The big differences, Pat, are the manageability of that debt and whether the club in question is unable to pay fees owed to other clubs and their playing staff.

In Portsmouth’s case, they had transfer fee obligations they could no longer meet and apparently have "Champions League"-level wages they could no longer afford so the Premier League put a lien on their Sky payments.

Manchester United and Liverpool may be up to their eyeballs in debt but they are still able to pay they monies owed for player transfers, etc. Plus, their huge revenues and status allow them to keep raking in TV money and make them attractive targets for billionaire investors.

Now, at the moment, Everton are able to service their own debt by sticking with modest transfers, loans, free transfers and selling the occasional piece of family silver.

Our biggest problem is the increasingly dangerous player salary to turnover ratio and that is also a big factor behind the shrinking transfer budgets but thus far Bill Kenwright and the Board have done a decent job of living within their meagre means.

Yes Pat I would like to reinforce what Lyndon has said. You are a victim of ignorant journalists who are unable to explain anything because they don’t understand anything. This is why Toffeeweb is such a godsend.

The amount of debt a club has is not by itself very meaningful. So headlines that club X is £100m in debt does not mean that club X is in any kind of financial trouble. Nearly all listed companies borrow money — its one of the ways they fund their growth, and its a cheaper way of funding growth than selling shares which gives the purchaser a share in future profits. Whereas a lender just gets back his loan plus interest.

So there is no problem with having debt. The problem comes when the club does not have enough revenue to pay back the lenders on time. When clubs cannot pay their VAT bill (like Portsmouth) or players wages (like Portsmouth) it means that they have run out of cash and cannot service their debts from their revenue.

VAT is also worth explaining. Clubs charge VAT on their services (e.g. ticket sales etc) and effectively act as a tax collector for the government. Having collected this VAT they are supposed to hand it over to the government. It is not the clubs money. Well run companies maintain a reserve to pay the VAT bill when the government come and ask for the money. However, this reserve gets raided when a company runs out of cash. That is why it is a clear indicator that the game is up for Portsmouth.

Portsmouth will not be able to continue until they need to find a new buyer to buy fresh shares in the club (called an equity investment) to lend the club money (without any prospect of getting it back, sometimes called shadow equity — it takes the legal form of a loan but commercially it is an equity investment).

However, they need to be careful because it was loans from their former owner that is what has got them into this financial pickle. He lent them lots of money — they signed lots of players. Then he sold the club, withdrew financial support AND asked for his money back. The club thought they had an equity investment, but the owner decided to treat it as a loan after all. Harry Rednap saw the writing on the wall and immediately left for Spurs.

Portsmouth were doomed from the moment they lost their sugar daddy. Chelsea and Man City could face this nightmare scenario if their owners suddenly pull out as their investment in those clubs has been by way of loans. Notts County and West Ham are currently in deep trouble because of similar events.

Who holds the debts also makes a difference. Auditors normally assume that loans from shareholders will not be re-called and treat them as equity. But the Portsmouth case shows that this is not always correct.

Liverpool and Man Utd have manageable amounts of debt (just about) but their real problem is that the debt is owed to outside professional lenders — not to cuddly shareholders. These lenders will want their money back and charge commercial rates of interest. If either club failed to qualify for Champions League group stages for a couple of seasons you could see them default on their loans.

However, Liverpool and Man U are such prized brand names that they are very likely to find a white knight to come and bail them out — this will at least stop them from going into administration.

Everton have not been too extravagant but our ratio of salary to income is relatively high — and this is a leading indicator of financial health. Fortunately, players wages should start to fall as other clubs are no longer able to pay the wages of the past.

Everton also need to fund a new stadium and this can be a dead weight — just look at the effect it has had on Arsenal’s finances, at least in the short/medium term.

However, it does seem that there is a bit of levelling of the playing field — particularly if Man U and Liverpool do default on their loans and Man City and Chelsea’s sugar daddies lose interest. Already, Newcastle and West Ham have been neutered as potential big spending rivals for the forseeable future... Here’s hoping!

