Manager Sean Dyche is working under “very difficult circumstances” amid Everton’s worst start to a league season in 66 years, says the club’s director of football Kevin Thelwell.

The Toffees are bottom of the Premier League without a point having lost all four of their games so far, conceding 13 goals.

They have the poorest record of the 96 teams in Europe’s top five leagues and were knocked out in the third round of the Carabao Cup on penalties by fellow strugglers Southampton on Tuesday.

In an exclusive interview with BBC Radio Merseyside’s Giulia Bould, Thelwell said: “Sean and I work very closely together, our offices are a metre apart so we are talking regularly and consistently about what things we can do, how we can use the resources we have available to try and make things better going forwards.

“Sean has a responsibility for the preparation and performance of the team and fundamentally the results. My responsibility is the support services that sit around that. It is about us talking through some of the performance problems we have got.”

Dyche’s contract expires at the end of the season and, despite the wretched start, club sources have told BBC Sport the 53-year-old’s job is currently safe.

Thelwell added: “I can promise everybody that there is no stone being left unturned in terms of trying to rectify our current situation. He [Dyche] is working under very difficult circumstances.

“We still have ownership and financial situations to resolve so that makes it very difficult for a manager when we want to take that next step.”

Last week, Everton said there is “some work to be done” for American businessman John Textor to complete his takeover of the club following aborted attempts by 777 Partners and the Friedkin Group this year.

The Blues are also scheduled to move to their new stadium on Bramley Moore-Dock for the start of next season.

The races take place across head-to-head events that are split into two parts.

The first part – the Louis Vuitton Cup – determines which of five challengers will face this year’s defending champion Emirates Team New Zealand in the second, the America’s Cup itself.

Races take approximately 25 minutes and this year start in August and end in October.

Endurance is the key metric for cyclors, who need to be able to consistently produce a high wattage during the races themselves and maintain their form across 10 weeks.

“We just want a huge reliable engine for the three months that we’re going to be racing,” Van Velthooven says.

“Big days are big days and easy days are still big days because they still need heaps of power. It’s relentless.”

The UK’s Ineos Britannia team, led by Sir Ben Ainslie, might not have recruited professional cyclists to their crew like some of their rivals but they have the next best thing – an affiliation with the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, formerly Team Sky and winner of seven Tours de France.

Matt Gotrel is part of Ineos Britannia’s crew. This year will be his second America’s Cup, but his first as a cyclor rather than grinder. A former Olympic gold medal-winning rower, having been part of Great Britain’s eight at Rio 2016, Gotrel has found it a “big challenge” to train a different muscle group, even if recreationally he considered himself a cyclist already.

“As rowers, we had an upside-down pyramid [body shape] before, but it’s flipped around now,” Gotrel says.

As grinders, his crew would aim to produce 400 watts of power over 20 minutes. As cyclors they are now “well north of that”.

Training for the past two years has predominantly taken place on the road or in the gym, rather than on water. Volume blocks can consist of four to six-hour-long rides, three times a week, interspersed with high-intensity intervals on a static bike and weight training.

Gotrel, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, compares powering the boats in a race to a cycling time trial, but with repeated sprint efforts throughout.

“You want to have a really good aerobic base where you can sit at as high a power as possible without producing too much lactate, and then you have your big spikes and need to be able to recover from those,” he says.

The connection to Ineos’ cycling team has been a “massive” resource for Gotrel and his fellow cyclors, enabling them to share training and nutritional insight on a training camp in Spain together.

“I had a chat with [sprinter Elia] Viviani about some sprinting technique, and then there are Filippo Ganna and Dan Bigham who have been really good on some of the strategy and fuelling things and what they did to push on the hour record,” says Gotrel

Bookmakers, usually protected and in profit thanks to margins and finely-tuned odds, were losing on National League South.

They were seeing floods of money on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world – tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy.

More money was reportedly placed on the total goals in one November 2012 National League South game than on the equivalent market for a Champions League match involving Barcelona.

Bookmakers started refusing to take wagers on some teams, scrubbing them off the coupon. The Football Association launched an investigation into betting patterns in the division.

As the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans were suspecting their own players, accusing them from the stands.

The situation couldn’t last. The net was closing in. Swaibu’s final Bromley fix – ensuring they lost an April 2013 fixture away to Maidenhead by two clear goals – bordered on farce.

Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game’s first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.

