Everton owners explore sale of club after two years, leaving January transfer plans in question

Everton's owners explore sale of club after two years as January questions mount

Everton's owners have spent the international break exploring a sale of the club, two years into their tenure, according to The Guardian's Football Daily — and the email is not convinced it amounts to a vote of confidence in the January window.

"Which doesn't exactly scream 'Don't worry David Moyes, we'll buy you that striker in January', does it?!" the email writes of the development. With the transfer market reopening in under three months, the suggestion that the club's hierarchy devoted its hiatus to weighing an exit rather than recruitment plans is unlikely to calm supporters hoping for a striker-shaped New Year arrival.

The Toffees travel to Hull this weekend with that boardroom uncertainty now among the loudest noises around the club.

Hull digest an 'extremely lenient' ban

The hosts have their own off-field subplot to chew over. "Having previously threatened legal action over the Spygate scandal, we're not sure how the Tigers took Tonda Eckert's extremely lenient six-week suspended ban," Football Daily notes — a punishment so light that a club once ready to lawyer up over the affair will, on the email's telling, have received it with raised eyebrows at best.

Between an ownership saga on one side and a Spygate sequel on the other, Hull v Everton may lack star names but not storylines — a suitable microcosm for a Premier League weekend whose return has been anything but quiet off the pitch.