I just wanted to add to Lyndon and David’s insightful comments. I think the EPL is the next big ’bubble’ to burst.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with David that Man Utd and Liverpool will find white knights to save them. There will be potential buyers, but they will not be Abramovich or Emirate types who do so for the joy of owning a winning team (like the former), or to profile their country (like the latter). They will be pure businessmen looking to find a brandname to market their product/services. Their investment will be short-term, loan-based, and they will get out as soon as they’ve achieved what they want. They will leave the clubs in a worse off position to when they found them.

In particular danger is Liverpool. I really doubt they have the wherewithall to remain in the top 4 this year. Without Champions League money, they will have to ’prostitute’ themselves to all and sundry. They will eventually go to bed with anyone who can buy them out of their immediate financial woes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Liverpool in the same boat as Portsmount in a few years time.

For all his short-comings, we should be thankful that BK has kept Everton on the straight and narrow.

What do people think is the likely oucome for Pompey next week if they can’t pay the tax bill? Will it be immediate closure or administration.

If they get put into administraton, they will probably see out their remaining fixtures this season, then a summer of turmoil to see if they can continue.

If they get closed down, what then? I imagine that all clubs who’ve played against them will have any points gained, removed from their current total.

Typical! The RS have only taken 1 point off them!!

David Ellis - Thank you!

That's the clearest explanation I have yet read on a subject that, like Pat Finegan, I was struggling to understand. Top post!

Cheers Lyndon & David... very interesting reading. Maybe Blue Bill isn’t doing such a shoddy job after all.

Portsmouth also have a stadium that holds 20,000. The income from match days could not go anywhere near towards finding the wages for their high earners like Crouch, Defoe, Distin and Johnson. They also did not meet their instalment payments for players they bought like Kaboul who was sold back to Tottenham who were still owed £2m for him.

Redknapp did see the writing on the wall but it was he who was purchasing players on salaries far more than the club could afford.

Portsmouth owe £7m to the VAT man and £5m unpaid PAYE according to the Guardian Newspaper, plus Redknapp is in court for taking a bung at the moment also.

The PAYE on player’s wages is colossal and when clubs are in financial trouble it is always the taxman who gets paid last. The taxman has seen all the extravagant spending by Portsmouth and now wants what is rightfully due to them. Imagine what would happen if your employer who had deducted all your PAYE used that money to keep going. The tax authorities would be down on you immediately.

If a club goes into administration, players continue to get paid according to an FA rule but other creditors such as non-playing staff, small local businesses such as caterers, electricians and plumbers etc don’t get paid and will never get paid.

In Portsmouth lots of local firms who have done maintenance work and security at the ground or training complex have failed to get paid. The minibus firm that buses their youth teams around have stopped doing it because they haven’t been paid. Players have to be ferried around in parents' cars.

Redknapp is carrying on that policy at Tottenham, buying all and sundry... who needs a right back when you can have four of them? They have more dosh than most clubs but even they are now trying to offload. Is it people like Redknapp who help create the situation football has got itself into.

Thanks guys. When you cut through all the financial speak, in the end football like any other business is about one thing — CASH. And having enough cash to pay your creditors (whether government, investors, other clubs) and your employees when you have to.

Portsmouth are in a different situation from everyone else (although West Ham are close) because they took in cash (i.e. borrowed) against incoming cash that has never materialised. Read David Conn’s recent excellent articles in The Guardian to understand more.

Man Utd and Liverpool have pretty huge debts and interest payments by any standards, and that is constraining them mightily (don’t believe all the nonsense about Fergie not ’liking’ Tevez — the reality is that the club would not pay for him what his agent was demanding). But they also have (unlike Portsmouth and West Ham) (a) huge cash inflows, and (b) very sellable high value assets when they need some cash (think Ronaldo to Real Madrid — and that that money went to pay off debt not to buy eg Tevez).

