As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. A seesawing match packed with plenty of incident including a straight red card for Phil Jagielka and four goals ended in a draw after brilliant performances from two 21-year-olds on either side.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when Everton paid £40m to Watford to sign Richarlison a few weeks ago but the Brazilian showed exactly why he is rated so highly with two goals that seemed to have secured an opening day victory for his manager, Marco Silva.

Yet in Rúben Neves, who scored a stunning free-kick before setting up new boy Raúl Jiménez for a late equaliser to earn a deserved point for his side, Wolves have a real gem. Purchased for £15.6m from Porto last summer, despite his tender years Neves is already the fulcrum of the team built by Nuno Espírito Santo that, on this evidence, look good enough to do more than merely survive.

The Wolves manager said: “Rúben has this kind of talent but it is all about the organisation of the team. That is what is fundamental to our side. He came last season and adapted well to English football but this is a player who was captain of a big club when he was 17. At 21 now he still has a lot of things to improve.”

In their first match in the top flight since 2012, Wolves fielded four new faces including goalkeeper Rui Patrício and João Moutinho in midfield, who boast almost 190 caps for Portugal between them. The club’s last Premier League campaign ended in relegation with 25 points after Mick McCarthy was sacked in February but – after the low point of spending a season in League One – Molineux is a different place these days.

Richarlison scored two goals on debut for Everton. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

Fosun, the club’s Chinese owners who are estimated to be worth around £60bn and have a stake in super agent Jorge Mendes’s Gestifute company, already invested heavily in the playing squad before the arrival of the likes of Patrício, Moutinho and Adama Traoré, who joined from Middlesbrough for £18m this week. The intention – as witnessed by the fireworks that preceded kick-off here – is clearly to make quite a bang.

Silva was taking charge of his first match after replacing Sam Allardyce at the end of May, having been unceremoniously dumped by Watford four months earlier, and was delighted to see Richarlison pounce in the 17th minute after some sloppy defending from a Leighton Baines free-kick.

That certainly was not in the script for the home supporters and Everton seemed to be coasting towards victory until disaster struck four minutes from half-time. Jagielka was under minimal pressure from Jota as he allowed a pass to run across his body but after a slip of concentration the former England defender was shown a red card for clumsily bringing down his opponent. “It was a really harsh decision,” said Silva. “Maybe the game would have been different if we had 11 men.” Neves stepped up and curled the resulting free-kick into the top corner to rub salt into their wounds.

Jordan Pickford will have been disappointed to have conceded after seeming to take a step in the opposite direction at the crucial moment, although there was no doubting the quality of the strike from a player who made a knack of scoring spectacular goals in the Championship last season. With Gylfi Sigurdsson sacrificed in favour of Mason Holgate in an attempt to shore up his defence, Everton retreated deep into their own half and it seemed only a matter of time until they conceded again. The Mexico striker Jiménez wasted the best chance when he failed to finish off Ryan Bennett’s superb through-ball, failing to find a way past Pickford as he charged off his line.

They were made to pay when Richarlison combined with Baines and Cenk Tosun to curl a wonderful finish into the corner of the net to set up a frantic finale. “We had very good organisation in the second half and looked like we could score more goals after that,” acknowledged Silva.

It was not to be. Espírito Santo threw on Léo Bonatini and Rúben Vinagre as Wolves poured forward in search of an equaliser and they were rewarded when Jiménez touched home another pinpoint cross from Neves 10 minutes from time. With him in the side, who knows what may be possible this season.