Mate, awesome post. Any chance you can summarise it to a little paragraph? Sorry had a few drinks after the results todayHere’s another article by Jonathan Northcroft that appeared in the Times over the weekend. There’s been 3 articles by Samuel,Northcroft and Owen Slot in 48 hours.
Everyone knows the Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe story. They were the young wingers giving legs to Manchester United’s 1991-92 title challenge when Sir Alex Ferguson got wind of a party at Sharpe’s house. He went round and scorched them with the hairdryer treatment so badly that Giggs was trembling, and Sharpe felt sick to his stomach. Three days later, Sharpe found himself out of the squad completely — but Giggs started against Liverpool at Anfield.
Giggs went on to play almost 900 further games for Ferguson but Sharpe, although he stayed at Old Trafford for a few more years, became increasingly peripheral. His dad felt Ferguson “was never again the same towards me”.
There is a long history, in football, where if not the littler guy then the lesser guy, the more expendable guy, gets punished in ways that more “valuable” participants do not. We can all picture a tackle from a star player that wasn’t sanctioned as severely as the similar challenge from an ordinary one; the big manager who gets away with behaviour to referees that the coach of an unglamorous team would not.
Now that the dust has settled, it is hard to see the ten-point penalty imposed on Everton through any other lens. For incompetence and daft attempts to cover it up — but not for cheating, or deliberate deception — the club has been hit with a punishment way beyond precedent. Nobody in the game (and this includes in private conversations with executives of rival clubs) is saying “only ten points? I’d have expected more”.
As the football finance expert Kieron O’Connor wrote on his Swiss Ramble blog at the end of a forensic post on the findings of the independent commission that delivered the verdict: “Everton’s punishment certainly looks steep when compared to the paltry £3.7 million fine paid by each of the six Premier League clubs involved in the attempted European Super League breakaway, which was a far greater threat to football’s integrity.”
Those clubs? Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur. The three clubs in history hit by Premier League points deductions? Everton, Middlesbrough, Portsmouth. Notice a pattern?
Last week this column tried to provide the narrative of how Everton got into trouble. Though a tipping point was interest on stadium loans it is made repeatedly clear in the commission findings that the big issue was overspending on players, and the Premier League’s views towards Everton hardened in light of behaviour outside of the accounting period they were punished for; continued spending and poor arguments made in mitigation by now departed directors.
Fans protest outside the Premier League headquarters.
But last week this column didn’t — and should have — provide a critique of the punishment itself, and so to do it now: ten points? As the mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, said, Portsmouth were hit with only a nine-point deduction in 2010 for serious mismanagement that ultimately propelled them towards administration. And you go back to the Super League. As well as the small fine imposed on the “big six” who tried to set up a rival competition which, if successful, may have devoured the Premier League, a rule was made that if clubs ever tried anything similar again, they would be hit with a 30-point fine.
So: Everton exceeding their profit and sustainability rules (PSR) limit by £19.5 million — allegedly five months’ pay for Erling Haaland — is deemed a third of the way to being as serious as possibly destroying the league. Among fans of other clubs there is sympathy for the outrage Evertonians feel, the Football Supporters’ Association branding the judgment “yet another undeniable example of the need for an independent regulator”.
Even the commission seems to have been more bemused than outraged by Everton’s attempts at accounting. Its judgment is full of wry passages like: “Everton’s understandable desire to improve its on-pitch performance [to replace the non-existent midfield, as Mr Moshiri put it in evidence] led it to take chances with its PSR position.”
Everton are the child who repeatedly blew its school lunch money on fizzy drinks, but not the prefects who plotted to burn down the gym hall. Remember, the PSR rules are there for two reasons — to stop clubs deliberately gaming the system, and to protect clubs from going bust.
After the failed Super League coup, a rule was made that if clubs ever tried anything similar again, they would be hit with a 30-point fine
ROB PINNEY/GETTY IMAGES
The commission exonerated Everton on the first count and, given the incredible £417 million losses Everton accumulated from 2018-22 were covered by the even more incredible sum (£750 million) Farhad Moshiri has invested since buying the club in 2016, the second is not an issue either.
There has to be some punishment, and it is right this should be in the form of deducted points for overspending on players.
To let Everton off would not be fair on a club such as Leicester City who, by rigidly sticking to PSR, were forced to sell talent after talent and went from title winners to the Championship. But two or three points and a warning would have surely sufficed.
