It's a while since I've bothered with such stats but, as I recall, there are just seven teams who have played in all 20 Premier League seasons (I think even you can see where I'm going with this...)

Six of the seven are not Everton, and six of the seven have better Premier League records than Everton.

Ergo, Everton have the worst Premier League record of their peers... including Aston Villa!

The ONLY achievement has been staying in the Premier League. Roll on August and that trusty definition for success: 40 points is our target and then we shall see what from there...

If only...

Thanks for letting me dream Doddy.

If we keep it up we will soon become the 7th most successful club in the history of the top league that's unless Kenwright takes us down a league before he finds the "investor"
he has been looking for 24/7 for the last 12 years.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

It's not my logic at all but the standard way of doing it. Numbers 0 to 4 get rounded down and 5 to 9 get rounded up.

The original piece was about our average Premier League place and I wondered what our average under Moyes was. I wrote the result and offered no opinion on it what so ever.

That is why we are in 7th as there are only 7 teams that have been in EPL since conception (although we are only just ahead of Newcastle). So if we look at win % instead as a more representative indicator that puts us 11th in the league (behind Leeds).

It really annoys me when people look at starts based on 'the premiership years' alone. What happened to that 100 odd years of football before that? All this 'premiership top scorer', 'premiersjip 1000th, 10000th goal' etc is bollocks imo. Its just a marketing exercise for Sky.

Should we just forget/ignore all the great memories and achievemnts from before (not just from Everton but football in general)? Or is it that you cannot find stats on the web for the twilight zone era of pre 1992 football?

Give me back div 1, div 2 div 3 format etc anyday. No matter what you call it the 2nd division is still the 2nd division, and dont get me started in League 1!

liverpool 5 finals - 4 cups
Villa 3 finals - 2 cups
utd 6 finals - 4 cups
spurs 4 finals - 2 cups
chelsea 4 finals - 3 cups
Arsenal 3 finals - 1 cup
Everton 0 final - 0 cup

Whichever way you look at it we grind an existence in the Prem and naff all else - hardly the stuff of street parties is it?

Why, oh why, are some Evertonians so eager to grasp onto any meagre morsel of respectability and demand instead it by reinterpreted as some kind of Herculean triumph?

Why should the 9 years of shite before him be hung around his neck?

"Just checked the tables for the last 10 years of Moyes's reign and the average finish came out at 7.7... so 8th" - It's not the average though is it? It's points gained. Where are we in that in Moyes's era?

Points tally over the last 10 years for the 8 teams above

Man U - 838
Chelsea - 804
Arsenal - 754
Liverpool - 667
Spurs - 570
Everton - 566
Man City - 561
Villa - 512

So 6th in terms of points gained in the last 10 years

There's the League, the Cup, and Europe. The League cup's only use to give lower league teams the chance to play in a big ground.

Thats EXACTLY my point - no one gives a fuck - the top teams use it as a training exercise for the juniors.

YET...... we can't even get to the effin' final let alone win the thing. We are a non-competitive, dire-to-watch (purple patches aside) filler in the Premier League ? not good enough.

Banging the drum of statistical 7th is meat and drink to the Kenwright/Moyes clown act perpetuating a situation I once thought would be unacceptable to ALL Evertonians.

Far from it.

I understand your frustration but thus is not 1980s anymore and the teams who finish above Everton have vastly bigger turnovers etc.

Liverpool's wage bill = £130 odd million, ours £58 million.

Everton isn't a big club anymore.

I really dont know what planet some of our fans are on, do they really expect us to be challenging for the title considering we spend so little in transfers. Avoid being in a relegation battle and maybe have a chance of one of the cups is the absolute best we can expect.

Man City have spent nearly a billion pounds in the last 5/6 years, so how are we to compete with that. Also Chelsea,Man utd,Liverpool have spent fortunes. You only have to look at Liverpool never won the Premiership, and I couldnt tell you what they have spent over the past 20 years trying to win it.

To be fair I dont think anyone is expecting us to be challenging for the title,people are just saying that an overall finish of 7th in premiership history is nothing to celebrate.

We should be proud that out of about 30 odd teams to have a crack at the premiership we are 1 of only 7 to be ever present but its nothing to make a song and dance about for a club of our stature,even if we dont have the finances to match.

