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Marcel Brands’ appointment as Everton’s Director of Football hints at a significant change in Everton’s structure - even though we appointed our first Director of Football two years ago.

It was very interesting to read Marcel’s comments about why he wanted to come to Everton: he wants to win trophies and he wants to be competing against the best in the league.

That’s exactly what we want to hear and suggests that Marcel is going to have more control over the club than Walsh ever had.

The model at the club seems to have changed significantly. Farhad Moshiri has scoured the globe to find the man he wants to take the club in a different direction.

And Marcel has a great track record of doing just that.

He has been linked with Everton for several months now and as time dragged on I was fearing that the move for him might not get over the line.

He struggled in the first couple of years at PSV, but finally helped them to win titles and that’s why I thought it would be difficult to entice him away because he probably had a job for life there.

This is a whole new challenge, coming to a club which has a journey to undertake if they want to be winning things again.

The last 18 months proved that the recruitment model at Everton was flawed and we might have learned a lesson with Steve Walsh and Ronald Koeman probably not seeing eye to eye on transfers.

It’s all positive at the moment. Marcel has been appointed and hopefully a new manager will follow sooner rather than later.

Because we need to start building for next season as soon as possible with the transfer market closing earlier than usual.

But we also have to be patient.

I was listening to Pep Guardiola talking about his reign at Manchester City recently and he spoke of how Manchester City are reaping the rewards now of changes they made 10 years ago.

We know it’s not going to change overnight at Everton.

We’re not going to win the league rightaway but we need to be moving in that direction - top six, then top four, then pushing for titles.

Marcel will hopefully be part of that.

He has come to the club and will want trophies on his CV.

And with his connections in world football, and especially South America, he will have a big black book of players he could bring to the club and that is what we’re looking forward to seeing.

I keep in touch with the former Blackburn defender Andre Ooijer, who played at Blackburn and was at PSV with me.

He’s back at PSV now as a youth coach and while he knew something was going on with Marcel, he wasn’t sure if he would leave or not.

I was worried he might have been waiting for a bigger opportunity but we’ve tied him down and he has the platform now to improve us.

We have to back him.

At this moment there’s a bit of positivity around the club which has been lacking for a while.

We just need a manager in place now!