CHANTS of “sack the board” rang out around Goodison Park during Everton’s second-half collapse against Brighton & Hove Albion last week.

Whatever sacking the board involves, it is surely the only option left for Everton now. 

A restructuring of the board may not be enough. New ownership may be needed to take the club forward in a game, and a league, that has advanced beyond the current leadership’s capabilities.

At Everton’s annual general meeting in January 2021, chairman Bill Kenwright boasted: “I believe that the Everton board is revered throughout football — I know all the boards in football — and I know that our board is what other football clubs aspire to.

“In fact, one very famous football club said to me two or three days ago, ‘whenever we have a problem, we say what would the Everton board do? Because they always get it right.’

“Maybe you don’t know what a chairman does,” Kenwright added. “It’s my job to uphold everything that is good and I believe is right for Everton.”

At this point it would appear to be the right thing for Everton, is new leadership in the boardroom and new ownership.

It is worth pointing at this stage out that Everton’s community arm, Everton in the Community, continues to do good work off the pitch. Maybe the sporting side of the football club can learn some things from them.

Managers have come and gone, and current boss Frank Lampard is now in a precarious position with the club dropping ever closer to the foot of the table.

Even directors of football have come and gone — the very job supposed to provide stability at a club. But for various reasons, often beyond their control, those in this post have been unable to carry out this role, often due to ownership interference.

During the past year, there has been a root and branch review of football operations at Everton.

A new director of football, Kevin Thelwell, was hired to revamp that structure (in a solely sporting sense) which he has attempted to do with numerous appointments in the past year in all areas of the football operation.

One appointment he didn’t make was Lampard. This itself is an immediate red flag as the hiring of a director of football should come before the hiring of a manager. It sums up Everton in their current state that it didn’t.

The club were pressed into a managerial appointment earlier due to poor results under Rafa Benitez midway through the 2021/22 season, but those poor results are being reflected in the 2022/23 campaign.

Lampard and Benitez evidently weren’t, or aren’t, good enough to turn things around. They weren’t the right managers for the job, but neither are they the main problem.

Everton fans indicated the main problem when they turned their ire towards the board during Tuesday’s embarrassing 4-1 defeat.

Their opponents that night, Brighton, are the complete opposite of Everton at this moment in time. 

They are a well-run club with good recruitment. They have an idea of how they want to play and the players, and indeed the coaches and managers, who can implement it.

It seemed impossible for them to improve on what Graham Potter had brought to the club before he left for Chelsea, but they might be even better to watch under Potter’s replacement, Roberto De Zerbi.

Brighton know the profiles they need in all roles at the club, from playing staff to coaching staff and beyond, and let each do the job they were hired for.

Some Everton fans applauded Brighton off the pitch at the end of Tuesday’s game, enviously, no doubt, but also in appreciation of what a well-run club looks like.

For the home team, there were boos at the end of the game, almost obligatory now. 

More telling was the air of resignation around Goodison Park in the second half with their team down 4-0 to goals from Kaoru Mitoma, Evan Ferguson, Solly March, and Pascal Gross.

Boos after the goals from Ferguson and March ebbed away and Goodison was silent. Everton fans who last season kept their team in the Premier League through collective shows of support rarely seen at this level, especially for teams in the position Everton were, now themselves appear at a loss. They shouldn’t have been in this position again.

This was a season where the club was supposed to give supporters something back following their efforts at the end of the last, but now the team are in the same position once again, if not worse.

Demarai Gray’s late penalty to make it 4-1 against Brighton was no consolation for fans who can no longer be consoled.

De Zerbi was annoyed Brighton conceded that goal and spoke of his disappointment with their first-half display, such are his standards.

The kind of standards that don’t seem to exist at Everton — a club that should be in Brighton’s current position of challenging the top six, but whose expectations have been lowered so much that a relegation battle was expected by some even before the season started.

It has become evident, as supporters always said it would do, that the recent root-and-branch review at Everton should have gone beyond the sporting side into the overall running of the club at the boardroom level.

Everton now slump towards the bottom of the table and, the way they are going, if they were relegated to the Championship there would be little faith in them being able to bounce straight back up to the Premier League.

The root-and-branch reform at the club needs to start at the top rather than the bottom.