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The question of proportionality may form a significant plank of Everton’s appeal against the sanction. They might also bring out the fact that the Premier League has no formalised sanction policy and it was only in August 2023 that the league proposed a tariff of six points for any breach followed by one point for every £5 million by which a club exceeds its PSR threshold.
Everton’s punishment is exactly in line with this, but was it fair to only announce the potential penalty the club faced just before the commission sat in October?
They might also note the hardline policy contrasted with the previous approach of the Premier League, which was to work with Everton to help them balance their books, even striking a deal along those lines in August 2021.
The elephant in the room is the Premier League’s 115 charges against Manchester City for alleged breaches of financial rules. These date back to 2009 but because City continue mounting legal challenges, the case may not go before a commission for another two or three years.
Whataboutery is invidious but in this instance it seems reasonable for Evertonians to contrast their situation with that of the world’s wealthiest club. They will make their statement at a febrile Goodison Park today.
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Iana
Player Valuation: £1.5m
Rollo Tomassi
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The same Leicester that got fined 3 million for breaking FFP rules before they got promoted.Here’s another article by Jonathan Northcroft that appeared in the Times over the weekend. There’s been 3 articles by Samuel,Northcroft and Owen Slot in 48 hours.
Everyone knows the Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe story. They were the young wingers giving legs to Manchester United’s 1991-92 title challenge when Sir Alex Ferguson got wind of a party at Sharpe’s house. He went round and scorched them with the hairdryer treatment so badly that Giggs was trembling, and Sharpe felt sick to his stomach. Three days later, Sharpe found himself out of the squad completely — but Giggs started against Liverpool at Anfield.
Giggs went on to play almost 900 further games for Ferguson but Sharpe, although he stayed at Old Trafford for a few more years, became increasingly peripheral. His dad felt Ferguson “was never again the same towards me”.
There is a long history, in football, where if not the littler guy then the lesser guy, the more expendable guy, gets punished in ways that more “valuable” participants do not. We can all picture a tackle from a star player that wasn’t sanctioned as severely as the similar challenge from an ordinary one; the big manager who gets away with behaviour to referees that the coach of an unglamorous team would not.
Now that the dust has settled, it is hard to see the ten-point penalty imposed on Everton through any other lens. For incompetence and daft attempts to cover it up — but not for cheating, or deliberate deception — the club has been hit with a punishment way beyond precedent. Nobody in the game (and this includes in private conversations with executives of rival clubs) is saying “only ten points? I’d have expected more”.
As the football finance expert Kieron O’Connor wrote on his Swiss Ramble blog at the end of a forensic post on the findings of the independent commission that delivered the verdict: “Everton’s punishment certainly looks steep when compared to the paltry £3.7 million fine paid by each of the six Premier League clubs involved in the attempted European Super League breakaway, which was a far greater threat to football’s integrity.”
Those clubs? Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur. The three clubs in history hit by Premier League points deductions? Everton, Middlesbrough, Portsmouth. Notice a pattern?
Last week this column tried to provide the narrative of how Everton got into trouble. Though a tipping point was interest on stadium loans it is made repeatedly clear in the commission findings that the big issue was overspending on players, and the Premier League’s views towards Everton hardened in light of behaviour outside of the accounting period they were punished for; continued spending and poor arguments made in mitigation by now departed directors.
Fans protest outside the Premier League headquarters.
But last week this column didn’t — and should have — provide a critique of the punishment itself, and so to do it now: ten points? As the mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, said, Portsmouth were hit with only a nine-point deduction in 2010 for serious mismanagement that ultimately propelled them towards administration. And you go back to the Super League. As well as the small fine imposed on the “big six” who tried to set up a rival competition which, if successful, may have devoured the Premier League, a rule was made that if clubs ever tried anything similar again, they would be hit with a 30-point fine.
So: Everton exceeding their profit and sustainability rules (PSR) limit by £19.5 million — allegedly five months’ pay for Erling Haaland — is deemed a third of the way to being as serious as possibly destroying the league. Among fans of other clubs there is sympathy for the outrage Evertonians feel, the Football Supporters’ Association branding the judgment “yet another undeniable example of the need for an independent regulator”.
Even the commission seems to have been more bemused than outraged by Everton’s attempts at accounting. Its judgment is full of wry passages like: “Everton’s understandable desire to improve its on-pitch performance [to replace the non-existent midfield, as Mr Moshiri put it in evidence] led it to take chances with its PSR position.”
