Everton’s next manager will face big obstacles turning season around

So just how much of a state are Everton in?

In terms of the league table, it’s bad, but it could be worse. They are in 18th, just inside the relegation zone, but are level on points with the three teams above them, Stoke City, West Ham, and Swansea City. Their goal difference is miserable at -11, but then Stoke’s is -10 and West Ham’s -9, so they aren’t alone there. And they’ve got quite a few of the season’s more harrowing fixtures out of the way: they’ve been to Old Trafford, the Etihad, and Stamford Bridge, and both halves of north London have been to Goodison Park.

But that’s the analysis of a relegation fight, which tells you that in broader terms, everything’s either gone wrong, caught fire, or both. This is the team that finished seventh last season. Before this campaign began, Ronald Koeman announced that Everton had “big ambitions”; after the 4-0 defeat to Manchester United, he suggested that they might have to settle for seventh again. You suspect they’d take that now.

The decision to sack Koeman was certainly understandable, even in the light of that awkward schedule. Things were not going to plan at any level: the defence was a mess, the midfield a wet paper bag, and Oumar Niasse, explicitly told to leave the club in the summer as his manager simply didn’t rate him, is currently the club’s No. 2 scorer behind Wayne Rooney. Yet Koeman’s departure leaves the club in an intriguing and tricky position.

Running a football club isn’t just difficult because it’s, well, difficult. It’s not just the monstrously tricky business of assembling a squad that works together, a manager that can coach them, a network of staff to support them all, and a corporate structure that helps and doesn’t hinder. It’s also the irresistible onward march of time, coupled with the fact that a football season starts, then ends. And at the end there must be judgements for all, prizes for those teams that are very good, and punishments for those that are bad.

Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers has said a lot of very silly things during his time in the public eye, but when he compared managing a football team to trying to build an aeroplane mid-flight, he was pretty much spot on. You can’t park anywhere, and if you don’t get the basics sorted, then you might fly into a mountain while you’re trying to invert the wings.

So Everton are, from one angle, the perfect team for a project. They lack the money to buy their way from seventh to fourth, but they’re the ideal job for some young, up-and-coming innovator — former Borussia Dortmund coaches seem to be popular at the moment — to come in and reshape the club into something that overachieves. Or perhaps they could take the tack of Southampton, and look to establish a footballing culture that permits managers and players to come and go while maintaining style and standards.

But Everton are, from another angle, in precisely the wrong position for any such project. They’re in the Premier League relegation zone. They are below Apollon Limassol in the Europa League. And they have a squad that consists entirely of slow playmakers and children. We saw with Frank de Boer and Crystal Palace what can happen when a manager is given somebody else’s squad and told to remake them in his own image. It turns out Sam Allardyce’s squad doesn’t know how to Ajax. Everton, abstractly, are far too good to go down. But they’re certainly not playing like it.

This is the tension, between long-term ambition and immediate necessity. The desire for an architect and the need for a firefighter. Do Everton appoint a manager on the basis that they finished seventh last season and want, in the fullness of time, to do better and look good doing it? Or do they appoint a manager on the basis that they’re sitting in 18th place and look slow, disorganised, and almost entirely toothless?

Ideally, there would be a candidate that could cope with both. More likely, perhaps, is a compromise -- a short-term, rest-of-the-season solution that will buy everybody the space for some long-term planning. But whoever is on the shortlist, we can all agree on one thing — It will be extremely funny if they end up with Rodgers.