“It means too much for me,” Beto said after his stoppage-time goal rescued a point for Everton against Fulham.
It has been a difficult couple of months for the striker, who failed to see any game time between the 3-2 defeat at Aston Villa in mid-September and Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Goodison Park.
But with Everton needing a goal, he was introduced as a late substitute and delivered. The team had a lifeline, stretching their unbeaten run despite a below-par performance. He had a lifeline after six weeks in the wilderness.
In that moment, the emotion of it all was seemingly too much to bear.
Beto released a roar in front of the Gwladys Street End after converting his 94th-minute header, before racing back to the centre circle, dropping to his knees and pounding the turf. At full time, he burst into tears and pulled his shirt over his face in an attempt to conceal his emotions from the encroaching television cameras.
Beto couldn’t contain the tears at full time after scoring a 94th-minute equaliser against Fulham 🥲
‘You can’t imagine how much this means for me.’
Amazing. pic.twitter.com/Iht5nio0gj
— Optus Sport (@OptusSport) October 27, 2024
“These goals mean so much and to help the team is emotional,” he told Sky Sports afterwards. “I put my head up every week and every day, I want to improve.
“These last weeks were really difficult. But God helped me, so here I am today — happy and I scored a goal.”
There is a temptation to see Beto’s reaction on Saturday as about more than just the start to this season. Fifteen months after joining Everton in an initial €25million (£21m/ $27m) deal from Italian side Udinese, he has not showed his best form.
Earning the trust of manager Sean Dyche and dislodging first-choice striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin has proven problematic. He has made just nine Premier League starts and this season, he has played 52 minutes.
Calvert-Lewin, plagued by injuries in the two seasons before Beto’s arrival, has since put together a more consistent run of games than anyone at Goodison could have expected. But even then, Beto has not profited from what has been, at times, a chronic lack of goals in the Everton ranks.
Confidence has been further eroded this season. Perhaps more than any other player, Beto seemed to be left carrying the can for Everton’s dreadful start to the campaign and their back-to-back capitulations against Bournemouth and Aston Villa. On both occasions, they led 2-0 but ended up losing 3-2.
Both times, Beto appeared as a late substitute. Then he was not seen again on the pitch for six weeks.
The Bournemouth game appears to have weighed heaviest in Dyche’s mind. While he entered the fray at Villa Park with the home side already 3-2 up against Andoni Iraola’s side, Beto was partly complicit in Everton’s downfall. They lost a platform up front after his introduction, the game became chaotic and nobody could prevent it from spiralling out of their control.
For Dyche, the decision to regularly go with Calvert-Lewin over Beto is not just about goals.
Calvert-Lewin is more refined in certain aspects of centre-forward play, including most of those that Dyche privileges. Everton have the lowest average possession figure in the league this season but progress it upfield the quickest, with the fewest average passes. No side plays a greater percentage of their passes forward (42 per cent).
The lone striker in Dyche’s system must win long aerial balls, battle opposition defenders while isolated and bring team-mates into the game. It is a tough ask, harder still when adapting to a new league and culture.
In Saturday’s post-match press conference, Dyche pointedly referred to Beto’s unconventional pathway into the professional game. Days earlier, he had told assembled media that the striker “needed to work on his game”.
Beto’s journey has been unconventional. He dropped out of Benfica’s academy, played in Lisbon’s amateur leagues while also working part-time at KFC, and was 20 when he signed with Olimpico do Montijo of the Portuguese fourth tier in 2018.
Twelve months later, he was in the Primeira Liga with Portimonense and two years on from that, he was at Udinese in Italy’s top flight. It has all happened fast, away from the usual breeding grounds of academy football.
“His development curve has been a delayed one,” Dyche said. “He didn’t come into the game professionally that long ago, in relative terms.”
Although they both possess the physicality associated with a traditional target man, Beto and Calvert-Lewin are not actually that similar. They have different strengths and weaknesses.
Beto is better racing in behind and stretching play than coming short. He is taking up better positions in the box, on the whole, than his team-mate and boasts an expected goals total of 0.7 per 90 since the start of last season compared to Calvert-Lewin’s 0.48.
The Guinea-Bissau international is in the top eight per cent among his positional peers in that time for shots taken and top six per cent for shots on target, again comfortably surpassing Calvert-Lewin. He averages more touches in the attacking third and more in the penalty area (6.4 to 5).
“He always wants to be on the scoresheet,” Everton defender Ashley Young told Optus on Saturday. “He hasn’t had many opportunities this season, but when he gets his chance he wants to get in the box. He causes defences all sorts of problems.”
Beto’s seven senior goals for Everton have come in 1,363 minutes, at a ratio of one every 195 minutes. That does include two strikes against League Two side Doncaster Rovers. In that time, Calvert-Lewin has netted 10 times at an average of a goal every 340 minutes. Both players are significantly underperforming their expected goals, a recurrent problem for this Everton side that highlights their inability to take chances.
Crucially for Dyche, though, Calvert-Lewin has the edge in other areas. He has a better aerial win percentage and is more secure in possession. Where Beto miscontrols the ball nearly five times a game, placing in him in the bottom one per cent among his peers in this metric and is also in the bottom 10 per cent for dispossessions, Calvert-Lewin is only dispossessed roughly once per match (top 32 per cent of strikers). Leading in recent games against Crystal Palace and Ipswich, Dyche decided not to turn to use Beto.
Beto tends to make more tackles in the final third and more recoveries, but both are seen as a work in progress defensively, with Dyche and his staff making that an area of focus in recent training sessions.
“He (Beto) has been working hard in training,” Dyche said. “The staff and myself have been working with him, doing extra bits, showing clips.
“He’s different, he’s difficult, especially as a striker. I keep saying to him, ‘You don’t have to be pure when you’re a striker like you but you have to be a handful and awkward’. It’s a real weapon and he can find different ways to affect the opposition.
“The goal reinforces the work he’s been doing. We’ve spoken to him a lot about the defensive side, he’s still getting to grips with that, as is Dom (Calvert-Lewin).
“Defending from the front is important for the modern centre-forward. It’s not just, ‘Stand up there and score’, centre-forwards have to defend cutely — not tackles but getting in passing lanes to cut off the pass. He’s got to continue to learn that side as well as scoring goals.”
There is still a sense, both at Everton and in the wider game, that there is a player in Beto provided he can iron out some of his creases. At the moment, he is an agent of chaos, perhaps too unpredictable to be trusted regularly.
He is unconventional and can look ungainly, yet his back-to-back seasons of double figures in Italy and his unique skill set mean Everton have not been willing to cut their losses just yet. When rumours of interest from Italy appeared over summer, they made clear their preference to keep the big striker at Goodison — at least for the time being.
Saturday’s goal should grant him a new lease of life after a challenging start to the season but the next couple of months feel significant.
Injured duo Armando Broja and Youssef Chermiti will return at some stage — the former is close to resuming full training — while Dyche’s faith in Calvert-Lewin has also been unshakable. There could be a point soon when Everton have four options for one lone striking role.
This was an uplifting week for Beto, but Saturday’s intervention will need to become a more regular occurrence if he is to truly make his mark at Goodison.
(Top photo: Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