Everton are the child who repeatedly blew its school lunch money on fizzy drinks, but not the prefects who plotted to burn down the gym hall. Remember, the PSR rules are there for two reasons — to stop clubs deliberately gaming the system, and to protect clubs from going bust.
After the failed Super League coup, a rule was made that if clubs ever tried anything similar again, they would be hit with a 30-point fine
ROB PINNEY/GETTY IMAGES
The commission exonerated Everton on the first count and, given the incredible £417 million losses Everton accumulated from 2018-22 were covered by the even more incredible sum (£750 million) Farhad Moshiri has invested since buying the club in 2016, the second is not an issue either.
There has to be some punishment, and it is right this should be in the form of deducted points for overspending on players.
To let Everton off would not be fair on a club such as Leicester City who, by rigidly sticking to PSR, were forced to sell talent after talent and went from title winners to the Championship. But two or three points and a warning would have surely sufficed.
ADVERTISEMENT
The question of proportionality may form a significant plank of Everton’s appeal against the sanction. They might also bring out the fact that the Premier League has no formalised sanction policy and it was only in August 2023 that the league proposed a tariff of six points for any breach followed by one point for every £5 million by which a club exceeds its PSR threshold.
Everton’s punishment is exactly in line with this, but was it fair to only announce the potential penalty the club faced just before the commission sat in October?
They might also note the hardline policy contrasted with the previous approach of the Premier League, which was to work with Everton to help them balance their books, even striking a deal along those lines in August 2021.
The elephant in the room is the Premier League’s 115 charges against Manchester City for alleged breaches of financial rules. These date back to 2009 but because City continue mounting legal challenges, the case may not go before a commission for another two or three years.
Whataboutery is invidious but in this instance it seems reasonable for Evertonians to contrast their situation with that of the world’s wealthiest club. They will make their statement at a febrile Goodison Park today.
Well in PL, in trying to preserve the scab six - you're going to destroy your product, the irony would be delicious is I didn't care for Everton.
UEFA doing exactly the same - I haven't seen a CL game for over five years
UEFA doing exactly the same - I haven't seen a CL game for over five years
Howards tipple
Player Valuation: £8m
It's a fantastic article, the question is..apart from out demonstration, which no doubt will be played down..how do we get this talked about and discussed on major networks like Sky and the BBC and how do we get former players (not necessarily Evertonians) who influence decisions to understand and raise it...It’s a long one!
Did you watch it, the big match? Obviously, I did, but then it’s my job. You, not so much. Nobody has to devote hours of their day to the Premier League any more, now we know it’s bent. Check back in five, maybe ten, years’ time and find out what happened. Possibly. Depends on the strength of the lawyers and accountants. They’re the real heroes now. Not those sweaty footballers.
Most of them shouldn’t be here anyway. The billionaire owners can’t afford them, apparently. And they can’t add up. It’s only the firm in the back office making sense of the balance sheet that gets any deals over the line at all. That should be the new transfer market. If Todd Boehly pays £105 million for Enzo Fernández, how much will he bid for a top accountant? Not to mention a King’s Counsel.
It’s Richard Masters’s great gift to the nation. He’s given us the weekend back. Now that football’s bent, no need to tune in, or go, at all. You can crack on with those jobs that need doing around the house.
Who won? Who cares? The result is only a basis for negotiation. Like the league table. It’s an opening gambit. We’ll find out what it really looks like a decade on, once all the fines have been paid, the deductions made and the prizes reallocated. Maybe Sheffield United are this season’s champions. They are going to be so excited when they find out, providing they are not back in League One by then.
On April 18, 2017, Sport Recife won the Brazilian championship. The 1987 Brazilian championship, to be precise but no doubt is was well worth the 30-year wait for the case to progress through the courts. Maybe that is Masters’s vision, too. Unsatisfied with being handed control of the most successful domestic club competition in the world, this is the model the chief executive and new chairwoman Alison Brittain prefer. Such larks.
In 2013, the four-times Brazilian national champions Fluminense were relegated and then swiftly reinstated when the much smaller Portuguesa — average attendance less than 5,000, the lowest in the Campeonato — were found guilty of fielding a suspended player and docked four points. Everton may recognise the handwriting.
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This was considered a harsh punishment because it was accepted there was a miscommunication from the league, and the club had no way of knowing of the player ban. But, conveniently, four points was precisely the number required to put them below Fluminense — three, and they would have survived on goal difference. The next season, Portuguesa attempted to walk off midway through a Série B game with Joinville, when a court official arrived with a ruling that they were actually a Série A club. Seriously, we’ve got so much to look forward to.
