Sam Allardyce will finalise a deal to become Everton manager on Wednesday.
The ex-England boss, 63, will become the permanent successor to Ronald Koeman, who was sacked in October with the club 18th in the Premier League.
David Unsworth remains in caretaker charge as the Toffees host West Ham at 20:00 GMT.
Allardyce, who has been out of work since leaving Crystal Palace in May, was pictured at Goodison Park before Wednesday’s match.
He stepped down after just five months in the job – his first since an ill-fated one-game spell as England manager – having led the club to eight wins in 21 games to secure a 14th-place finish in the league.
Everton are now 17th in the table and have won just one of seven games in all competitions under Unsworth, who is the club’s under-23s manager.
Dutchman Koeman guided Everton to seventh place in his first season in charge last term, but was sacked the day after a 5-2 home defeat by Arsenal on 22 October.
The Toffees spent more than £130m on new players in the summer but have struggled without last season’s top scorer Romelu Lukaku, who was sold to Manchester United for £75m in July.
Allardyce facts and figures
Everton will be Allardyce’s seventh Premier League club – that is more than any other manager. Harry Redknapp is next on the list with five.
He has never been relegated from the top flight as a manager and secured promotion to the Premier League with both Bolton and West Ham.
The Englishman has a Premier League win percentage of 33.8%.
What he said back then
When Allardyce left Palace last season, where he enjoyed his highest win percentage in the Premier League, he said he had “no ambitions to take another job”.
He added: “I want to be able to savour life while I am still relatively young, and when I am still relatively healthy enough to do all the things I want to do – like travel, spend more time with my family and grandchildren without the huge pressure that comes with being a football manager.
“I simply want to be able to enjoy all the things you cannot really enjoy with the 24/7 demands of managing any football club, let alone one in the Premier League.”
Analysis – ‘a combination of desperation and necessity’
BBC Sport chief football writer Phil McNulty
Everton’s appointment of Sam Allardyce is the result of a combination of desperation and necessity on the part of major shareholder Farhad Moshiri.
If Allardyce truly was the leader Moshiri says he required he could have appointed him after their first contact in early November – when the 63-year-old withdrew from the process citing the lack of an offer – and before the doomed pursuit of Watford’s Marco Silva.
In the intervening period Everton’s situation has become desperate as caretaker manager David Unsworth has been unable to stop performances and results declining on an alarming scale.
Everton’s 4-1 loss at Southampton made Moshiri, who likes a star in the technical area and even harboured wildly unrealistic hopes of attracting Atletico Madrid’s Diego Simeone, turn back to Allardyce.
It left Allardyce in a powerful negotiating position as Everton went to him for his brand of pragmatic troubleshooting that served Sunderland and Crystal Palace so well.
From Allardyce’s point of view he has been handed arguably the biggest club and transfer fund of his managerial career but will need to make a fast start to quell the undoubted scepticism about his arrival from some elements of Everton’s fan base.
[BBC]
