Will approach from former club turn Marco Silva’s head?

Once again it looks like the dreaded second season phenomenon is rearing its unforgiving head at Everton. After a first year where the Blues showed a drastic improvement in on-field quality and ended the season with a strong run, Marco Silva is finding that sustaining those levels is more challenging than he might have anticipated, injuries notwithstanding.

Before him Roberto Martinez and Ronald Koeman also fell victim to the same dips in performance, with Everton waiting too long to sack the former and likely pulling the trigger too quickly on the latter, but here we are again. Six games into the new Premier League season and already the Blues have racked up three losses, including one at home and two of those defeats to newly-promoted sides.

Next up is a visit from the defending champions who just thrashed Watford FC 8-0 last week, and it’s entirely possible that come Monday the Toffees could be sitting in the relegation zone, after having faced just two sides that finished in the top ten last season.

Meanwhile, Portuguese newspaper O Jogo (via SportWitness) are reporting that his former side Sporting Clube de Portugal are on the lookout for a new manager and have ‘approached’ Silva among a host of other names to gauge his interest in returning to the motherland.

SCP and Marcel Keizer parted ways earlier this month after less than a year of the Dutchman being in charge, and Sporting have already spoken with José Mourinho, Massimiliano Allegri and Vitor Pereira who all turned them down. Former player and currently Portugal Under-21 manager Rui Jorge and former manager Leonardo Jardim (now at AS Monaco) have also been tapped to gauge their interest in a return, as has Silva, according to the report.

Silva won the Portuguese Cup with Sporting in his one year in charge between 2014 and 2015, before moving to Greece to take over at Olympiakos. The Portuguese manager was well-liked at Watford and led them to a hot start in the 2017-18 season before he apparently ‘had his head turned’ by Everton who were floundering under Koeman, and eventually was sacked a few months later.

The bad blood between the Hornets and the Toffees was never really remedied, despite legal intervention to mediate between the two sides, and the Blues paying over the premium for Richarlison’s transfer with the expectation that some of that was to calm the situation.

Silva has (unfortunately for him) picked up a reputation of being a journeyman in his management career, and not since 2011-14 when he led Estoril to great things has he spent more than a year at one club.

Per insiders at the Toffees, the 42-year-old manager is well-liked by the Board and by the players, who admire his hard work and the dedication that he shows to his role at the club. At this point it does seem unlikely that Silva would leave of his own volition, and neither would the club’s leadership like to plunge the club into more chaos by sacking him before the end of the season. Should results continue to underwhelm though, and the Sporting position remain open, then it wouldn’t be remiss to think that Silva might revert to past form and hop clubs, again.