Everton's Defeat in Stuttgart Highlights Finishing Woes
Everton’s German tour ended with a 3-1 defeat to Stuttgart that said far more about their finishing than the scoreline on the board.
On a hot afternoon at the MHPArena, the Premier League side carved out enough chances to win two games. They left with a single Beto penalty and a nagging sense of déjà vu about a problem that refuses to go away.
Wasteful Everton punished
Jarrad Branthwaite, wearing the armband, led Everton out for their second and final match of the tour. Stuttgart immediately set the tone, moving the ball crisply and pinning the visitors back, and only a sharp intervention from Branthwaite cut out an early, dangerous break.
That should have settled Everton. It didn’t.
Beto muscled his way into the box on a rare early foray, only to miscontrol at the crucial moment. Hayden Hackney, starting in midfield, then tried to force a pass that was never really on, and Stuttgart sprang forward again. For the opening 10 minutes, Everton chased shadows.
Then the game opened up. Carlos Alcaraz was gifted possession by the home goalkeeper but Beto dragged his shot horribly wide. Hackney arrived on the edge of the area after a neat passing move and sliced his effort just past the angle of post and bar. The chances were there; the finish was not.
Stuttgart’s threat, though, never went away. From the first whistle they carried a menace Everton never quite matched, and the breakthrough felt inevitable. It came when Nartey, untracked, climbed onto a loose ball and lashed it into the roof of the net over Mark Travers. The pressure finally told, and Everton were behind.
To make matters worse, Tim Iroegbunam’s afternoon ended early, Michael Keane coming on after just 18 minutes to break up the new O’Brien–Branthwaite partnership at centre-back.
Everton responded with territory and volume of chances rather than composure. Lewis Dobbin Dibling, initially hesitant and short of conviction, began to find pockets of space but delayed one cross, was too tame with another, and saw a better ball into the area wasted when Alcaraz’s shot was blocked.
The move of the half should have levelled it. Travers launched long, Beto rose superbly to flick on, and Röhl met the header with a perfect cross back into the six-yard box. Beto, unmarked, swung at fresh air with the goal at his mercy. An astonishing miss, and the kind that drains belief from a team and bench alike.
Dibling then forced a smart low save at the near post and delivered a dangerous corner that Beto could only head over when the slightest glance was needed. Stuttgart, by contrast, were ruthless in their spells of pressure. Mittelstädt hammered over from distance, then a thumping header from a corner looked destined for the top corner until Travers flung himself across to claw it away. Another low drive was kept out by his outstretched foot.
Everton still had their moments on the break – Alcaraz driving them forward, Röhl raiding from right-back, Armstrong timing a key tackle at the other end – but Beto repeatedly chose the wrong option, checked his run, or found a defender instead of the net. At half-time, the game remained lively, open, and somehow still 1-0.
It should not have been.
Travers stands tall, but Stuttgart seize control
Alcaraz restarted the second half with Everton unchanged, but Stuttgart came out with the sharper edge. Travers stayed busy, making a series of sharp stops, including one from his own teammate when Alcaraz’s defensive header almost crept inside the post from a corner.
Dibling tried to drag Everton up the pitch, driving at his marker and linking with Röhl, yet too often the final ball arrived a beat late or a yard off. A neat move saw Dibling slide Röhl in down the right, only for the cross to fizzle out. Another surge from the winger won a free-kick, which Everton promptly played backwards.
Stuttgart rattled the post with Travers beaten, a warning that the Bundesliga side were still operating at a different level of precision in the final third. At the other end, Vitalii Mykolenko squandered a promising position with a dreadful cross, and when Keane sent a fine long ball into Beto’s path, the striker again undid his own work by laying it straight to a defender.
On the hour, Stuttgart rolled through a raft of changes. Everton, by contrast, tweaked more gradually: Röhl, Dibling and Alcaraz made way for Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Iliman Ndiaye and George, with Barry replacing Beto a little later. The rhythm of the game inevitably fractured.
Before that, though, Everton finally got a break. A slick exchange on the edge of the box sent Beto racing through, he hurdled the onrushing goalkeeper and tumbled under minimal contact. The penalty award was generous, but Beto didn’t argue, stepping up to drill home from the spot on 72 minutes and drag Everton level.
It felt like a lifeline. It didn’t become a turning point.
Stuttgart responded with another spell of slick, incisive passing. Hackney had to hack clear inside his own area, and a clever move ended with a header brushing the top of substitute goalkeeper King’s crossbar. King then made a routine stop from a wide angle as the game drifted into the untidy territory of late pre-season.
Everton’s defending slipped with it. A poor clearance from Keane came straight back, Stuttgart pounced on the loose shape in front of King, and the third goal was swept in with embarrassing ease. The details of the finish mattered less than the pattern: one side clinical when the moment arrived, the other still searching for a cutting edge.
Late scrambles, familiar questions
The closing stages were chaotic. Branthwaite briefly caused concern when he clutched at his leg – thigh, knee, or lower, it was hard to tell – but he waved away the physios and carried on. Patterson, Aznou, King and Foster all came on as Sean Dyche’s staff used the final minutes to share out minutes and test combinations.
Everton still might have left with a more respectable scoreline. A late corner saw Keane’s header clawed away on the line, Ndiaye’s follow-up blocked twice in quick succession, with one effort looking perilously close to crossing before being hacked clear. Deep into an oddly long 10 minutes of added time, Dewsbury-Hall rose to meet another corner and watched his header bounce just wide.
The whistle cut through the noise and ended a game that, as a workout, ticked plenty of boxes: intensity, adversity, and long spells of attacking play. As a snapshot of Everton’s recurring issues, it was brutally honest.
They can build moves. They can press, disrupt, and create. Travers and King showed there is depth in goal. But in both boxes, the margins that decide Premier League seasons were on stark display in Germany.
Everton left Stuttgart with sore legs, plenty of footage to analyse, and the same glaring question hanging over them: who is going to put their chances away when it really matters?