It’s some leap, from best to bent, but the Premier League has made it. So we have Everton deducted ten points, making Manchester City and Chelsea appear under threat of, what, 50, 100, 1,000? We thought we had to wait for the government regulator to turn up and kill the competition, but the league have done it all by themselves. They have made a blue-riband brand that was the envy of Europe, and brought us Chelsea 4 Manchester City 4 on November 12, look worthless five days later. Nothing we see now is to be believed, not the title race, not the tussle for European competition, not relegation.
Everton were deducted ten points for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules
PETER POWELL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Real Madrid, Barcelona and the clubs that wanted to form the Super League must be howling. They have been trying to denigrate the Premier League for years, without success and now this. Well done, Señor Masters. Our mission, accomplished.
But Everton broke the rules. Well, yes they did, but no they didn’t. They broke the Premier League’s grandly named profit and sustainability regulations and that carries a punishment. We all understand this, even if we don’t agree. Yet the profit and sustainability rules are a false construct, shaped by the richest and most powerful so they stay at the top and keep the upstarts down. They are protectionist, anti-competition and serve only an established elite. They are the real crime in football. So, yes, Everton fell foul of them. But ten points? Really?
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So a short digression. I am sometimes asked why I don’t make more fuss about Manchester City’s 115 charges, or those now expected at Chelsea. Bear with me. If you know somebody in the creative arts, particularly the music industry, you may have talked to them about drug use. And they may have said they don’t use drugs. But that probably doesn’t include marijuana. Drugs means the serious stuff. Dope is different. They’ll say they don’t use drugs sitting across a table with an overflowing ashtray and an empty packet of Rizlas. They’ll say they don’t use drugs while rolling a joint in front of you and listening to Light Up Your Spliff by the Bush Chemists.
And that’s how I feel about FFP. I know it’s illegal to contravene those rules but, personally, I don’t see it as a major crime and never have. Rules that limit owner investment are wrong and I was writing that the previous time I was employed by Times newspapers. I was gone 14 years.
Unless the owner is sending his club skint, of course. I’d have teams or lawyers and accountants on standby ready to march on Reading this morning, and take the club out of the hands of Dai Yongge. The moment an owner can’t pay the wages, or HMRC or other contractors, even for a matter of weeks, he would forfeit the right to run the business.
City may be in for a more severe punishment given that they are facing 115 financial charges
MICHAEL REGAN/GETTY IMAGES
If Everton were in jeopardy under Farhad Moshiri, that would be different. Seize the club, put it under administrative control, take whatever action is needed to make it secure. If that means selling players or making do without new arrivals, so be it. And maybe Everton would be relegated as a result of these measures, but that would be achieved on the field. Not by a committee of three behind closed doors and with what appear to be clear instructions from the Premier League.
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There should be plenty of rules governing club ownership, but none governing the inward investment of owners. It is what just about every fan wants. Newcastle United fans did not praise Mike Ashley for running a tight ship, even though that was in part what made them a good investment for Saudi Arabia. They wanted more of what Everton attempted: ambition, expansion. Moshiri’s mistake was to invest, badly. He bought unwisely, or without strategy. Yet what he tried to do, quite simply, was to break into the elite or, at the very least, keep up. On Boxing Day, 2020, Everton were second in the league. At that time, the plan was working.
Equally, throughout that period and before, Leicester City were fighting to adhere to profit and sustainability rules by selling players. Wesley Fofana, Ben Chilwell, Harry Maguire, Riyad Mahrez, Danny Drinkwater, N’Golo Kanté — the end result being relegation last year. No wonder they feel aggrieved at Everton’s carelessness. How is that fair? It isn’t. But it’s not unfair because of Everton. It is unfair because Leicester were made to comply with arbitrary financial controls thwarting their progress.
Leicester are owned by wealthy people. They shouldn’t have to sell players if they don’t want to. They have the money to keep the club going with investment, to aim high, to have some fun. What is stopping them? Rules that benefit the very clubs that covet their players and want to keep the ambitious at bay. Rules that benefit Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City. Arsenal, too, if they could have got their mitts on a peak Jamie Vardy. And smaller clubs have always sold to wealthier rivals.
Yet there is a difference between making that choice and having to do so — even after winning the title — because the rules demand it. An owner should not land the club with unsustainable debt, but inward investment is not an offence. Moshiri bought players. It didn’t work. He shoulders the burden of that, financially and reputationally. The harm to rivals is artificially created.
