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John from Bootle
Player Valuation: £10m
They always were mate. I was just hoping we wouldn't be involved.
I had a conversation with my son in the summer. He told me Luton and Sheff Utd were 100% doomed. I told him not to be so sure. He told me they were rubbish. I agreed, but then reminded him how rubbish Everton were last season, and that being rubbish is no guarantee of going down, because there will be other rubbish teams.
I'm at the point that I'm not even losing sleep over relegation fears anymore, tbh. If we get shafted, so be it. What I do worry about is the stadium. If that gets finished, I can live with anything else, because with Bramley Moore, and a reinvigorated, some might say reinvented, fanbase, we would be back in no time, and in a much stronger place than we've been this side of the Premier League's inception.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Sky can do all they want protecting the host they parasitically feed off.
But this isn't going away. And they and the PL know there are enough sympathisers with our plight that they cant dominate the narrative.
Watch Sky today manage the protest as best they can like we're in Stalinist Russia. They cant ignore it though...and it's not going away.
The league they leech off is beyond doubt a corrupt organisation; it's not fit for purpose and pretty soon it'll be they who are fighting for their lives.
But this isn't going away. And they and the PL know there are enough sympathisers with our plight that they cant dominate the narrative.
Watch Sky today manage the protest as best they can like we're in Stalinist Russia. They cant ignore it though...and it's not going away.
The league they leech off is beyond doubt a corrupt organisation; it's not fit for purpose and pretty soon it'll be they who are fighting for their lives.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
I am too. Everyone will know if it happens we were never relegated on the pitch.
It'll still devastate me though.
Drico
Player Valuation: £50m
T
The exception that proves the rule.
msb
Player Valuation: £10m
He said that WE had not read the report. Said it showed we had been told time and again to comply, which we did not.
he did not mention that they changed the rules so we could not comply, did not mention an attempt (apparently failed) to introduce a penalty designed only to be used in this case, and the make up of the committee was two thirds a vested interest in our being found guilty. Did not mention the fans being penalised; when it us that have been pointing out our hopeless governance for years.
no mention of his beloved Arsenal being one of the 6 teams that tried to break the EPL, quelle surprise.
One of very few human beings I detest, he’s always sliding at Everton.
No not when he spoke it was just like a statement of fact really, his opinion. Later they had what was like a one sided debate defending the premier league and stating all clubs agreed to this before the season started, which I find incredibly naive if the bottom 24 voted for these rules and penalties, like a Turkey voting for Christmas proportions.
John from Bootle
Player Valuation: £10m
Yeah, it's shocking they've put us in a position were I can even say stuff like that. But what am I meant to think?
What would be worse, at this point in time: Relegation, or the stadium being abandoned? And I know they're not mutually exclusive, and that relegation would actually increase the likelihood of the stadium going tits up, but my worries are solely on the stadium now. Teams can recover from relegation, if something went wrong with this stadium build, it would take us decades to recover.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
One of our best players last season who's tackles and interceptions were in the top 5 of the PL. Basically we stayed up last season by his defensive game.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
I'm not sure we're hanging too much on the stadium to propel us to a new era.
Inside the PL it might - if we could use it to attract an owner that the corrupt PL would allow us to have without threatening their cartel - languishing in the Championship for a few seasons would pretty much destroy us for a generation.
Drico
Player Valuation: £50m
An appalling passer of the ball - wins it like you say, only to pass it straight back to the opposition. A liability. A far better team without him in the middle. If we can avoid injuries in midfield, January could be a profitable month for us in our fight to get out of the bottom three.
Milk
Udderly delicious
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Well we're not a passing team, so he's ok in that respect.
bcblue1878
Player Valuation: £50m
Not always been a big fan of Martin Samuels but to use a very well known phrase “he’s hit the nail on the head”!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.
Should be compulsory reading for every “proper fan of football”, and I don’t mean the pot hunting glory hunters that have attached themselves certain football clubs since Sky invented their favoured 6!