They are unlikely to be sunk, but the panic at Liverpool and Benitez’s ’guarantee’ of a top four position was revealing: their financial situation looks precarious if they don’t get Champions League football, and they know it. If they don’t, a number of things would be likely to happen to keep the wolf from the door for them. Firstly, players would certainly be sold (Torres, Gerrard, Mascherano). Secondly, the club would probably be sold, although even rich Middle Eastern buyers may be a bit thin on the ground. Their financial position is shown by the fact that they are still not able to make any apparent progress on their new ground.

And us? We have been run relatively prudently (it’s all relative — the financial models of all Premier League clubs are pretty crazy by normal standards). And given our excellent manager we have developed and improved plenty of ’assets’ we could sell in an emergency (e.g. Rodwell, Fellaini, Pienaar...). Although of course hopefully not.

Without major new sources of profitable revenue (e.g. Champions League, a new ground), it is impossible for us to make any great leap forward. But we are also not in any imminent danger unless we contrived to get relegated or went silly a la Portsmouth on transfers / wages (neither likely to happen). And as the football bubble bursts it is likely that players will become somewhat cheaper to buy and will cost somewhat less in wages.

By the way, agree with James about Redknapp. He bears a real share of the responsibility for Portsmouth, and is lucky he has much deeper pockets at Spurs to cover his profligate habits (for now...).

Whisper has it that Portsmouth have put the rest of their money on the Euro millions lottery for this Friday. Hope an Evertonian wins it instead. All Evertonians do at least one ticket. You never know...

I don’t know much about business matters but it was mentioned on the news on Monday that the judge hearing the case said she was mindful of Portsmouth’s fixture commitments for the remainder of the season but that she had also to be mindful of the law.

While it wasn’t actually stated (to my knowledge), I did take this to mean that there was a possibility that Portsmouth would be ordered to stop trading (ie playing!) irrespective of those commitments if the Court was not satisfied next week.

I have no idea what would happen then if that was the case. Surely no club could be allowed to gain an advantage from Pompey’s demise by wiping out points from games with them already played?

Just supposing (in theory) Burnley had taken six points off them and Wolves none... and Burnley go down 5 points behind Wolves who stay up!

Does anybody know definitively what would happen? I’m intrigued.

Dave, they actually said on Sky Sports News in an interview the other day with an FA official that the FA rules irrespective if you in the Prem League or the Pub league, if you fold then all your results are removed from the records books, which will be to the benefit of Liverpool because they lost to them and all the other title contenders had beaten them.

I wonder if anyone can clarify our own financial results to me.

At the time there was a lot of press on how the club had "lost" £7m. If I remember correctly, we made a pre tax profit of £7m before player amortisation? As I understand it, this is basically the value of our squad and their registrations? So in available cash terms we have actually made a bit of profit this last financial year?

While I am happy to admit to my previous comment that I know little about business law, I do know just a little bit about how capitalism works and football clubs, as businesses, have to be included in that capitalist scheme of things. With one big difference that I will come to shortly.

If we substitute, say, the retail trade for football clubs, what normally happens is that the big boys (Asda, Tesco etc) work diligently to put out of business the little corner shops. Look at any High Street today and the truth of this is obvious. The big boys will no doubt deny doing that but there is no denying that they do. All areas of business try to put their competitors to the sword.

If football was to follow this same pattern, then the natural laws of capitalism would suggest that the big boys (the Premier League let us say) would be working just as hard as Asda and Tesco to put the little boys (in football terms the lower leagues) out of business.

The advantage of this (in theory) is that the big boys will pick up all the customers who previously serviced the little boys. For example, Stockport ’customers’ would become customers of United or City and Tranmere or Southport customers would become customers of Everton or the shite.

But this simple business model does not work in football does it? It may begin to work in the longer term as new customers are born and grow up but for the here and now it does not and that is the big difference. It does not work because of all the emotional attachments and loyalties as well as cultural and community issues involved in supporting football clubs.

As a result we have clubs trying to compete as businesses outside of any understandable business model and which few if any run of the mill businessmen could understand according to the way they ordinarily think and operate.

