Journalist Paul Brown insists that Everton owner Farhad Moshiri has “wasted” money during his tenure at Goodison Park because he pays too much attention to agents.

The club are again on the hunt for a new manager after Rafael Benitez was sacked last week.

What’s the latest with Everton?

The club have really struggled to secure proper new additions who can improve the first-team throughout Moshiri’s time at the club.

He took control at Everton in February of 2016, meaning that he has been in charge for six years and has overseen a number of transfer windows.

Indeed, under his stewardship, the Toffees aimed to make a splash in the transfer window before the 2016/17 season, paying a total of £77.4m for the likes of Yannick Bolasie, Morgan Schneiderlin, Ashley Williams and Ademola Lookman.

Since then, they have repeatedly spent big, paying over £44m to sign Gylfi Sigurdsson from Swansea City, and a combined £51.3m on Michael Keane and Jordan Pickford.

Since then, the likes of Richarlison, Yerry Mina, Alex Iwobi, Moise Kean and Ben Godfrey have all arrived for over £20m.

It’s arguable if any of those signings, maybe bar Richarlison, have been outright successes, and Brown believes that Moshiri spends too much time listening to advice from agents instead of those in the know.

What has Brown said?

He told GiveMeSport: “You couldn’t really ever be sure at Everton who was buying each player and I suspect that even now, he’s still buying players on the advice of an agent rather than someone at the club which is a dangerous thing to do and is probably one of the reasons why he’s wasted so much money.”

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Is he right?

Absolutely bang on.

Everton were limited in the summer transfer window because of the excesses of previous windows leading to them falling foul of financial fair play rules.

It left Rafael Benitez essentially handcuffed in the window and it is little surprise that his tenure went as badly as it did prior to his sacking.

Of course, a run of one win in 13 games is not purely down to an inability to splash the cash but it certainly didn’t help.

Moshiri needs to surround himself with people who actually know what they’re doing because, as it stands, Everton are a mess, and one without a permanent manager too.

If this carries on, he will find it all the more difficult to lure anyone to the club.