Well, yeah, but baseball is actually a Federally-regulated sport, by virtue of the anti-trust exemption. Just one more example of the ‘socialism for billionaires’ ethos of American sport
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Oh just fuck off (not you Rambler).
I heard Alan Shearer the other day putting forward this nonsense.
Interest in the Super League project did not in any way undermine the integrity of the domestic league. He was claiming we had tried to leave the Premier League, until Lineker corrected him.
They cheated. They got punished. That’s it. You want to see the industry and community threatened? Then go ahead and let clubs spend whatever the fuck they want.
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Ah this is why they blamed Spurs.
Yeah, the ‘far more severe breaches’ starts to gore our particular ox - and is ludicrous on the face of it, because the driving sentiment of the ESL was the utter failure of UEFA to deal with the onslaught of clubs willing to spend external capital without regard to financial sustainability. Everton is actually in that same category, but as Everton, they ended up with a shoddy version of it.
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It’s mostly the awkward Squad and Rob Roberts who I assume is an Everton fan.
Nasty man all the same.
You’ve got to know a history about Early day motions to realise while there are some excellent unknown causes that are championed there is also some absolute batshit stuff.
I see McGovern has stayed clear.
It also needs to be understood that this was a very slow moving violation. They had years to maneuver themselves out of it and at no point did they take significant enough actions to do that. Strict cost cutting measures, including a forced sale of their best players and a signing embargo, would almost certainly have been more damaging to their chances of staying up that year than a ten point penalty this season is, which is why they didnt take that option and gambled that they could find some why around, including very dubious book keeping. They have now lost that gamble yet likely still come ahead than had they have taken their medicine and actually tried hard to get into compliance. So complaining about it is pathetic.
In short, they can fuck off.
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And I believe they are also looking at making Gylfi Sigurdson’s incident and saying they lost out on transfer money etc.
This is purely clutching at straws from Everton.
Cardiff could well feel aggrieved about the sad Emiliano Sala plane crash. But they still had to fork out the transfer fee (not sure if they are appealing it).
Everton are trying to claim something similar w.r.t Gylfi and Dele
I thought the thrust of Everton’s argument is that there was no tariff of penalties for rule breaches.
However, the fact that they continued to buy players after they hit financial problems doesn’t really go in their favour.
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The way spending is amortized, the signings they made in the last year in question are pretty trivial - total spend of about 30m, which adds probably only about 6 million onto the books for that year meaning even without any of that spending they’d still be about 15 million over. But that is a trivial amount to get off their books through sales and eliminated wages. It amounts to about 290k a week in wages to lose even without raising any money from sales. Had they have actually tried, even with as unattractive as most of their players would have been to other teams, that is a trivially easy amount to cut. That’s 3 players leaving on a free just to get their salaries off the books. Or it’s one 10m sale of Pickford by himself getting his 6-7 million in wages off their books.
They faced a reckoning and were unwilling to take the steps necessary to get back into compliance for fear of what it would do to their capability to compete. Instead they chose to manipulate their books and chance it. They cannot now complain about being punished.
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This is based on their projections - they based their financials on coming 6th. Not even 8th, but 6th!
I know it looks clear in retrospect, but take Calvert Lewin alone. I bet at the end of of the 20-21 season they’d have got 40+ million for him. Instead they put their hopes on him and he’s rewarded them without about 6 appearances since. How much worse could they really have been had they sold any number of their established players and used kids instead?
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One problem with the Blueshite, was that they had a flurry of different managers over a short period, and as each to their own, wanted to spend spend spend… Take Hippopotamus Head for example… and that guy Cenk Tosun - Another £27m down the pan
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if you look at their year-by-year transfers, it “appears” that they were actually profitable in their dealings. But who knows if those numbers are accurate…
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Always felt they outspent us for some reason.
Considering in the period outlined we actually qualified for the CL every year and won the league and the CL it’s a bit odd.
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Good grief, 6th…
They also had a flurry of staff working with them to identify and buy the players - the guy from Leicester didnt last long, and the dutch guy wasnt kept on for much longer either.
The whole setup is/was a mess
It’s the 3 year period from 19-20 through 21-22. The first two years of that were significant transfer losses
19-20 was 40+ (110 vs 67)
20-21 was about 55 (62 vs 5)
the final year was more or less break even with them pulling back on their spending.
Obviously transfer deals alone dont tell the whole story, especially those from public sources like wiki, but that series of transfers does at least show that they consciously spent their way into this by continually spending more than they were bringing in. Especially as this 3 year period in question came after a period of 3-4 years of repeated big losses in the transfer market.
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They’d have been relegated already had they replaced Calvert-Lewin with a kid.
He’s scored 10 goals in the 3 seasons since.
And it is still true.
They go down last season without him.
He scored 2 goals last year. One was in a 3-0 win over Palace, one was in a draw versus Leicester. His scoring accounted for 1 point.
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