Accordingly, clubs cannot grow in any meaningful short-term manner by swallowing up the competition as normal successful businesses do. To compensate for this (it seems to me) they borrow very heavily relative to their turnover (or if they are lucky they stumble over a sugar daddy) and this is what leads to the high level of debt in the game today, even more than in previous decades as clubs have abandoned the benign ’social club’ ethos of yesteryear in search of commercial success.

James

Apart from disagreeing with you that the shite are title contenders (!) what you say can only mean one thing. The shite have renewed their contract with the devil (which was what I suspected anyway after the Goodison Derby!!!).

The Premier League is pressing a financial self destruct button and the powers that be seem powerless.

The most urgent problem that should be tackled is unrealistic players wages. Some say a wages curb would lead to an exodus of stars. I do not believe that would happen. A flood of star players suddenly swamping the market would bring about the law of supply and demand. That would create drastic downward pressure on transfer fees and wages.

Most foreign clubs are caught in the same financial crisis as English clubs. This is shown by the enormous number of players they have either on loan or loaned out. Benfica for example have over 20 players loaned out and about 10 loaned in. The vast majority of foreign clubs do not get Sky largesse so there is no chance they could cope with a mob of money-hungry so-called stars.

I use the term foreign clubs to describe those with a home ground in their own country. They are not to be confused with the likes of United, Citeh and the RS whish are foreign clubs that do have a home grounds in England.

What makes for good television is crowd atmosphere and without that element the game becomes sterile and ceases to be a spectacle.TV ratings would go the same way as Basketball.

With that in mind, it would be in the best interest of the football bodies and SKY to insist that 50% of SKY money be earmarked for facilities and keeping spectator costs down.

I also suggest that a special government tax be levied on any profits made by sporting clubs. Such a tax would show carpet baggers the futility of raiding our clubs.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Redknapp taking 10% of all transfer out fees.

Over recent months the man’s got millions from what's gone on.

And knew he would too.

Yes you're right, Dave they are not title contenders, Champions League 4th place contenders I should've said.

Anyone else keeping tabs on the Paul Strettford / Rooney trial?

Any comments on that in relation to the above topic?

The boy was money mad. All I will say.

And the "marketing description" of him being "not manufactured". = Laughable.

Mark what’s that about ’Arry taking 10% of the transfer fees? Could it be to fund his overdue tax cash?

Tony, Redknapp has taken a 10% cut of any transfer fee out of Portsmouth since he returned from Southampton.

So he took 10% of the £18.88 million fee from Real Madrid for Lassana Diarra (£1.88 million).

He’s also interestingly taken 10% cuts off all the players' transfers from Portsmouth — he’s bought again — whilst at Spurs.

What does that say to you?

^ correction:

Tony, Redknapp has taken a 10% cut of any transfer fee out of Portsmouth of ANY PLAYER HE BROUGHT IN since he returned from Southampton.

Apologies

Brian Clough was like ’Arry Redknapp he used to like to take a bung at a motorway service station (according to legend).

’Arry is the biggest wheeler dealer in the league, he must be on a bung, the amount of transfers he does. What gets me is when they are caught they plead innocence say they are set up, ban the BBC from speaking to them, and then hire a rich lawyer and get off.

Thanks guys!

Interesting read lads. Wouldn’t it be just typical of the FA to impose that rule of deducting all points from Clubs gained off Portsmouth to the 5 point benefit of the RS. Just another squirmy event waiting to help ’em out.

Given the experts we have amongst us, can anyone clarify if players are actaully "employees" of clubs who dutily pay the PAYE to HMRC plus the 11% employers contribution on top of gross pay? Or are they really brought in as "contractors" to avoid paying the additional 11%. Any building contractors with experience of CIS get this?

Oh, and if 'Arry has been taking bungs all his life, what must El Tel Venables have been up to all those years ago??

With Redknapp too, look at Storie who he brought in from West Ham (anohter dead duck), to "handle transfers and wages", on a £1million a year contract.

Basically, between them they created a nice little earner for them both buying/selling using high wages as a inducement...

Once the "sell on" for higher fees stopped, Portsmouth who’s wage bill quarupled in 18 months under Redknapp - literally hit a brick wall with the removal of their external benefactor.

