Everton’s current predicament is a tale of two football clubs. About the worst of times under majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri amid the hope of the best of times when the team moves into a £500m new docklands home in 2025.

It is an age of foolishness via boardroom chaos, and an owner running the club so badly the team was deducted Premier League points on two occasions last season. Yet it is also an age of wisdom under manager Sean Dyche, organising the team so efficiently that the deduction of eight Premier League points did not prevent safety being secured with relative ease last season.

Then, Dyche’s spring of hope was the antidote to Moshiri’s winter of despair.

The extreme differences make Everton the most contradictory of institutions.

Moshiri’s struggle to sell the club seems to persistently threaten a season of darkness, but others see his growing desperation as a step closer to the light because eventually he will be compelled to agree a realistic sale price.

“Farhad must accept he will have to take a haircut,” is probably the most used phrase at Everton in the last few months, Moshiri understandably struggling to accept the inevitability of eventually walking away with personal losses of hundreds of millions.