There are three ways to grow a football business. The first is to be successful, but that is extraordinarily difficult in such a competitive climate and, as Leicester found, even when the miracle happens, financial regulations make it hard to sustain.
Then there is organic growth, much celebrated by fans and executives of clubs that achieved it in a time of no financial restraints at all. These days, it is a myth. There was no greater foundation for organic growth than the youth policy and recruitment at Southampton. They bought well, produced well, developed well and had Mauricio Pochettino as their manager. And everyone saw it.
Then in came Arsenal (Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Calum Chambers), Liverpool (Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Rickie Lambert, Nathaniel Clyne, Sadio Mané, Virgil van Dijk), United (Luke Shaw, Morgan Schneiderlin), Tottenham Hotspur (Pochettino, Victor Wanyama, Pierre-Emile Hojberg). So Southampton could not grow organically, because the major clubs would not let them, and now they are in the Championship, with Leicester. It may happen to Brighton & Hove Albion or Brentford too one day soon. It only needs a sale too many, or a sale that coincides with a spate of injuries, a few moneyball-type signings replacing key players that don’t work as planned.
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Nothing grows organically if a vandal keeps entering the garden, pulling young plants out by the root. This leaves one form of growth. Inward investment. So that’s what the richest clubs strive to regulate out of existence: the only way it is now possible to climb the ladder. Checkmate.
And the Premier League helps them. Everton were found guilty by an independent commission, yet it now transpires Masters got exactly the punishment the League demanded to within 0.1 of a point. It was initially reported that the Premier League had asked its independent commission for a 12-point deduction, but this is wrong. We now know Masters asked for six points, plus one point for every £5 million breach of the profit and sustainability rules. Everton were in breach by £19.5 million. So had Masters got his way, Everton would have been deducted 9.9 points.
But, we are told, this independent commission did not want a fixed punishment schedule and instead decided to enforce a sanction on the evidence submitted. They went with ten instead. Masters must have been chewing the furniture in rage. Imagine wanting 9.9 and getting ten.
Still, that’s the sort of random judgment you get with independent minds. Coming soon, a ruling on how much compensation Leeds United, and other relegated clubs, might receive from Everton. This will be decided by a panel headed by David Phillips KC, who also headed the commission that docked the ten points, and the commission that decided relegated clubs had a compensation claim against Everton, and represented Leeds when they were deducted 15 points by the EFL in 2007 for breaking insolvency rules. Independence abounds, as you can see.
That is the next stage, turning back time, as they do in Brazil. So Leeds were not relegated because they lost eight and drew two of their last 11 Premier League games, but because Everton overspent by £19.5 million. And Burnley did not drop in 2021-22 because they won a single Premier League game — ONE — between the start of the season and February 19, but because numbers on Everton’s balance sheet did not add up. Where does this stop? Jermain Defoe’s transfer from Tottenham to Portsmouth in 2008 is now being reinvestigated over the alleged use of an illegal agent.
That carried a points deduction when Luton Town did it but, at the time, the FA did not follow through on Defoe. In 2009-10, when the investigation was taking place, Tottenham finished three points above Manchester City to qualify for the Champions League. Can it now be argued that had Tottenham been deducted points, then City would have been in the Champions League a year earlier, their balance sheet might have looked different — Tottenham got to the quarter-finals — and they might not be facing so many charges? How far do we want to go back? By all accounts, Arsenal’s entry into the top division in 1919 was a bit of a rum do. Should we look at that?
The Lord Griffiths ruling that Sheffield United were not responsible for their league position in 2006-07 was always going to return to haunt football and here it is. If further precedent is established, more than ever football will become the sport of the middle class — middle-class lawyers and accountants. The workers will do the menial jobs, the running around, shooting, dribbling, defending, the stuff that no longer matters. Meanwhile, the Premier League rolls on, as if nothing has changed, as if we all still believe in it, and think it fair and sustainable.
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What we are being asked to concede is that Chelsea buying Eden Hazard was a bad thing, that Everton trying to compete with Liverpool was wrong for the game, that Manchester City’s move from punchline to headline bringing with it some of the greatest football and footballers we have seen, plus the greatest manager, was without merit. The very thing that made the Premier League the best is being redrawn as its biggest failing.
And there will be new and different rules next season because Uefa’s financial regulations are changing. So keep up at the back, the rules shifted on Everton and now look where they are. Value the suits, those doing the hard yards on paper, who understand. They will be the heroes.