Meanwhile as well as his £3mil a year contract Redknapp probably made another £10million out of his transfer dealings...

Funny that figures pretty similar to the HMRC bill.

For the past 5 to 10 years in the League of Ireland we have seen clubs go to the wall like this... Usually the case was that if the team wound up during the season (ala Dublin City a few years ago), the points from the games that were played against them were removed... so if you had played and beaten them twice already, 6 points were removed..

I thought that stuff could only happen in a semi-pro league like the LOI, but it seems that the Premier League could have its first casualty in this manner as well. What a complete joke!

Recently, a private members club in Dublin went bust... They were using the PAYE money take from employees pay packets to run the business. Tax man eventually caught up with them and they were gone..... If this is what Portsmouth have been doing then they are goners... unless they can stump up the cash, which isn’t looking likely right now.

For all the moaning about Kenwright (and I am one of them who thinks he has been dithering over the years), he has us in a financial situation which a lot of Premier League clubs would love to be in... i.e. managing to live reasonably within our means.

Rednapp & Storrie are up before the beak, for tax irregularities. How Storrie has kept his job at Portsmouth is anybody’s guess. I think I am right in saying he was at West Ham with rich boy Rednapp. So they go back along time, maybe they will end up doing some.

There’s another little twist to all this jiggery-pokery which has been revealed in Rooney’s current court case. Apparently his image rights (let’s hope he puts on some make-up!) are worth £760,000 monthly of which — get this — his agent received £152,000 per month. Obscene.

The sooner agents are banned, if that’s possible, and footballers are made to spend several hours a week in school to learn basic maths and English plus a foreign language (which they neglected to do when they were of school age, thereby equipping themselves to face the challenges of how to use their inflated salaries in responsible fashion) the better.

As someone else pointed out maybe West Ham’s initiative in forewarning a 25% salary reduction from next season will be followed by other clubs.

Who cares about Pompey,West Ham or even the Mancs and RS? Just thank God that our club is managed with such financial acumen that never a whiff of scandal or toxic debt is associated with it.Blue Bill may not allow Harry Boy type signings at Goodison but he and his advisers certainly know how to keep the wolf from the door!
Long,long may he remain.

David Ellis — slight correction to your economics: a shareholder is only entitled to a share of the profits if a company decided to pay a dividend. If you are a minor shareholder, you can be out-voted on this and the majority shareholders decide to use the profits to stuff the balance sheet, pay down debt etc. Therefore, as a shareholder, you might never see any of the profits.

Another worry that David Ellis alluded to is that most Prem clubs have posted increased turnover, and higher debt ratio. In the real business world, the company would either have to slash its operating costs or face the consequences...

I know it’s currently popular to villify Redknapp, but it should be remembered that the clubs he works for choose to employ him & allow him to operate in a manner that they, presumably, find acceptable. Indeed, did Spurs not pay Pompey about £8 million compensation when they head-hunted Redknapp? We may be critical of Redknapp’s wheeler-dealing but he doesn’t seem short of job offers.

As for Storrie, apparently Redknapp recommended him to the Pompey Board & successive owners have kept him on. It seems the charges relating to Storrie were with regard to the club’s accounts rather than any accusation of personal gain.

Maybe it’s just a reflection of the type of "fit & proper person" who takes ownership of a Premier League football club nowadays. Somebody posted recently that perhaps the FA should take the radical step of including a test of the prospective owners interest in the game of football in their assessment of what constitiutes a "fit & proper person"!

Not read through all the replies but the underlying reason the likes of Portsmouth and Cardiff are in the shit is because they owe HMRC, you can owe a bank a fortune up to the credit cash and they didn’t give a monkey’s. The second you owe the revenue, they will hunt you like an animal.

Doddy, toxic debt maybe not but record debt you can’t deny, where is your beloved’s acumen now?

Interesting article, and nice opening comments too. I’ve heard rumours Portsmouth are asking for their Premier League Money early, but need the agreement of the other 19 clubs.

