Former Everton assistant manager Erwin Koeman has suggested the club were to blame for Davy Klaassen’s disastrous time at the club.
Koeman was assistant to his brother Ronald during his stint in charge at Goodison Park and thus part of the team that elected to bring Klaassen to the club in a £24.3m deal from Ajax in 2018.
His arrival was met with great optimism, with Klaassen having been one of the stars of the show at the Dutch giants in their run to the Europa League final the previous year.
The hope was that he could be the regular goalscoring midfielder Everton desperately needed, but that did not prove to be the case.
Instead, he would manage just 16 appearances and 820 minutes of football that season, failing to fit into Koeman’s plans following the return of Wayne Rooney and a big move for Gylfi Sigurdsson.
He was quickly sold to Werder Bremen the following year and has since spoken regularly about his failure to adapt to life at the club.
“Romelu Lukaku had just left. Everton lost power and the urge to score. The absence of a strong, scoring striker didn’t help Klaassen as a box-to-box player either,” he told Algemeen Dagblad, relayed by Voetbal Primeur.
“Ronald was also crazy about Klaassen. He came into a new environment for the first time, where the difference in speed and power was much greater than Klaassen was used to in the Eredivisie.
“The fact that he didn’t score in the preparation didn’t help him.
“Also because Everton had recruited competitors in Wayne Rooney and Gylfi Sigurdsson. They didn’t make it any easier.
“We started reasonably, but then the defeats came. Davy had a hard time. Everton is not Ajax, where you get eight chances a game.
“But for a club, it is important that you give a player time to settle if you bring him in for a large sum. But that is difficult, also because the competition at Everton is much bigger.”
