After two-and-a-half years of uncertainty and anguish, two failed managerial tenures, as many close calls with relegation and a staggering 10-point deduction handed down by the Premier League, Evertonians finally felt as though they knew where they stood in November.
Get behind the club, Sean Dyche and the players; cheer, cajole and support the team to Premier League safety, regardless of what Everton’s appeal against a historic and wholly disproportionate sanction might throw up; then pause to take stock this summer. Thanks to that run of results between early October and mid-December, and the potential for the manager to collect enough points over the remaining 17 games of the campaign, it seemed as though that was a plausible scenario.
Then came the news yesterday that Everton had been referred to an independent commission for a second time, charged with further breaches of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability rules (PSR) and at risk of further censure by way of another points deduction. If you’re asking yourself, “What’s the point anymore?” you’re not alone.
Likewise it may seem to you as though the Premier League have been making up the rules as they go along. Despite the ruling by October’s “Independent” Commission, there is still no official, published framework by which clubs can be punished for breaching PSR, although we assume that Nottingham Forest, also referred yesterday, and Everton will be subject to the same protocol as the one by which the Toffees were docked 6 points for transgressing and then 1 point for every £5m by which they went over the permitted £105m threshold.
And, despite telling rival clubs in March last year that it would be impossible to come to a decision on Everton’s case in time for the ruling to take effect in the same season due to the complexity of the case, now the whole process — appeals and all – can be wrapped up by the end of May. Yes, the 2023-24 season could end and we still won’t know who has been relegated for another week!
In any case, the League have tacitly admitted that the existing spending rules, which could, depending on the outcome of Everton’s appeal against November’s points deduction, send the club down, will be scrapped in August in favour of a new framework based more around wages-to-turnover ratio than outright spending totals. (Frustratingly, according to a source at the club, Everton believe they would comfortably be compliant under those new rules.)
All of that pales, however, against “double jeopardy” and the absurd notion that Everton could be punished for the same crime twice in the same season for the actions of people long gone from the club and an owner with one foot out the door and because the League’s own process wasn’t completed by the end of the previous campaign. Meanwhile, the case against Manchester City and their alleged 115 charges continues to get kicked down the road and, all the while, they continue to accumulate tens to hundreds of millions of pounds in Premier League merit payments and Champions League revenue. One rule for the elite…
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It’s utterly depressing but, as a sporting endeavour, the Premier League has become a farce. Undermined by sub-standard match officials and weekly controversy around Video Assistant Referees, it ceased to be a true competition many years ago. Its inception in 1992, driven — and the bitter irony isn’t lost here — by Everton, their former chairman, Sir Philip Carter, and the rest of the old “big five”, ushered in a new age of increasingly rampant capitalism and reckless spending, one that has culminated in the transfer of ownership of some of the country’s most treasured community institutions to Russian oligarchs, Far Eastern billionaires and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.
Inequality and a lack of fairness are now baked into English football at the top level and the Premier League is so popular and so rich that the fact that it lost its integrity long ago doesn’t seem to matter. Not enough people can bring themselves to turn away. To a far smaller degree, that lack of fairness has always existed but, within many Everton fans’ lifetimes, clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool could go down; such was a cyclical nature of the game that no longer exists.
These days, clubs like Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal enjoy huge intrinsic benefits from simply being based in London; Manchester United and Liverpool enjoy the imperviousness that comes from enormous legacy support, a global following — with all the commercial benefits that brings — founded on success decades ago. The kind of dynastic success denied Everton by the indiscriminate ban on English clubs from competing in Europe following the tragedy at Heysel.
Introduced in 2014 (and voted in by the member clubs at the time, including Everton it shouldn’t be forgotten), PSR, under the guise of protecting clubs from spending beyond their means, simply had the effect of cementing the status quo as it was, with Manchester City and Abu Dhabi United Group nipping under the wire to form the “big six” alongside United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool. To mix metaphors, it allowed the cartel to begin the process of pulling the ladder up behind them before attempting the ultimate fait accompli with the European Super League before a revolt by fans reined them in. Their penalty for a gross act of rebellion and treachery? A measly £3.67m “donation” of contrition from each.