All big companies have identifiable branding, much like football kits. Wilberforce Chambers, where Phillips works, appear to favour a dark green and white. Blackstone Chambers, home of Lord David Pannick, representing Manchester City, are navy blue with flicks of white, and pink. As far as accountants go, PWC are black, red and orange; Deloitte black, white and green. You think this is a joke? There has already been a banner held up at the Eithad Stadium, in support of Lord Pannick, by name. These are your new colours, people. This is where the Premier League has brought us. The score no longer matters, the verdict does.
Leylo
Player Valuation: £35m
BrilliantIt’s a long one!
Did you watch it, the big match? Obviously, I did, but then it’s my job. You, not so much. Nobody has to devote hours of their day to the Premier League any more, now we know it’s bent. Check back in five, maybe ten, years’ time and find out what happened. Possibly. Depends on the strength of the lawyers and accountants. They’re the real heroes now. Not those sweaty footballers.
Most of them shouldn’t be here anyway. The billionaire owners can’t afford them, apparently. And they can’t add up. It’s only the firm in the back office making sense of the balance sheet that gets any deals over the line at all. That should be the new transfer market. If Todd Boehly pays £105 million for Enzo Fernández, how much will he bid for a top accountant? Not to mention a King’s Counsel.
It’s Richard Masters’s great gift to the nation. He’s given us the weekend back. Now that football’s bent, no need to tune in, or go, at all. You can crack on with those jobs that need doing around the house.
Who won? Who cares? The result is only a basis for negotiation. Like the league table. It’s an opening gambit. We’ll find out what it really looks like a decade on, once all the fines have been paid, the deductions made and the prizes reallocated. Maybe Sheffield United are this season’s champions. They are going to be so excited when they find out, providing they are not back in League One by then.
On April 18, 2017, Sport Recife won the Brazilian championship. The 1987 Brazilian championship, to be precise but no doubt is was well worth the 30-year wait for the case to progress through the courts. Maybe that is Masters’s vision, too. Unsatisfied with being handed control of the most successful domestic club competition in the world, this is the model the chief executive and new chairwoman Alison Brittain prefer. Such larks.
In 2013, the four-times Brazilian national champions Fluminense were relegated and then swiftly reinstated when the much smaller Portuguesa — average attendance less than 5,000, the lowest in the Campeonato — were found guilty of fielding a suspended player and docked four points. Everton may recognise the handwriting.
ADVERTISEMENT
This was considered a harsh punishment because it was accepted there was a miscommunication from the league, and the club had no way of knowing of the player ban. But, conveniently, four points was precisely the number required to put them below Fluminense — three, and they would have survived on goal difference. The next season, Portuguesa attempted to walk off midway through a Série B game with Joinville, when a court official arrived with a ruling that they were actually a Série A club. Seriously, we’ve got so much to look forward to.
It’s some leap, from best to bent, but the Premier League has made it. So we have Everton deducted ten points, making Manchester City and Chelsea appear under threat of, what, 50, 100, 1,000? We thought we had to wait for the government regulator to turn up and kill the competition, but the league have done it all by themselves. They have made a blue-riband brand that was the envy of Europe, and brought us Chelsea 4 Manchester City 4 on November 12, look worthless five days later. Nothing we see now is to be believed, not the title race, not the tussle for European competition, not relegation.
Everton were deducted ten points for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules
PETER POWELL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Real Madrid, Barcelona and the clubs that wanted to form the Super League must be howling. They have been trying to denigrate the Premier League for years, without success and now this. Well done, Señor Masters. Our mission, accomplished.
But Everton broke the rules. Well, yes they did, but no they didn’t. They broke the Premier League’s grandly named profit and sustainability regulations and that carries a punishment. We all understand this, even if we don’t agree. Yet the profit and sustainability rules are a false construct, shaped by the richest and most powerful so they stay at the top and keep the upstarts down. They are protectionist, anti-competition and serve only an established elite. They are the real crime in football. So, yes, Everton fell foul of them. But ten points? Really?
SPONSORED
So a short digression. I am sometimes asked why I don’t make more fuss about Manchester City’s 115 charges, or those now expected at Chelsea. Bear with me. If you know somebody in the creative arts, particularly the music industry, you may have talked to them about drug use. And they may have said they don’t use drugs. But that probably doesn’t include marijuana. Drugs means the serious stuff. Dope is different. They’ll say they don’t use drugs sitting across a table with an overflowing ashtray and an empty packet of Rizlas. They’ll say they don’t use drugs while rolling a joint in front of you and listening to Light Up Your Spliff by the Bush Chemists.
