Manager
David Moyes: First Manager of the Bramley-Moore Era
David Moyes being the first manager of Everton's dock era is complicated in the way Everton things usually are. It is sentimental, practical, slightly awkward and perfectly understandable all at once.
He returned in January 2025 with the club still needing to reach the new stadium as a Premier League side. That fact matters. Whatever anyone thinks of ceilings, style or recycled appointments, the first job was not romance. It was survival.
At Bramley-Moore, the job changes. Moyes cannot live forever on steadiness. The new ground raises the question from staying up to pushing on: home form, recruitment, attacking courage, and standards that make the stadium feel like an advantage rather than a backdrop.
There is a fan argument here because Evertonians have memories. Some remember the first Moyes era as rescue and respectability. Some remember the glass ceiling. Some remember the way it ended. All of those feelings can be true.
The first dock manager will be judged by whether he makes the new place feel like Everton: hard to play, honest in effort, sharper in attack, and unwilling to drift. That is the test now.
Moyes is an unusually Everton appointment because he arrives with history already attached. Supporters are not meeting him fresh. They bring old gratitude, old frustration, old jokes and old arguments back into the room with him.
That makes the dock job fascinating. If he succeeds, it will not just be a steady-manager story. It will be a second Everton act that helps the club cross from survival habits into something more assertive.
The pressure is fair. A new ground should not become a comfortable excuse for modest football. Moyes has to make Everton awkward, organised and harder-edged, but he also has to give the crowd enough attacking life to believe in.