Every summer seems to bring the same story at Everton, and this one is no different.
Right-back has been the club’s most glaring hole for several windows running, and with the Premier League season already underway, David Moyes still does not have a clean answer at the position.
A problem that refuses to go away
The club’s options heading into the new campaign remain thin. Nathan Patterson, injury-prone and reportedly expected to leave, is not a reliable answer, and Jake O’Brien, a natural centre-back, has spent large stretches of the past two seasons deputizing out of position at right-back simply because there has not been a better alternative.
Seamus Coleman’s departure after seventeen years at the club only sharpened the urgency, removing even the fallback option Moyes had leaned on in previous seasons when the position was short-handed. Moyes has been direct about the priority publicly, and reporting has consistently described right-back as a “high priority” that would be “extraordinary” for the club to leave unaddressed again.
Targets that have come and gone
Everton’s move in 2025 for Fulham’s Kenny Tete fell through when Tete signed a new three-year contract to stay at Craven Cottage instead, forcing Moyes back to the drawing board.
Since then, a long list of names has cycled through speculation: Tottenham’s Djed Spence, reportedly available for a fee in the £25 to £30 million range; Genoa’s Brooke Norton-Cuffy, a player Everton previously pursued in January before he chose to finish the season in Serie A; Atalanta’s Raoul Bellanova; Strasbourg’s Guela Doue; and Celtic’s Alistair Johnston, whose move has been described as still needing “significant” work to get over the line as of early August.
Sporting’s Georgios Vagiannidis has also been linked, with reports suggesting his current club may be favourites to keep him.
That is an unusually long list of names to still be circulating with the season already begun, and it reflects a club being deliberate, or at best cautious, about a decision it has repeatedly gotten wrong in recent windows.
Why the delay makes some sense, and why it’s still frustrating
There is a defensible read here. Everton’s ownership situation has stabilised under the Friedkin Group, reportedly giving Moyes a budget to work with this summer, and spending patiently to get genuine value rather than overpaying out of desperation is not an unreasonable approach in isolation.
The problem is that this exact pattern, going all-in on one target and coming away empty when a rival move materialised, has repeated itself across multiple windows now, going back to last summer’s pursuit of Tete himself.
Supporters have watched this play out enough times to be sceptical that patience alone solves it.
What comes next
Everton have until September 1 to get this right, and Moyes hasn’t hidden that right-back isn’t the only gap he wants filled before then, midfield and the wing are still very much on his list too.
What happens next says a lot about where this club actually is.
Either the right-back search finally ends with a signing walking through the door at Finch Farm, or it’s another deadline day that comes and goes with Jake O’Brien still stuck playing out of position, doing a job he was never signed to do.
At this point, that’s the story of Everton’s summer in one sentence.
For fans following the squad shake-up while also keeping up with the new football season on the pitch and in FC 27’s Ultimate Team mode, checking where to buy fc 27 coins before building a squad around this season’s new signings is worth a look, especially with real transfer business still shaping what Career Mode and Ultimate Team rosters will look like once the window finally closes.