Their huge commercial revenues and power to attract multi-billionaire potential buyers mean that there is never truly any risk to their sustainability as a going concern. (For the same reason, Man Utd are permitted to carry £1bn in debt with none of the repercussions Everton are facing.) They can also keep buying the best players as success begets success begets prize money and more commercial revenue. And their ability to attract players is what enabled Chelsea to bend the rules to breaking point with a £750m net spend over the past five years whilst Everton’s was a mere £28.5m.
Of course, net spend is only one part of the equation. As Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper argued in the book Soccernomics, there is a quantitative relationship between wages paid by Premier League teams and where they end up finishing in the table over time. The Premier League has become an arena where, if you want to truly compete – to break that glass ceiling to join the so-called Big Six – you have to gamble, you have to speculate, you have to take risks and you have to be willing to pay players top dollar to play for you if you don’t have a long-term outlook like the likes of Brighton.
As Evertonian and author Jim Keoghan tweeted, echoing the frustrated cries of many of his Blue brethren, “You can’t consistently spend like the elite until you grow revenue. The best way to grow revenue is to enjoy on-field success. But you can’t do that without consistently spending like the elite. But of course, you can’t consistently spend like the elite until you grow revenue…”
There is no doubt that Farhad Moshiri tried to spend Everton’s way into the Champions League between 2016 and 2020, culminating in the massive outlay on the likes of James Rodriguez, Allan, Abdoulaye Doucouré and Carlo Ancelotti and their associated salaries, in the expectation that revenue would take off as a result. Had it worked, we wouldn’t be in this position.
That gamble demonstrably failed, though, and he and his since-departed Board have left the club and its supporters to deal with the fall-out. But Everton did try to grow their revenue and, just like Man City did with their ties to Abu Dhabi and Newcastle are doing with their links to Saudi Arabia, used Moshiri’s relationship with USM Holdings to leverage commercial deals.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine, a forthcoming naming-rights deal for the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, worth an estimated £200m over 20 years, had to be scrapped and existing sponsorships with USM companies were immediately suspended. That hamstrung the club in terms of further commercial deals as they have been unable to arrange sponsorships in the same asset class — the club can’t take on a new sponsor for Finch Farm, for example, because the deal with USM is merely suspended but unlikely to ever be revived.
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The upshot of it all is that, by most measures, Everton have, under Moshiri, practically become what the Premier League’s half-baked and fluid spending rules were designed to prevent — unsustainable. The hierarchy admitted in the last accounts that relegation would represent a serious challenge to the Blues’ future as a going concern and the club is currently limping by from month to month on loans from a prospective buyer that may yet be rejected by the League itself as unsuitable owners.
Yet, with Everton having acknowledged how close to the wind they had sailed during the first four years of Moshiri’s association with the club and undertaken to work in tandem with the Premier League on a concerted plan to reduce their transfer expenditure and wages-to-turnover ratio; and with the consensus being that the existing PSR rules are fundamentally flawed, surely the prudent thing would have been for the League to give the club some latitude as it worked through that process. Certainly it would, having already whacked them with the biggest sporting sanction in English top-flight history.
Instead, the League’s rules around spending over a rolling three-year interval have Everton trapped and almost locked into multiple punishments for the same crime even though they have already been sanctioned for 75% of the accounting period that will be in question for the second independent commission. (This is in marked contrast to the EFL which, sensibly, caps losses after the first year.)
Perversely, the Premier League’s actions are driving Everton towards an unsustainable situation that could, potentially, result in the club going under completely and, with the chief bone of contention hinging on the consideration of interest payments on loans to fund the one thing that could make the club sustainable and self-sufficient once again — the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock — it all just feels vindictive at this point.
Sadly, in another damning indictment of the modern game, the Toffees’ immediate future looks as though it will be decided not on the pitch but in the courtroom; the club’s most important signing not a player with silky skills but a “super silk” KC who can hopefully hone in on double jeopardy, autrefois convict, and the flawed nature of an entire process that stands to wreck one of English football’s grandest institutions beyond the damage already inflicted by its owner.
Even if Laurence Rabinowitz and his team succeed, it will still feel like Everton are standing at the bottom of Mount Everest, with all the uncertainty over the club’s future ownership and the tilted playing field of the Premier League… but at least they’ll be alive to fight another day.
Note: Some of the comments below regarding Richard Masters at the House of Commons Select Comitttee on Football Governance have been moved to this thread