Duncan Ferguson’s tenure as interim manager of Everton is winding down, and it’ll probably be most memorable for what he did to Moise Kean over the weekend. Big Dunc inexplicably substituted Kean in stoppage time, just 20 minutes after bringing him into the game.
Fixing Moise Kean is Carlo Ancelotti’s top priority at Everton
Everton has lofty Premier League ambitions. Mending Moise Kean’s confidence will make the biggest difference in whether they shake up the top six hegemony.
His explanation for the substitution made no sense. If he wanted to waste time, he could have subbed off anyone else. If he needed fresh legs, it would have made more sense to take off someone who was tired. There are two realistic possibilities here: Ferguson was trying to send some kind of message to Kean, or he simply forgot how little time Kean had been on the pitch.
Either way, Kean looked shellshocked by the decision, and he’s not a player who needs his confidence rattled at the moment. The 19-year-old striker, who arrived from Juventus for €30 million over the summer, is simultaneously Everton’s most talented and worst performing player.
Kean has the physical and technical tools to be the best player Everton’s ever had in the Premier League era. He found the back of the net 12 times in Serie A as a teenager, and has an outstanding scoring record in an Italy shirt. He’s built like a brick house, lightning quick, an elite dribbler and a technically superb finisher. But he has yet to show off his talent since moving to England.
Kean hasn’t scored for Everton in 12 appearances, and he’s not doing much to make up for it, either. According to data from StatsBomb, Kean isn’t setting up chances for his teammates nor taking a lot of quality shots, and he contributes less defensively than almost every other forward in the league.
It probably hasn’t helped that recently fired Everton manager Marco Silva didn’t want Kean in the first place. The Athletic reported that Kean was not on the list of targets agreed upon by Silva and Everton sporting director Marcel Brands, but a deal was eventually engineered by Kean’s powerful agent, Mino Raiola.
As distasteful as all that might sound to Toffees, and as poorly as Kean has performed, his signing should still be seen as a coup for the club. Everton is desperate to break the Premier League’s top six monopoly, but it doesn’t have the financial means to do so. Getting the most out of Kean is the standard it has to meet in order to challenge England’s best teams.
Doing so will have to wait until next season, most likely. The Toffees are seven points off a European place, and even perfect management won’t turn a listless Kean into an elite player over night. But thankfully for both club and player, there’s reason for optimism. He’s about to get a new lease on life at Goodison Park, with the Toffees expected to hire experienced manager Carlo Ancelotti this week. Presumably, a decent chunk of the job interview was spent on what Ancelotti will do to turn around Everton’s struggling wonderkid.
Ancelotti’s history suggests that he’ll have a number of ideas to get Kean firing. He’s a tactically agnostic coach who has never been married to one system. He has consistently built around the strengths and weaknesses of his teams, rather than force players to adhere to a system.
He was famous for running narrow systems without wingers at Milan, and continued to do so at Chelsea, though he utilized formations with wide players later in his Blues tenure. At Real Madrid, Ancelotti created a morphing formation that got the most out of Cristiano Ronaldo by letting him attack on the left wing while shifting another player into what would normally be his defensive position so that he could stay up top. Ancelotti’s Bayern Munich and Napoli tenures weren’t as successful, but he mostly used 4-3-3 formations that resembled those of his predecessors at each club.
Ancelotti is coming into an Everton team that has no reason to believe it can crack the top six this year, nor any reason to believe relegation is likely, which gives him some room to experiment. He will have the time and leeway he needs to tinker with Kean.
And turning around Kean’s career should be Ancelotti’s top priority for the rest of the season. Silva and Ferguson seem to have damaged Kean’s confidence, and the player himself surely deserves some responsibility for his performance, too. But he’s still the squad’s biggest talent.
Kean isn’t just another struggling young player. He’s the key to Everton meeting its ambitions. And in Ancelotti’s hands, he has a second chance to become everything they hoped.
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