Former Everton director of football Marcel Brands has revealed he was in meetings where a manager was told to pick the team by the club’s owners.
The 61-year-old has been speaking to NRC in his homeland about his career so far, which inevitably means a conversation about his time at Everton.
He moved to Goodison Park as Steve Walsh’s replacement in May 2018 after successful spells with PSV and AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands.
There was much optimism about his arrival, but he would only last three years at the club, eventually departing in December 2021 after an apparent falling out with the club’s ownership.
That had coincided with a miserable season in which Everton had slid down the table under Rafa Benitez, a controversial appointment the previous summer after Carlo Ancelotti left to re-join Real Madrid.
That was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of interference, according to Brands, with NRC stating that he was in ‘meetings on expensive yachts and phone calls where the coach was told who to line up’.
He also didn’t ‘name names’ and could not go into too much detail ‘out of respect‘ for his previous employer.
“You can’t imagine that world if you haven’t seen it yourself,” he said.
“I think they want the best for the club. But I firmly believe that with good policy you can achieve something. They think: I’m pumping money into it, so it should quickly yield success, right?
“But in the Premier League everyone has a lot of money. The funny thing is we get more from commercial activities with PSV than Everton, but they get between 130 and 140 million in TV money [against almost 9 million at PSV]. That makes it all a bit easier.”