And that’s how I feel about FFP. I know it’s illegal to contravene those rules but, personally, I don’t see it as a major crime and never have. Rules that limit owner investment are wrong and I was writing that the previous time I was employed by Times newspapers. I was gone 14 years.
Unless the owner is sending his club skint, of course. I’d have teams or lawyers and accountants on standby ready to march on Reading this morning, and take the club out of the hands of Dai Yongge. The moment an owner can’t pay the wages, or HMRC or other contractors, even for a matter of weeks, he would forfeit the right to run the business.
City may be in for a more severe punishment given that they are facing 115 financial charges
MICHAEL REGAN/GETTY IMAGES
If Everton were in jeopardy under Farhad Moshiri, that would be different. Seize the club, put it under administrative control, take whatever action is needed to make it secure. If that means selling players or making do without new arrivals, so be it. And maybe Everton would be relegated as a result of these measures, but that would be achieved on the field. Not by a committee of three behind closed doors and with what appear to be clear instructions from the Premier League.
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There should be plenty of rules governing club ownership, but none governing the inward investment of owners. It is what just about every fan wants. Newcastle United fans did not praise Mike Ashley for running a tight ship, even though that was in part what made them a good investment for Saudi Arabia. They wanted more of what Everton attempted: ambition, expansion. Moshiri’s mistake was to invest, badly. He bought unwisely, or without strategy. Yet what he tried to do, quite simply, was to break into the elite or, at the very least, keep up. On Boxing Day, 2020, Everton were second in the league. At that time, the plan was working.
Equally, throughout that period and before, Leicester City were fighting to adhere to profit and sustainability rules by selling players. Wesley Fofana, Ben Chilwell, Harry Maguire, Riyad Mahrez, Danny Drinkwater, N’Golo Kanté — the end result being relegation last year. No wonder they feel aggrieved at Everton’s carelessness. How is that fair? It isn’t. But it’s not unfair because of Everton. It is unfair because Leicester were made to comply with arbitrary financial controls thwarting their progress.
Leicester are owned by wealthy people. They shouldn’t have to sell players if they don’t want to. They have the money to keep the club going with investment, to aim high, to have some fun. What is stopping them? Rules that benefit the very clubs that covet their players and want to keep the ambitious at bay. Rules that benefit Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City. Arsenal, too, if they could have got their mitts on a peak Jamie Vardy. And smaller clubs have always sold to wealthier rivals.
Yet there is a difference between making that choice and having to do so — even after winning the title — because the rules demand it. An owner should not land the club with unsustainable debt, but inward investment is not an offence. Moshiri bought players. It didn’t work. He shoulders the burden of that, financially and reputationally. The harm to rivals is artificially created.
There are three ways to grow a football business. The first is to be successful, but that is extraordinarily difficult in such a competitive climate and, as Leicester found, even when the miracle happens, financial regulations make it hard to sustain.
Then there is organic growth, much celebrated by fans and executives of clubs that achieved it in a time of no financial restraints at all. These days, it is a myth. There was no greater foundation for organic growth than the youth policy and recruitment at Southampton. They bought well, produced well, developed well and had Mauricio Pochettino as their manager. And everyone saw it.
Then in came Arsenal (Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Calum Chambers), Liverpool (Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren, Rickie Lambert, Nathaniel Clyne, Sadio Mané, Virgil van Dijk), United (Luke Shaw, Morgan Schneiderlin), Tottenham Hotspur (Pochettino, Victor Wanyama, Pierre-Emile Hojberg). So Southampton could not grow organically, because the major clubs would not let them, and now they are in the Championship, with Leicester. It may happen to Brighton & Hove Albion or Brentford too one day soon. It only needs a sale too many, or a sale that coincides with a spate of injuries, a few moneyball-type signings replacing key players that don’t work as planned.
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Nothing grows organically if a vandal keeps entering the garden, pulling young plants out by the root. This leaves one form of growth. Inward investment. So that’s what the richest clubs strive to regulate out of existence: the only way it is now possible to climb the ladder. Checkmate.
And the Premier League helps them. Everton were found guilty by an independent commission, yet it now transpires Masters got exactly the punishment the League demanded to within 0.1 of a point. It was initially reported that the Premier League had asked its independent commission for a 12-point deduction, but this is wrong. We now know Masters asked for six points, plus one point for every £5 million breach of the profit and sustainability rules. Everton were in breach by £19.5 million. So had Masters got his way, Everton would have been deducted 9.9 points.
