In the Daily Mail, Ian Herbert highlights the hypocrisy of arbitrary changes to the treatment of interest claimed on loans that helped to fund the construction of the new stadium.
Everton were given the very distinct impression that the cost of interest on loans to build the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock would be excluded from Profitability and Sustainability considerations, just like Man City’s huge investment in their training facilities.
They argued that six other clubs had been able to keep such infrastructure costs out of the financial calculation and that this was an investment in the long-term future of a club and its city.
The Premier League agreed. Last week’s independent commission report, which ruled against Everton, relates precisely when – 14 January 2021 – in black and white, in points 26 and 27 of its findings.
Yet read on a further two pages, to points 33 and 34 of the report, and you see the picture changing. It relates how a call, in December 2022, from the Premier League to Katie Charles, Everton’s director of legal services, informed the club that a subsequent stadium interest payment would count towards the losses.
Everton would not have incurred this marginal breach of the sustainability rules if they had not been building a new £760M football stadium to help protect their Premier League future.