Mikel Arteta revelation proves what many already knew about damaging chaos at top of Everton

Marcel Brands’ revelation that he tried to bring in Mikel Arteta as Everton manager summed up the damaging chaos at the top of the club that has blighted Farhad Moshiri’s tenure.

Brands was the second of three directors of football appointed by Moshiri, serving from May 2018 until December 2021, quitting just eight months after he penned a new contract that would have ran until this summer. When confronted by an irate fan who asked: “Did you recruit them?,” following a 4-1 home defeat to Liverpool as visiting supporters mocked their hosts by singing the name of their former gaffer Rafael Benitez, whose short but not-so-sweet tenure as Blues boss ended the following month, the Dutchman left with the cryptic parting shot of: “Is it only the players?”

Now in a second stint with PSV Eindhoven where he was employed before his time on Merseyside, Brands has claimed he “moved heaven and earth” to bring former Everton player Arteta back to Goodison Park as Marco Silva’s successor in December 2019. The 62-year-old said of his courting of the Spaniard who ended up leaving his position as Manchester City assistant to go back to Arsenal instead: “I spent the entire evening at his house and I saw him as the ideal man for us.”

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If ever you needed a perfect example of the dysfunctional factionalism that existed within Goodison Park’s corridors of power under Moshiri for the greater part of his time at Everton then this was it. Former long-serving Blues boss David Moyes has gone on record about this period with the Scot who had previously been in charge of Everton