But, we are told, this independent commission did not want a fixed punishment schedule and instead decided to enforce a sanction on the evidence submitted. They went with ten instead. Masters must have been chewing the furniture in rage. Imagine wanting 9.9 and getting ten.
Still, that’s the sort of random judgment you get with independent minds. Coming soon, a ruling on how much compensation Leeds United, and other relegated clubs, might receive from Everton. This will be decided by a panel headed by David Phillips KC, who also headed the commission that docked the ten points, and the commission that decided relegated clubs had a compensation claim against Everton, and represented Leeds when they were deducted 15 points by the EFL in 2007 for breaking insolvency rules. Independence abounds, as you can see.
That is the next stage, turning back time, as they do in Brazil. So Leeds were not relegated because they lost eight and drew two of their last 11 Premier League games, but because Everton overspent by £19.5 million. And Burnley did not drop in 2021-22 because they won a single Premier League game — ONE — between the start of the season and February 19, but because numbers on Everton’s balance sheet did not add up. Where does this stop? Jermain Defoe’s transfer from Tottenham to Portsmouth in 2008 is now being reinvestigated over the alleged use of an illegal agent.
That carried a points deduction when Luton Town did it but, at the time, the FA did not follow through on Defoe. In 2009-10, when the investigation was taking place, Tottenham finished three points above Manchester City to qualify for the Champions League. Can it now be argued that had Tottenham been deducted points, then City would have been in the Champions League a year earlier, their balance sheet might have looked different — Tottenham got to the quarter-finals — and they might not be facing so many charges? How far do we want to go back? By all accounts, Arsenal’s entry into the top division in 1919 was a bit of a rum do. Should we look at that?
The Lord Griffiths ruling that Sheffield United were not responsible for their league position in 2006-07 was always going to return to haunt football and here it is. If further precedent is established, more than ever football will become the sport of the middle class — middle-class lawyers and accountants. The workers will do the menial jobs, the running around, shooting, dribbling, defending, the stuff that no longer matters. Meanwhile, the Premier League rolls on, as if nothing has changed, as if we all still believe in it, and think it fair and sustainable.
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What we are being asked to concede is that Chelsea buying Eden Hazard was a bad thing, that Everton trying to compete with Liverpool was wrong for the game, that Manchester City’s move from punchline to headline bringing with it some of the greatest football and footballers we have seen, plus the greatest manager, was without merit. The very thing that made the Premier League the best is being redrawn as its biggest failing.
And there will be new and different rules next season because Uefa’s financial regulations are changing. So keep up at the back, the rules shifted on Everton and now look where they are. Value the suits, those doing the hard yards on paper, who understand. They will be the heroes.
All big companies have identifiable branding, much like football kits. Wilberforce Chambers, where Phillips works, appear to favour a dark green and white. Blackstone Chambers, home of Lord David Pannick, representing Manchester City, are navy blue with flicks of white, and pink. As far as accountants go, PWC are black, red and orange; Deloitte black, white and green. You think this is a joke? There has already been a banner held up at the Eithad Stadium, in support of Lord Pannick, by name. These are your new colours, people. This is where the Premier League has brought us. The score no longer matters, the verdict does.
Old Blue 2
Player Valuation: £35m
Having worked with Gavin for several years in the 1980s, I can say with 100% certainty that he is an Evertonian.
Davideeyore
Player Valuation: £30m
I disagree with Northcroft on this.
Foreign TV deal rights is where the big money is. Most foreigners don't care about anyone but the big teams. If they left to form a super league the remaining teams would barely get a viewer.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but, as an overseas viewer, I wouldn't want to watch the 'big 6' play an artificial competition against Europe's elite. I'm a big cricket fan and can't be arsed with the IPL/Hundred and other manufactured stuff etc and I won't pay for it. I don't think it's a given that the European breakaway would have been a success.
I'm thinking more non-Europeans to be honest. Those with no real connection to the other clubs. The Asian's would love a super league. Barca, Real, City. They don't care about "Eberdan".
Hinchcliffe's Corner
Player Valuation: £40m
I'm sorry, what?
-10 would’ve sent anyone up to Chelsea in 12th place down last season btw.
Just to give an idea of what they’ve tried to do to us.
Just to give an idea of what they’ve tried to do to us.
YoboCopter
Player Valuation: £50m
We will survive on 30