An incensed team-mate who wasn’t in on the fix was sitting on the bench, telling the manager that something suspicious was unfolding in front of them.

“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu says.

“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.

“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.

“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.

“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”

Swaibu left the club two games later, at the end of the season.

He wasn’t the only fixer who realised the National League South had come under too much scrutiny.

A clutch of players left Hornchurch – another team in the league – and travelled around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league team based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.

Their arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Sportradar – a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events – had suspicions. The players’ social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them.

The Australian police were tipped off and the Southern Stars’ dressing room, clubhouse and even goalposts were rigged with hidden microphones.

Undercover officers posed as fans, phone calls were intercepted and bank transfers examined.

It led to a string of convictions, a clutch of leads and, ultimately, a sting operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.

By then, Swaibu could well have been out of the game, both legal and illegal.

He says he had saved up around £200,000 from fixing football.

And, at 24, playing football seemed to be over. Two short-term deals with Sutton and Whitehawk led nowhere.

“But I was addicted at this point, something was pulling me back in.”

One of Swaibu’s contacts had been tapped up by a new group of fixers – a gang trying to break into match-rigging and put together a network of players to pull it off.

Swaibu had his suspicions. The new fixers didn’t seem to know the rules. They seemed naive and inexperienced, with little idea of what was possible.

They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu’s previous bosses.

Some were also white, British and middle-aged, an unlikely profile for hi-tech gambling conspiracies, invariably leveraged from Asia.

Swaibu wanted to believe though. Because if they were new to fixing, they could be fleeced.

Swaibu says he took a photo of his local five-a-side team and told the fixers they were players in his pocket. He invited his new contacts to a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge and told them it was rigged. It would end, Swaibu said, in a 1-0 win for Wimbledon.

Watch the moment substitute Salvatore ‘Toto’ Schillaci announced himself on the global stage at Italia ’90 with his side’s first goal during Italy’s opening match against Austria.

Schillaci was the top scorer at the 1990 World Cup, scoring six goals to win the Golden Boot on home soil.

It was announced on Wednesday that Schillaci has died aged 59.

READ MORE: Italy’s World Cup icon Schillaci dies aged 59

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Data, tactics and small-screen fame

“I did a quick calculation,” says James Yorke, director of football at StatsBomb, one of the sport’s leading data suppliers and analytics companies.

“After about 25 yards, the expected goal value of a shot is about 0.03, so roughly one in 33 goes in. From 20 yards, that doubles, but is still only 0.06.

“Even from 12 yards – you think, ‘oh, penalty spot, that is a good chance’ – but the likelihood of scoring is still one in six.

“You have to be in the six-yard box before you are even talking about 50:50 coin flips.

“It sounds crazy – your intuition is that goals are more likely than they actually are. For any shot, everyone overestimates the likelihood of it going in.

“But there is a fundamental truth that getting closer in changes something that is highly infrequent into something that is, relatively, much more frequent.

“It doesn’t get exponentially more likely, but the curve is step.”

What Yorke is describing – an expected goals model – is one of the most basic building blocks in football analytics.

But less than a decade ago, using cold numbers to assess shooting opportunities, rather than relying on gut feeling and optimism, was revolutionary.

“Around 2012 up to 2015, expected goals models became prevalent, understood and known more widely,” says Yorke.

“You would be crazy as a coach not to incorporate what those models are telling you into what you are telling players.”

So, did data change tactics? Did coaches see in the spreadsheet that long-range goals carve themselves into our memories, but, over the season, attempting to repeat them dents their chance of victory?

There is a precedent.

In basketball, where successful long-range shots are worth three points rather than two, analytics have conversely fuelled a switch to teams taking on more attempts from distance.

But even the biggest brains in football data aren’t convinced their industry is the cause of the trend.

Speaking at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference in March, Sarah Rudd – who pioneered the use of advanced statistics in football when she was brought in by Arsenal in 2012 – was asked how and why things had changed on the pitch.

“Data is forcing people to be a little more intentional in how they analyse things,” she said.

“So people now ask ‘if I shoot from outside the box what are the consequences?’”

But she also pointed out that long before mathematical models arrived the best teams tended to focus on taking higher-quality shots, closer in.

One of Rudd’s first projects at the Emirates was to assess whether, as per a common criticism of late-era Arsene Wenger, his Arsenal team were attempting to “walk it in”.

“What I found was that they were, but so were all the other good teams in the Premier League,” she said.

