With a penchant for blasting out Foo Fighters on his drive to work and relaxing at Glastonbury in the summer, Sean Dyche is a 52-year-old with a youthful zest for life.
But when it comes to the dynamic between managers and their players, the Everton boss would seem to possess old-school values from a bygone footballing era.
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Witness the messy deterioration of his relationship with Demarai Gray and the resulting sale of the midfielder to Saudi Arabian club Al Ettifaq after the European transfer window closed earlier this month.
The narratives conflict.
Gray suggests he wanted to be involved at Everton, gave his “all to this club on and off the pitch” and was eventually edged towards the exit door by disrespect and the conviction he was not wanted.
Dyche, in turn, took the rare step of explaining to the club’s official website his side of the story. It was a helpful slice of transparency — and also a blessing given it spared whichever reporter would otherwise have been tasked with asking him about the issue, thereby provoking one of those unnecessarily terse exchanges with journalists that are increasingly becoming his trademark.
“It’s an unfortunate one because I try to keep our business in-house,” he explained. “On this occasion, it’s right to reply.
“Demarai made it clear that he felt he was getting a move (away from Everton) and he told us a move was done, which was interesting to hear from a player. We reminded him that no moves are done without this club’s say-so. That’s the truth of it.
“We look after these players; we look at all the different ways of looking after them. Mental and well-being are big, the tactics and technical, the physical. We look at all of that for all these players and we look after them.
“When it comes to a time like that then you go, ‘Well, hang on a minute. You made it clear you didn’t want to train, you didn’t want to be here, and you also said there was a move that was a done deal’.
“We said it’s not a done deal because this club is the most important. This club will make decisions on the future of you as players and not the other way around. I think it’s right to let our fans know that’s the truth.”
At the core of Dyche’s approach is that no player is bigger than the club and the old power dynamic that supports that dictum is important and forms part of a respectful organisation.
In many ways, there is a lot to admire about that. It is the type of approach taken by Sir Alex Ferguson or, more locally, David Moyes — especially during the early years of his authoritarian reign at Goodison Park.
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But by ostracising and ultimately selling one of Everton’s more naturally gifted attackers without replacing him, Dyche has also taken a significant risk in a season that is already shaping up to be as fraught as the last, when relegation was avoided on the final day of the campaign.
It means that, until January at least, Dyche has three players to call upon who you would call wingers: Dwight McNeil, who made his injury comeback against Sheffield United after missing the first four games of the season, Jack Harrison, who is yet to play for his new club as he recovers from his own injury, and Arnaut Danjuma.
At a push, the unproven 20-year-old striker Lewis Dobbin can also play out wide.
It follows the sale of another of the team’s better attacking players capable of operating on the flanks, Alex Iwobi, at the end of the window. While the sale of Iwobi could be justified given the context of his contractual situation — Gray, too, had entered the final 12 months of his deal — he also went unreplaced.
It had been clear for some time that Gray was not viewed as a natural fit for Dyche’s methods. The player preferred to do his best work in the final third and wanted fewer defensive demands to shine. Dyche, for his part, wants wingers such as McNeil who have the engine and mentality to do exactly what he asks in their own half.
Gray was benched for Dyche’s first game in charge, last February’s win over this weekend’s visitors Arsenal, and found it difficult to break consistently back into the team thereafter.
He started nine of the 18 games under Dyche last term and still managed to finish second in the squad’s dismal list of league goalscorers — with four goals to McNeil’s seven.
If Everton had better options, it would be entirely reasonable for Dyche to conclude he did not need a player who did not suit his game plan. Gray, who at the weekend scored his second international goal since switching allegiance to Jamaica earlier this year, has a history of struggling to consistently make his undoubted ability fit at clubs; from Leicester, where he found it difficult to secure regular minutes, to Bayer Leverkusen and, in the end, on Merseyside.
To categorise him as a difficult character would be unfair — none of Dyche’s predecessors had issues with him — but he is now Steven Gerrard’s gifted puzzle to solve in Saudi.
The Everton manager’s conundrum is getting enough attacking input from his depleted ranks, even if a new experienced striker in Beto offers some hope that this season’s abysmal start can improve.
It can be hard to grasp in the era of social media hot takes, but it remains the case that two things can be true at the same time.
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Dyche’s stance in standing up to player power and refusing to cuddle Gray’s ego enough to keep him can be right. It can also be right that his inability to handle the situation without it spilling into a messy exit could be proven to be a mistake.
Only time will tell, but it is a risk. Everton’s manager must hope that McNeil stays fit and Harrison returns swiftly and proves physically robust.
Like everything connected to the fraught transfer dealings in the current Goodison era of austerity and cuts, Gray’s exit represented a gamble where short-term needs are constantly measured against long-term strategy. Difficult decisions have had to be made and the rumoured £8million ($10m) Everton received for Gray could also have represented extra pressure on the manager to sanction his exit, particularly given his contractual situation.
If that is the case, let’s hope Dyche can reinvest that in January. He may need to.
(Top photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)