Four games into the season, my team have not scored a goal.
Not a euphemism. Zero. Tottenham, two points, seventeenth in the table, and one of only two sides in the division yet to trouble a scoreboard.
Which, after a summer spending three hundred million pounds and committing properly to a new manager in De Zerbi, is quite the return. I have had to sit with it.
There is a stat doing the rounds at the moment, put about with some glee by Liverpool supporters, that says Everton are the only club in the ninety two not to have won a trophy or been promoted this entire century. Hold that thought. We will come back to it.
Because let me tell you about last season.
We survived on the final day. That is the polite version. The real version is that we spent most of the spring closer to the trapdoor than anyone at that club has been comfortable with in a generation, and it came down to one afternoon. We beat Everton to stay up. Three points, job done, and the sort of relief that is not really celebration at all because you are just grateful the thing stopped.
Then a summer of rebuilding. Serious money, serious intent, a manager everyone wanted. All the signs were good.
And now four games, no goals, and everyone who fancies a quick swipe at Tottenham having a lovely time of it.
Here is the thing, though. Look at the other column.
Brentford put three past us. Newcastle put two past us. Then Nottingham Forest, nothing. Then Everton on Saturday, nothing.
Two clean sheets in a row. A defence that has stopped looking like a collection of individuals and started looking like a unit. A side that, in patches, is clearly beginning to gel.
None of that shows up in the goals column. The goals column says zero, and zero is the number everybody is talking about.
Which brings me to Coventry, the other side yet to score.
Coventry have played four and scored none, exactly like us. On the one measure everybody is quoting, we are identical. Underneath it we are nothing alike. They have no points to our two, ten conceded to our five, and on Sunday they lost five nil at home to Brighton.
Same number in one column. Completely different situations. Anyone reading only the goals scored would put us in the same boat, and they would be wrong about at least one of us.
And Everton, for all the confidence around Saturday, could not beat us either. We were, by common agreement, there for the taking. A side without a goal all season, at home, under pressure, wobbling. Everybody said it. Everton came, Everton looked at it, and Everton went home with a point.
What has been bothering me, though, is the noise around managers at this point in a season.
Four games. Four. And the phone-ins have already worked out who is finished, which appointment was a mistake, who has lost the dressing room. It has been going on for as long as I have followed the game and it gets faster every year.
Four games is nothing. It is not a sample. It is barely a warm-up. The one thing everyone points to, the points column, is the slowest-moving indicator on the entire pitch, and the things that are genuinely changing are the things nobody has a number for yet.
And I have been thinking about this all week, because we are three weeks into a school year.
Right now, in every school in the country, there is almost nothing meaningful to measure from this school year. No data worth the name. Nothing you could put in front of a governing body and honestly call evidence of anything. The things that will actually determine how this year goes are all happening, and not one of them is countable yet.
Whether the new team is gelling. Whether the routines are holding. Whether the person you appointed in July is finding their feet or quietly drowning. Whether the children who struggled last year have walked back in with something different about them. Whether people are still talking to each other in the staff room by half term.
Those are your clean sheets. Nobody puts them on a dashboard.
And yet the pressure arrives immediately, and from every direction at once.
Parents, entirely reasonably, want to know how their child is settling, and want to know now, three weeks in, when the actual answer is that we are still working it out. Governors have a meeting cycle that does not pause for the fact that it is September, and a paper to receive. Inspection frameworks describe a school as it is on the day somebody walks through the door, with limited interest in whether that day falls in week three or week thirty.
None of that is unreasonable in itself. Every one of those people is doing their job. The problem is that none of it adequately recognises where you are in the year, and the cumulative effect is relentless.
So a headteacher three weeks into a new post, or a new structure, or a new team, finds themselves in exactly the position of a manager four games in. Everything that is genuinely improving is a bit invisible. Everything that is being measured is lagging. And the pressure to do something about it is immediate.
Which is where it gets dangerous, because when the visible measure is not moving, the pull towards doing something visible becomes enormous.
Change the system. Change the personnel. Change the timetable, the marking policy, the behaviour policy, anything at all, so that it looks like you are acting.
Sometimes that is right. Sometimes a thing is genuinely broken and waiting is negligence. But four games in, most of the time, it is panic wearing the costume of decisiveness. And every time a leader does it, they destabilise the very team that was beginning to gel.
What I have learned, slowly and not always willingly, is that the job is to be able to see the clean sheets.
To know the difference between a thing that is not working and a thing that has not landed yet. To hold your nerve when the only available number is the wrong one. And to say it out loud to the people doing the work, because they cannot see the table from where they are standing, and they are reading your face instead.
That last part matters more than anything. A manager who looks like he has lost faith has already lost the dressing room, regardless of what he says in the press conference. Staff in September are watching their head far more closely than their head realises.
We need one goal. One. And I genuinely believe we are away.
As for the stat I asked you to hold on to.
Everton, our final day survivors, the side who could not beat a team that had not scored all season. Decades without a trophy or a promotion. Nothing to celebrate this entire century.
All of which is a long way of saying that whatever September throws at you, it could always be worse.
At least we are not Everton.