unquestionably strengthens Everton’s hand, something that is not the case with Barkley who enters the final 12 months of his current deal this summer. “Every situation is different,” Koeman acknowledged. “Ross is a boy from Everton and what we need to show from him is the best reasons to stay and of course his situation is different because his (contract) is running out next season.
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“Football is a business and you make decisions at the end of the season. He needs to sign a new contract, if not you need to sell the player. It is not an ultimatum but that is normal – that is business. You don’t give every player in his last season of his contract. The player needs to understand this. I spoke to Ross about a new contract and now it is up to the board to get that contract over the line.
“If not, as a player, you see a new future for yourself. That is normal. When I was manager Southampton we had (Nathaniel) Clyne and he did not accept a new contract so we sold him in the summer. The player has to understand if he does not sign a new contract by one year (left) you need to make a decision for the club so it knows what will happen next year.”
If football is merely a business then their chances of retaining Lukaku will diminish significantly should a club with the means to prise him away go from being an interested party to a determined one. As yet, that has not transpired but the potential for it happening will only have risen following the comments he made to the national media.
Conversely, it is Barkley who has remained silent on his own future out of loyalty to the club that he supports who is the more likely to remain at Everton and if he does it will be partly because he sees football as something more than business.
