Bolton Wanderers: One transfer window looks the turning point in Ian Evatt’s tenure | OneFootball

The failure to replace Dapo Afolayan and spending quite heavily in the same window has had Bolton Wanderers trying to recover ever since.

Ian Evatt departed Bolton Wanderers earlier this week after a four-and-a-half-year spell was ended by a 2-1 defeat at home to Charlton Athletic on Tuesday evening.

Following on from last season in which Bolton failed to gain automatic promotion on the final day of the campaign away at Peterborough United, after a campaign in which they spent the vast majority of their time in the top two before collapsing and then losing to Oxford United in the play-off final at Wembley Stadium a few weeks later, it has been a really poor term for one of the pre-season automatic promotion performances.

Despite being as low as ninth as Evatt departed, way below expectations, results have actually flattered Evatt and Bolton, with that leading to his eventual departure. The malaise and stagnation at the one-time Premier League stalwart club can be marked back further than just the last 12 or so months.

The January transfer window of 2023, whilst not alone in doing damage to Evatt’s tenure and legacy with the Trotters, and the failure to evolve from that, may well have been the root cause of the Wanderers’ now extended underperformance.

The Afolayan sale and inability to replace

In January 2023, Bolton decided to sell Dapo Afolayan to 2. Bundesliga side St Pauli for a fee believed to be in the region of £500,000. Afolayan has since made himself a key man for the Hamburg-based outfit and now plays regularly in the German top-flight, despite St Pauli being rock-bottom in the second-tier when he made the move.

Bolton, challenging for automatic promotion at the time, spent that money on Burton Albion striker Victor Adeboyejo for the same fee, as well as bringing in Cameron Jerome on a free transfer from Luton Town and Shola Shoretire on loan from Manchester United.

Afolayan had struggled to get himself regularly into the starting eleven for Bolton in the first-half of the 2022/23 campaign and the signings of Adeboyejo and Jerome proved that Evatt’s intention was to find players more suited to his often blunt 3-5-2 system. Jerome scored just four goals in 55 appearances for the club before leaving in the summer of 2024, whilst Adeboyejo has never hit the ground running and has struggled to make himself a regular starter this season.

Shoretire was the ‘creative’ spark that was supposed to replace that element of Afolayan’s game, but after a bright start, his intuition and natural ability was seemingly coached out of him. He was forced to play out of position in the ‘two’ of a 3-5-2 alongside one of Bolton’s plethora of strikers, including Dion Charles, Jon Dadi Bodvarsson and Dan Nlundulu.

Rather than trust his side to play with two strikers as well as an attacking midfielder, conservatism from Evatt often stifled their approach and led them to play with three central midfielders and two players detached from the rest of the side up-front.

Bolton’s squad by the summer of 2023 then needed another makeover, with James Trafford and Conor Bradley leaving at the end of their loan deals from Manchester City and Liverpool respectively, despite the fact that the bulk of the work was supposed to have been done in the winter.

Wanderers’ repetition of similar mistakes

In reality, that winter window was underwhelming to the point of outright failure and Bolton’s recruitment, led by Director of Football Chris Markham, as well as heavy input from Evatt and Ludonautics, has been trying to recover ever since.

However, ‘recover’ is perhaps the wrong word to use in this instance, because it doesn’t appear Bolton feel that way, as the Trotters seem to be repeating similar mistakes two years on.

In this window alone, Bolton have decided to sell one of their standout star attacking players, Dion Charles, who completed a £750,000 move to Huddersfield Town last week, because he wasn’t regularly starting for Bolton.

Afolayan now plays regularly in the top-flight of German football and Bolton are residing in the middle of League One two years after his sale, showing that Evatt was perhaps wrong in not being able to get him into his eleven. There is a fear that Charles will prove him wrong once again as Huddersfield compete for a top two finish in League One this season.

Charles’ departure means Bolton now have just one out-and-out centre forward, Adeboyejo, in their squad, and it is absolutely imperative that they get a replacement in. That replacement will have the pressure of trying to emulate a striker who became the first to score 50 goals for Bolton since Kevin Nolan, the first to score 20 in a season since Michael Ricketts and the first to do it in back-to-back seasons since John McGinlay.

The Shoretire experiment, which failed as a result of him often being played out of position due to Evatt’s conservatism, may well be happening again with Joel Randall – albeit Evatt’s departure may offer Randall a reprieve that Shoretire never had.

Randall, an attacking midfielder who has never played further forward than that, was deployed as a second striker as Bolton suffered a 2-1 defeat to Charlton the other night. Randall did put Bolton ahead in that game, but his overall game was completely stifled as he was forced higher up the pitch due to a lack of trust and inherent defensiveness displayed by Evatt.

The departure of Evatt may bring about an evolution in Bolton’s dealings in the next week or so, but there is a growing concern, especially with Charles’ sale being sanctioned just days before his departure, that issues of recruitment at the club run deeper than the now vacant managerial position.