We have to accept that it's ALL about the money, and we don't have any.

I'm lucky enough to have been in my "heyday" during the mid 80's and what times they were, but the financial mismanagement of the club stems back to then, and probably further. We had a chance to "kick on" and didn't, for any number of reasons.

I happen to think that considering our financial plight we've done ok. Don't get me wrong I'm not happy about it

I'm not happy about not looking like a famous film star, or having a foot long dong either....but hey it's called REALITY.

Gimme the money you can call me Brad foot Long Pitt
II....without it...guess I'll have to make do with 8" and a big nose!

But Brian 732# is the only one to raise the valid point, so I did a quick bit of maths from the following site:

http://www.transferleague.co.uk/

And came up with the following since Premier League inception:

Pounds spent per points gained:

Arsenal: 14969
Everton: 51633
United: 107006
Villa: 117861
Spurs: 156907
Liverpool: 170357
Chelsea: 369602

This obviously does not cover Moyes reign, but demonstrates that pound for pound, Everton are the second best team in the history of the Premier League. It doesn't win us any trophies or silverware, thats for sure. But it does show that we are twie as efficient as Villa, and more than 3 times more efficient that Liverpool in using our resources. So again it begs the question, just how good would Moyes be if he had the resources to spend as the other teams above us? Or is he only a good manager, because he has no choice but to be careful??

Having the sixth best record amongst that lot is pretty good going.

Surprise surprise.... the only teams ''above us ' have spent many times what we have...exception being arsenal, who have won sod all since they stopped spending.

I reserve my right to complain about the current situation at our club because prior to 1992 the game still existed and the likes of Dave Watson and Neville Sothall were still striving to win the league with minimal resource. They were not settling for 7th because we had no money.

Do yourself a favour Richard and start going for a beer with your dad again and learn some humility and find some winning spirit.

Maybe get yourself a couple of dvd's pre sky.

I believe that if Moyes was given £100M to spend on players, he'd bottle it like he did in 2005.

Back in the day....and lets be honest they were better days, not just because we were great in the 80s but basically any club... well most clubs, had a half decent crack at winning something. Compare the winners of the three domestic trophies in the last ten years with any ten from pre 92. Even when individual teams dominated there were far more teams winning trophies season on season than now.

Noone is settling for seventh, but its a completely different context now. Shit though that is. You pays yer money you wins yer trophy.

I'd like to give Moyes two seasons with good money. If he got the value from big bucks that he gets from our meagre pickings, we'd win a shit load... mall hypothetical of course.

In one sense, it really doesn't matter who manages us, they won't challenge regularly for trophies on our budget... no-one does.

Dan @ 752, the flaw in that argument is that those stats don't factor in things like wage bills, income generated from player sales, net spend, investment in youth development etc.

What did he bottle? He wasn't given anywhere near enough to fight our corner in our return to Europe. We had players like Marcus Bent and Kevin Kilbane in our team.

It's so easy to suggest that if he had money he wouldn't do well, it's all supposition but what cannot be denied is that he has performed consistently with little or no transfer money for nearly half of his era with us.

It is shown that if money is spent, teams win things, even the shitty redshite won a trophy this season after spunking £100m away....but they had the opportunity to spunk it away, we never will so we will never know how good Moyes could be with some financial clout behind him.

You have to be an idiot to not acknowlege the better than expected league placings given our shite resources.

But you have to be blind not to acknowledge he seems to bottle it against the big clubs and on big occasions.

One would have to be biased not to acknowledge that at times we've played dire awful football. But other times played some briliant pass and move football.

I think this is why there's always such extremes in the 'Is Moyes a good manager?' debates that always go on here.

The original post is fair and valid: given the money Moyes has had to spend, he has achieved disproportionately good league placings. That's a fact. Objectively, the statistics do not lie: he has kept Everton in the Premiership and achieved an average league placing between 6th and 8th depending on your measure.

Saying that to keep us up in no real achievement is to live in a world where you still think the earth is flat: get real. In todays round earth, money has the greatest power. Moyes has had no real money (our last £10M+ signing was big Felli and that was a few yrs ago) and has kept us a competitive team.

Let's acknowlege FACTS eh fellow Evertonians?