I’ll have a bitter please...It’s the Everton thread

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Erm that’s what I was insinuating but feel free to come off the long run.

Total aside for this thread but I’ve just had my (Evertonian) brother stating that Everton have been reigning league champions for 20 years - one more than Liverpool.

OK, I thought this was bollocks but Everton were reigning champions during both world wars when football was suspended. Christ, the Bitters can be pedantic as well as petty, can’t they?

I think I’ll point out that, on his basis, it’s spent more time in the Anfield trophy cabinet than the Goodison park one: hoist by his own petard!

Everton tried fiddling the losses onto Covid but the figure was more than every other team.

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Haha @Mascot

Was it? Didn’t look like it to me.

This a really good piece from Tony Evans relating to the Everton situation.

What Everton fans haven’t really considered through their rage is that had PSR not given the Premier League reason to put the brakes on their profligate spending, they may not have had a football club to support within a decade. Or best case scenario, Ridsdale’s Leeds Utd. That’s the reality of this.

The media are soft soaping this with the line that Everton’s punishment was for a paltry £20m breach. No it wasn’t. It was £125m, as the rules state clubs must be attempting to break even, but there is a £105m tolerance for losses within that. If clubs are within that £105m tolerance they need to be showing how they are actively bringing it down.

Everton knew they were sailing close the wind of their permitted losses. At that point they made a decision to throw even more money at the playing squad. That’s not careless. That’s absolutely fucking stupid, reckless and taking the piss.

The point Tony Evans makes in his piece about the fans should be stapled to the foreheads of any journalists pushing the ‘This is just punishing the fans’ line. Drop the solipsism. I’m sure Everton fans are feeling hard done by, but maybe they should be feeling some regret at how little they scrutinised what Moshiri and Usmanov were up to rather than celebrating all the money that was being pumped into the team. And if we are going to feel sorry for fans, how about Leicester’s fans who’s club played by the rules and went down instead of the Ev. Do they matter Alan Shearer? Or are they out of sight and mind as soon as they are in the Championship?

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Their previous strong case consisted of

  • We should have got more for Richarlison but Spurs wouldn’t pay £80m

  • we were budgeting for a top six finish, so it isn’t fair to punish us for not making it

  • Covid for some reason that we can’t explain cost us twice as much as every other club.

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Spot on, and if you want to make the case that other clubs have to keep up with it and ultimately you end up losing communities. The football league is full of teams on the edge, teams that effectively just been stagnant because that’s all they can do.

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The new strong case consists of:

  • We should have got more for Richarlison but Spurs wouldn’t pay £75m

  • we were budgeting for a top eight finish, so it isn’t fair to punish us for not making it

  • Covid cost us twice as much as every other club as our players had adverse reactions to the vaccine. E.g. Richarlison thought he was a chicken.

Everton do have some cause for consideration on these new charges considering the prior charges that are still under appeal already cover a portion of the timeframe now being charged. This is partly an issue of a new timeline on when accounts are reviewed and so Everton so have a strong point to make. But that is only an argument for mitigation of the punishment given, not a defense against the charges.

Their other complaints appear to be based on emotionally scrambling for any false equivalency they can find:

  • “Chelsea had the debts to Roman wiped out because of the Russian sanctions and so similar consideration should be given for the impact of those sanctions on no longer being able to book revenue from a similarly sanctioned Russian businessman” Ok, maybe some leeway should be given to grant time for a replacement sponsorship deals to be found to plug the holes that were left when they could no longer take Usmanov’s money. But they are not plugging those holes because they were not legit deals and so no one else wants to offer that money.

  • “Liverpool were close to administration and didnt get penalized”. Right, this isnt about debt per se, it is about spending. G&H put debt onto the club to buy it that they couldn’t repay. That is not the same as acquiring debt to overspend on players. Had we have got into that debt because of applicable operational costs, and the rules were in place 15 years earlier, then sure we’d have been hit with a punishment. But we didnt and they werent. So the one thing is not like the other.

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Christ, that’s pathetic.

Their defence is that rules that were put in place to prevent situations like Hicks and Gillette nearly destroying Liverpool, shouldn’t have to be followed because Hicks and Gillette nearly destroyed Liverpool?

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Just to be fair on the Richarlison point - Everton’s argument was that they had to sell Richarlison by the deadline for the financial returns and because they were close to that deadline they didn’t have time to negotiate a better deal which would have eliminated the £20m overspend.

When I originally heard their complaint I heard it reported as “Tottenham wouldn’t negotiate” but it was actually “The deadlines set by FFP/the PL restricted our ability to get maximum profit from Richarlison’s sale”.

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And whose fault is it they were so close to the deadline at that level of debt?

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I’m not defending them, just clarifying the argument they’ve put forward.

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Considering how Richarlison has played for Spurs , I do think Spurs were ripped off

Didn’t understand that transfer at the time.

Conte was the manager. He did have a different yardstick to measure players. Some of his disagreements with clubs has to be with his preference of more experienced players while ignoring the upside of youth.

Richarlison wasn’t old when he transferred to Spurs though

Richarlison is premier league quality player. But not someone to put a sizable football fee on. Somewhere on 30m would have been fair.

A great player in a golden era for the Blues…

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