The season is not yet over, and the Europa League remains a possibility, but Marcel Brands has been addressing how we will challenge the upcoming transfer window at the Football Innovation Summit, and quoted by the Liverpool Echo’s Phil Kirkbride.
The Football Innovation Summit brings together senior decision makers from around the world, and focuses on talent identification, recruitment, player & coach development and injury prevention.
For Brands, the topics to discuss ranged from the Everton in the Community project, his role as our Director of Football, the change in recruitment he helped to instigate and who our targets in the summer may be.
He did not name any particular players, but potential candidates for a spot at Goodison Park next season like Edin Dzeko may be out of the question now.
“We both have to agree,” Brands said, in relation to signing players with Marco Silva’s blessing. “Our offices are across from each other at Finch Farm and we are in contact every day.
“All the players we brought into the club in the summer were under 25. We do not want to invest big money in older players. We are looking at players aged 20-25/26.
“My first focus [after arriving] was the transfer window. We had 38 players so the squad was far too big and we had to bring in some new players in positions we felt we had to improve.”
Brands also confirmed that he travelled to Chile to watch the U20 South American Championship in January, and is clearly a huge fan of Andre Gomes like many of us.
“Gomes, he came from Barcelona, and we asked him in the first month to do some activities for Everton in the Community, and he picked it up straight away. He’s a fantastic player, but it’s also why the fans love him. He stole the hearts of the fans in just a couple of weeks.”
When his comments where later shared on the R/Everton Reddit page, this is what some of the Goodison Park faithful made of them…