Say Portsmouth do get the money now for finishing 20th, save the club, they’re almost certain of going down, they seem more screwed than Chester City.

Secondly, if these rich foreign Chairmen suddenly left, won’t they be liable for placing the company in such a poor position? I mean personally liable. Isn’t it a breach of their duty to the company?

It’s people like Redknap who drives up players' prices and wages. I’m sick of the cunt. Let's take Naughton for example: he joined a club with 3 other players for that position... WHY? Because Harry offered more than us, ie, price and wages.

He buys decent players, lots of them, and just changes them round till he gets a decent team; not rocket science and anyone with half a brain could do it, except Harry makes money out of it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Spurs went quiet on the transfer front for a few years and Harry fucks off somewhere else who will put up with his thieving. Portsmouths problems are down to good old Harry boy.

Iain, I don’t think Redknapp is solely to blame for Portsmouth’s problems. The board must approve spending before the coach can buy players. That goes for any team in a situation like that, regardless of the amount or type of debt.

Props to Blue Bill for being frugal in his spending. I don’t want him to stay chairman any more than anyone else on here but, credit where credit is due, he has kept us afloat and we’re not financially screwed. Unfortunately, I think that’s about all he can do right now.

Also, I’m sorry, I know we usually don’t have threads devoted to teams other than Everton and I didn’t mean for this one to be all about Pompey. They were just the first example that came to mind.

Gavin, how many times do you need to have it explained?

Record Turnovers mean you can service record debt. Is it really that hard to understand the more money you get in, the more credit you can manage?

The point that people do not seem to realise, that any new chairman will still have the same resources.

It doesn't matter who comes in, he will still have the same turnover to play with as Kenwright. If a new chairman chooses to give the manager £50 million for players, that debt will be ADDED to the club's coffers, and secured against his assets. Everton will pay off the debt, not the chairman.

The Chairman is not the only issue. From what I can see, we have sub-contracted and sold practically everything off to get as much cash as we can to fund players. I don’t think there is much left that can be done to free up cash.

The issue is around the money coming in. Our turnover was £80 million last year, our best ever. Spurs managed £113 million in a relatively unsuccessful year. This is what we have to address.

I am guessing that one of Kenwright’s sell-on clauses for the club is that the new owner must underwrite the debt for a new stadium. At least I hope so anyway. A new chairman will not take us any further while we are playing at Goodison Park in its current condition.

In relation to the Spurs £113 million turnover — how much of that was on the back of the higher property prices in London? Much of the money generated down there are on the back of property porfolios.

What could Everton buy in Liverpool that would be similar level assets? The Echo Arena maybe?... what I’m saying is there are macro economic issues at work that have allowed Spurs/Arsenal to do what they’ve done.

I am surpised that no one has mentioned Leeds on this thread with the classical case of over-spending against what you may bring in in the future.

I get shudders down my spine when Everton spend more than £6M on a player. Hopefully the bad debts in clubs will drive down the price of what are basically average players and drive down their disgraceful salaries.

I think the criticism of our Harry is justified, he simply plays out fantasy football has moderate results and then moves on. The FA should be held more accountable for a lot of what is going on, they have stoked the fire that is the Premier League and have done nothing to curb in excessive spending and careless owners. In fact I actually find it hard to understand what the hell the FA do actually do for the game?

Peter Storie was actually elected to the FA Council, of 8 Premier League club representatives.

The bad ’ens are in amongst the good ’ens and have got to be rooted out.

What gets me is that 10% figure cut that Redknapp contractually got for player sales of players he’d brought in.

Imagine Moyes getting a 10% cut of the Lescott deal? or Rooney?

Doesn’t happen. Didn’t happen.

Thankfully, there's no whiff of that sort of thing at Everton.

The parallels to the Sub-Prime economic collapse with the Redknapp/Storie setup is remarkable.

Risk, risk, risk.

Apologies for the double post.

But the above. That sort of setup just encourages a high player turnover. Doesn’t settle the club and adds nothing to player development.