The numbers only confirmed the wisdom in what the best were already doing.

Alongside Rudd on the panel was Ian Graham, who, until 2023, held a similar role behind the scenes at Liverpool.

Rather than data affecting tactics, he sees the opposite: a sea-change in tactical approaches affecting the data.

“I think a decrease in shooting distance is a consequence in a change in playing style,” he said.

“Compared to 10 years ago when there was a lot of long-ball football and attempts from outside the area, teams are playing in a much more similar style to that brought in by Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp.

“I think it is just a happy accident that it looks analytics related.”

High-line defences being pressed hard and fast by the opposition mean, when chances do come in today’s game, attackers have either a closer sight of goal or a clear run to it.

No longer are they feeding on knock-downs and snap-shots as deep-lying backlines keep them at arm’s length.

But Taylor’s thought process at Fratton Park in December 2006 wasn’t so complex.

As a loose ball flew up out of a contest between Nwankwo Kanu and Simon Davies, he didn’t think about high-value shots or low defensive blocks, opportunity cost or half spaces.

Instead, Taylor just noticed it sat up lovely.

Now a manager, he thinks today’s generation of players have more on their minds.

“If you sat down players from December 2006 and now, they would be two different groups of people,” he says.

“There has always been pressure internally – from your coach, team-mates and the fans in the stadium –  but there is a lot more pressure externally now.

“After a match a player will shower, do their media bits, then turn their phone on and they might have 50,000 messages where they have been tagged on Twitter or Instagram.

“That is where young players – young people in general – get a lot of their information and feedback from. And all humans like praise and dislike stick.

“If you take a shot from 25 yards, it goes over and you get that criticism, the next time that chance arises you are probably going to be thinking in the back of your head, ‘if I miss again, I might get the same response’.

“Does that affect people and shape their decision-making? Of course it does, it has to.”

In November, Sky Sports’ data editor Adam Smith noticed a statistical quirk that might reinforce Taylor’s theory, that what players consume via their screens affects what they produce on the pitch.

The release of Netflix’s docuseries charting David Beckham’s career – the first episode of which zeroed in on his famous long-range goal against Wimbledon in 1996 – coincided with a four-fold increase in shots from 30 yards and beyond in the Premier League.

A few weeks later, attempts from distance seemed to fall back to their previous level.

Social media was barely born in December 2006. Podcast analysis and YouTube watch-alongs didn’t exist. Television showed fewer games and highlights were harder to find.

Social contagion spread in a more personal way.

In today’s Premier League, competing systems and processes grind a way to a result. The players are cogs in the machine.

The noughties though, was a time of alpha ball-strikers. Greatness came more often via a single act from a single actor. A bolt from the blue – or 25 yards plus – formed team’s figureheads.

The top scorers of Premier League goals from outside the box maps the era’s biggest names and rivalries: Frank Lampard of Chelsea, Steven Gerrard of Liverpool, David Beckham of Manchester United, and Thierry Henry of Arsenal.

When the ball dropped to any of them 25 yards out, was their instinct, untamed by multi-outlet criticism, to try and outshine the stars elsewhere?

While most prolific and readily associated with wonderstrikes, those names aren’t the best long-range shooters. Or, at least, not the most efficient.

Since Stats Perform started collecting the data in 2003-04, the most successful player in converting outside-of-the-box shots into goals in the Premier League is Matheus Pereira, the Brazilian who spent two seasons with West Brom between 2019 and 2021 before heading to Saudi Arabia.

Interestingly, Manchester City – known for their highly structured, intricate attack aimed at getting round the back of defences – are well represented among the most efficient long-range artists, with Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden and Sergio Aguero all in the top five.

The whole list skews more recent, suggesting current players are more picky about their chances from distance, shooting less frequently, but more successfully.

There is a silent partner in every screamer of course.

A glut of long-range goals in this summer’s European Championship turned attention on the ball, with suggestions that something about Adidas’ creation – which contained sugar cane and wood pulp – favoured strikers more than goalkeepers.

At the 2010 World Cup an above-average number of long-range goals coincided with goalkeepers claiming Adidas’ Jabulani ball had an unpredictable trajectory.

The 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons – the two campaigns in Premier League history with the highest share of long-range goals – were both played with the Nike Total 90 Aerow II.

It was the first time that Nike had stopped mentioning the ball being “faster” in their promotional material, believing the quality had to be “inherent”. Perhaps they should have done.