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A miserable transfer window has exposed the Friedkin Group’s real face at Everton.

As Everton supporters got ready to say an emotional goodbye to Goodison Park, David Moyes delivered an uncommon burst of positivity along with an even rarer note of hope.

The Scot’s long-standing habit of lowering expectations had earned him the tag ‘Dithering Dave’ well before he returned to the manager’s seat in January 2025. Yet after the final Everton men’s first-team game at their spiritual home, Moyes struck exactly the right tone with what felt like a sincere statement of intent.

“This club felt like, to me, one which was a big family but looked broken, felt broken – and it doesn’t feel like that anymore,” he said. “I hope the owners are recognising what they’re seeing today as well, because this is to be built up, brought back and get us back to where we belong - and where we believe we should be. There are 100 players here today who played in some great games here and have been in some great teams. We have to now try to make that happen again.”

Not even 15 months on from that stirring speech on the pitch, life on the blue side of Merseyside has splintered again after a summer transfer window shaped by deeply familiar themes of deception and disappointment for Everton supporters.

When the Friedkin Group (TFG) arrived, only six months before the Toffees were due to move into Hill Dickinson Stadium, they came armed with the standard promises of a better future. Dan Friedkin said he would ‘contribute positively’ to the club’s history and strong local identity, while executive chairman Marc Watts promised the Americans would ‘usher Everton into a new era, one that is marked by ambition and professionalism’. This summer turned those bold words into a complete farce.

Just a fortnight after Angus Kinnear publicly told carefully selected fan media that the club was finally on stable financial ground again, TFG completely blew apart that impression.

The chief executive’s earlier talk of a ‘two-summer window plan’ has also effectively collapsed, with covert efforts to sell academy product Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest — abandoned only after supporter backlash at Bournemouth — setting the tone for a chaotic run-in to the close of the market.

Trying to place the entire episode solely on the owners gives them too much credit when it comes to understanding the market value of players in the current squad, particularly with Armstrong still only a fringe figure despite the increasing noise around his obvious promise.

Their established hands-off way of operating at Hill Dickinson Stadium meant they were unlikely to make decisions of that sort without guidance from figures such as Kinnear and head of recruitment Nick Cox.

Moyes is now left with an alarmingly thin squad until January, with only 18 established outfield players available to him, including Thierno Barry as the club’s only recognised striker.

Everton finished 18th in the Premier League for net spend at a time when huge sums were being thrown around elsewhere, and they also carried the equally dubious distinction of having the lowest squad value among the division’s 17 non-promoted sides.

Unlike many managers before him — several of whom only voiced their frustration over transfer dealings after leaving the role, aided by hindsight and sometimes a degree of creative licence — Moyes was candid throughout the summer about Everton’s shortcomings in the market, even taking the unusual decision to avoid media interviews until the very last possible moment.

A late move for Folarin Balogun ended in absurd fashion when the Monaco forward walked away from formalities at Finch Farm in the closing hours of deadline day. Before the United States international changed course, Everton had already adopted a scattergun approach to alternatives, looking into a loan for Manchester United’s Joshua Zirkzee and also exploring Tammy Abraham at Aston Villa, though neither option appealed to all parties involved.

Iliman Ndiaye’s exit to Manchester City, after a brief flirtation with Tottenham, had been broadly anticipated, but the £60m upfront sale still left a bitter aftertaste. Early plans to send the Senegal international to north London for the same fee had been balanced by the possibility of Richarlison returning to his former club in a £35m move — exactly what Everton had paid for him eight years earlier, without accounting for the effects of injuries or the passage of time. Even another loan for Jack Grealish, back from the Etihad Stadium for a second successive summer, did little to ease the pain of losing Everton’s most dangerous attacking outlet of recent years.

More than £100m was brought in through player sales on the final day of the window alone, nearly twice as much as Everton spent across the whole summer. It amounted to asset stripping on an industrial scale and drew comparisons with the January 2023 window that signalled the beginning of the end of Farhad Moshiri’s destructive reign.

For many supporters, it is becoming harder and harder to avoid the suspicion that Friedkin and his son Ryan looked at a financially troubled but consistently top-flight club, with an impressive new stadium nearing completion, and identified a chance to sweat the asset. Rather than showing accountability for a failed recruitment strategy, the club’s leadership has retreated further into a collective silence, while the absent owners have already started exploring possible investors to dilute their near-total stake.

That stance stands in sharp contrast to the way they continue to handle AS Roma, where they are still far from adored. In the Eternal City, supporters have told them to ‘go home’ during regular spells of unrest, yet that difficult relationship seems only to have strengthened their willingness to confront problems directly and often in person. Every issue emerging from Trigoria appears to trigger a swift response, especially in the season in which the Giallorossi went through three managers during 2024/25.

Back-to-back points deductions for breaches of the Premier League’s now-scrapped Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) had already prevented Everton fans from falling into the trap of assuming spending would become limitless under the group that replaced the habitually distant Moshiri. But even those more measured expectations have not been fulfilled by an ownership whose focus plainly lies away from the banks of the Mersey, with plans to launch an NHL franchise in their home state of Texas as part of an already unbalanced sporting portfolio.

American owners are, by nature, hard-nosed operators, but the Friedkins have pushed that vulture capitalism to another level. Kinnear’s claim that his bosses are ‘winners’ is not backed by any convincing evidence in the way they have run a club with major potential and a fanbase every bit as passionate, as they would have witnessed at the Vitality Stadium last weekend. Travelling Everton fans made it clear on the South Coast that their transatlantic rulers would have ‘a riot’ on their hands if Armstrong was sold behind their backs, but the threat of serious unrest is not disappearing any time soon.

Supporter atmosphere group The 1878s have already announced that pre-match displays at home games will be ‘stood down’ for the foreseeable future because of the recent transfer fiasco, while others are threatening to hit Hill Dickinson Stadium’s profit margins, however slightly, by refusing to spend any money inside the ground, beginning with Sunday afternoon’s visit of Manchester United.

Repairing the present divide rests firmly with the Friedkins and with those they have appointed to run Everton — and, it must be said, to run it very poorly in their absence. The events of this week suggest neither side has the appetite to put right the mess they have made.