BREAKING: Watching Everton Is No Longer Like Taking A Porcupine Quill To The Eyeball

If it feels like it’s been a million years since Everton was Everton, well, that’s because it basically has been. Once the paragon of Premier League upward mobility, the standard to which every ambitious but not megarich English club aspired, the Toffees haven’t finished in the single-digit places in the league since doing so almost every single year from 2005 to 2019. Since then, the club has more often flirted with relegation than the European places. Even boring but safe midtable finishes, the kind that used to be the club’s floor, have been hard to come by in recent times. Hell, it’s been a solid five seasons—you have to go back to that special, and in retrospect scarcely believable, 2020-21 campaign, when Carlo Ancelotti (!) brought in James Rodríguez (!!) and, coupled with a healthy (!!!) Dominic Calvert-Lewin, had the team playing some of the prettiest soccer in England—since Everton has been capable of simply providing a reliably entertaining spectacle on any given weekend.

The promise of the return of David Moyes, the manager responsible for building Everton into that exemplar of upward mobility all those years ago, was that something like the good old days might return with him. Granted, the megarich clubs have only grown richer and more numerous since Moyes’s glory days, and the competition for the annual European-spots dark horse is also much more fierce now than it was then, so nobody should’ve expected any top-four miracles right away. After rejoining the Toffees in January of this year, Moyes did well to steer the ship back into calm waters, guiding the group to a stress-free midtable finish—a joy for fans who’d suffered through three consecutive relegation nail-biters. Coming into this season, one attainable goal for Moyes and the boys would be to make Everton fun again. Judging from the current makeup of the roster, the rumors of exciting moves that may yet still come, and on evidence in some of the play so far this season, Everton looks very well positioned to give fans and neutrals alike good reason to tune in.

Sunday’s Everton-Brighton match was a game of important firsts for the home team. It was the first official match the Toffees would play in their new, state-of-the-art stadium, which predictably was packed to the gills with chuffed Liverpudlians eager to sing themselves hoarse to commemorate the day. Out on the pitch, it was the first start for Jack Grealish, the on-loan Manchester City player looking to recapture some of his old spark after a disappointing couple seasons as a Citizen, as well as the first start for 6-foot-5 man-mountain Thierno Barry at striker. The offseason additions of Grealish, Barry, and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, combined with holdovers like Iliman Ndiaye and Carlos Alcaraz (not that one), have given Moyes a genuinely gifted crop of attackers to work with, which ideally should power the team’s rise up the table while playing some appealing soccer along the way. Both the fact and nature of Everton’s 2-0 win were mighty encouraging to those ends.

Grealish will likely dominate the headlines this week, and for good reason. He notched the assists for both of Everton’s goals—in a single game matching his EPL assist total for his past two seasons combined—and, with his precision and ball magnetism and hunger to be in the thick of the action, demonstrated that the chaotic creator everyone fell in love with back in his Aston Villa days is still in there. My eye, though, was mostly drawn to Ndiaye. Even in the bleak end of the Sean Dyche era, the Senegalese whirlwind has always wowed me whenever I’ve watched Everton play. He’s one of my favorite types of players, the small-space dribbling maestros who possess such technique, agility, quickness, and quick thinking that when they receive the ball, regardless of their surrounding circumstances, they are constrained by nothing but their own creativity in their efforts to escape. When commentators say a well-performing team or player is “finding joy” in a particular area of the pitch, it’s players like Ndiaye who justify the metaphor.

Ndiaye compliments his dribbling wizardry with an off-ball intensity and sacrifice that isn’t common to his attacker archetype. Look closer, though, and you can see in both his expressiveness with the ball at his feet, and his willingness to sprint around making a nuisance of himself when the other team is in possession, the influences of his particular journey in the sport.

As he explains in this very cute interview laying out his soccer story, Ndiaye’s love affair with the ball began as a toddler, when he would rarely let it out from between his feet. His father helped him cultivate that relationship, instilling in his son the flashy footwork that typified the father’s own predilections as not only a soccer player but also a lover of dancing. Ndiaye says his father would often teach him a dance move, and then have them try to incorporate it onto the field with the use of the ball.

This unique training regimen honed Ndiaye’s skills with the ball, but those skills did not by themselves make him a big prospect in the eyes of the professional world. Across childhood years spent in his native France, his father’s native Senegal, and in England, Ndiaye was regularly rejected from the academies of major local clubs, who saw him as undersized and under-talented. It took a couple good years in England’s lower divisions with Boreham Wood for the 19-year-old Ndiaye to catch the eye of Sheffield United in 2019, and only then did his career really start to take off. It’s no surprise, then, that an attacker who’d followed such a circuitous, treacherous route to professional soccer wouldn’t be the type to thumb his nose at hard work, even of the relatively thankless variety.

This upbringing is how Ndiaye could find himself up against Brighton, playing in probably his least favorite position on the right wing, and yet still terrorizing his opponents in every way imaginable. Ndiaye opened the scoring by crashing hard at the back post and connecting with a Grealish cross, showing the kind of determination and nose for goal that many modern strikers lack. He finished the game with a goal, 91 percent pass completion, three successful dribbles, and also three tackles. Ndiaye was one of Everton’s best players in a mostly bad season last year, his nine league goals the most in the team. Now that the club has invested in a better supporting cast, surrounding him with Grealish and Barry and Dewsbury-Hall and the rest, Ndiaye should be in for an even more impressive campaign.

Naturally, the biggest reason for Everton’s improved performances and bright future is its ability to sign a great manager and excellent players. Luckily for Toffee fans, the club does not appear to be done in the transfer market. The Athletic reports that Everton is on the brink of finalizing the signing of Tyler Dibling, the 19-year-old Southampton winger who is one of the more promising young wide players in England.

An attacking midfield line of Grealish, Ndiaye, and Dibling, behind whichever striker—Beto or Barry—gets to banging in the goals, would make for one of the more formidable attacks outside of the league’s Champions League contingent. Armed with all that talent, it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility that this season’s Everton might prove to be the answer to last season’s Nottingham Forest. At the very least, it should be safe to expect that Everton games will be fun to watch for the first time in forever. For a club with such a dire recent past, simply being fun to follow looks like a mighty fine start.