I’d not have that sort anywhere near Everton.

Dan, how many times do you need? Business acumen and the ability to create a profitable strategy for on and off field activities increases revenues streams, the Capital of Culture vs when the club got off it’s sorry arse and got a retail presence in the City centre, QED fuck all business acumen. A new chairman you would hope would not repeat the same mistakes as the last. For the team most dubbed "best of the rest" by the national media and regularly knocking at the door of the top four with repeated fifth place in the league, you would think a marketing dream.

Back to the subject and the lion from the Wizard of Oz, isn’t he also responsible for the poor state of affairs at his previous club Southampton? He has a career of buying up shedloads of players and it seems pocketing a wad of cash each time he does so.

I’ve never thought about such things before... but now you’ve piqued my curiosity, Mark Reid:

How do you know there’s no whiff of that sort of thing at Everton? Do we know exactly what is and is not in David Moyes’s contract?

There certainly was a little bit more than a whiff — a heavy stench would be more accurate — when it came to double-dealing and profiteering for one Keith Wyness and his stadium development sideline.

Call me a cynic but sadly, the state football is in — some would say the state it’s always been in — suggests that no-one is squeaky clean.

Ok then, Michael, let me throw that back at you.

Have you got any evidence to suggest that Moyes or anyone else has or is taking a cut out of the transfer fees at Everton?

Certainly Redknapp’s deal at Portsmouth was that unusual it was worthy of comment even more so in light of their financial problems.

Everton commented publically that they paid £2million to agents in 2008-09 and they were on the low side, Man City paid £14million.

Michael. You can imply that their is some impropriety by innuendo. However, I think you’ll not find the HMRC come looking for Moyes.

The fact you know he’s on £4m a year shows this.

And you’ve confused my comparison of Moyes and Redknapp — and thrown in Wyness, which I do not appreciate!

And in relation to the above. It was well known that Moyes latest five year deal made him amongst the high earners in the league...

I’ve read complaints about this on here!!!

However, it shows an element of transparancy that we know this, and that there wasn’t any clauses or add-ons a la Harry Redknapp.

For one thing, think about our turnover of players. We’ve never gone out and bought loads.

Indeed, one of Moyes's first acts at the end of his first season was to release THIRTEEN (13) players on the wage bill who were draining the club of funds.

Doesn’t strike me of a manager who’s only interested in his pocket.

Want’s to be comfortable — paid like his competitors (Alex Ferguson, Wenger etc) but isn’t money mad.

That's the point I’m making.

Alan was surprised no-one has mentioned Leeds. I want to mention Southampton. Went out of the Championship last year because they went into administration — due mostly to long term high wage contracts left by... you got it... ’Arry when he left.

So... let’s see — Southampton. Hmm... Portsmouth? Yes... Tottenham?

'Arry’s got a method that works for him. Sign good players who are on a free and give them long-term contracts at top money. Enjoy the results — get called a miracle worker — and bugger off to a better job and let old club sink under the weight of these contracts as the players get older.

And did you see who else has a winding-up order from HMRC just now — Cardiff City — who’s there? Oh yes... Mr Ridsdale. That takes us back to Leeds.

Peter Hall - whilst correct, you were economic with your summary mate. The full managerial list would read:

Bournemouth — shortly after to go in to administration.
West Ham — what type of person would sign Mark Boogers on playing ability alone? ... later to be in shit street.
Southampton — administration shortly after as you quite rightly say.
Pompey — twice — who must surely shortly after go in to administration.
Watch out, Spurs fans... looks like you could be next!

Mark, I was simply expressing surprise at how you could be privy to what Moyes’s contract does or does not contain.

Let’s recap: You were the one who made the statement that "there’s no whiff of that sort of thing at Everton". I was just curious how you could be so sure. Especially given the highly questionable shenanigans going on seemingly throughout football. My example was the highly questionable contract provisions for the previous CEO at Everton.

Of course we all hope and want to believe that Moyes is whiter than white... but how can anyone be sure? Unless they know intimately the contents of his contract.

I don’t... Do you?