Another two off for Everton, and they've got off lightly

Their previous points deduction only took them up to the end of the 2022/23 season, so any surprise at this being expanded to take into account the following season is... bizarre.

So it’s going to go to the wire, then, but not really in the way that the Premier League would have wanted. I’m not talking about the race for the title. That’s very much the shiny thing that they would like everybody to be focused on. Three huge clubs from three even huger cities. One point between them. Seven games to play.

With Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool between them also having plenty of rivals, a lot of people who might otherwise have been considered ‘neutrals’ will be drawn into feeling as though they have something to win or lose by taking an interest.

But at the bottom of the table it doesn’t really feel as though there are any winners to be found. Both Burnley and Sheffield United are effectively lost causes, even though a run of form in their final few matches that neither have shown themselves to be capable of all season could mathematically save one or both of them.

The appearance of that word “mathematically” at this time of the season is football’s equivalent to a string quartet setting up on the deck of a wobbling cruise liner. But that third relegation place remains very much up for grabs, with five clubs within five points of the dotted line, and there’s every chance that the matter won’t even be decisively settled on the pitch.

The points deductions awarded against Everton and Nottingham Forest have introduced a new element of jeopardy to the relegation battle, and this week Everton have been back in for round two with a second points deduction of the season, this time for breaching PSR rules during the 2022/23 season. So, what is going on here? How did the independent commission reach their conclusion that they should be docked two points, when six was considered a fair sanction for similar offences from the previous season?

The reason why Everton have been sanctioned twice this season is fairly straightforward. The previous points deduction was for the 2021/22 season and the second for the 2022/23 season. PSR is calculated on a rolling three-year basis. At its most basic level, if your losses amount to in excess of £105m over the previous three seasons (with quite a few fairly sensible exclusions, such as infrastructure spending and women’s teams), then you’ve broken the rules. The rules that all the clubs agreed to when they were introduced. Everton lost £395m between 2019 and 2023, including an £89m loss for the 2022/23 season alone.

A lot of these losses have been mitigated. There are the infrastructural costs of the new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium, for example, and financial losses incurred as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Everton’s reported Covid losses were extremely high and this didn’t go unnoticed two years ago, when clubs reported them. Everton weren’t among the seven Premier League clubs to bring claims against insurers for these losses, and it remains unclear why their losses were so much higher than anybody else’s.

A study carried out by Sheffield Hallam University which was published in August 2022 found that Premier League clubs had cumulatively lost £800m due to the pandemic. But Everton’s losses, as reported through their company accounts, amounted to “losses of at least £170 million…with further market analysis indicating that figure could be as much as £50 million higher”, according to CEO Denise Barrett-Baxendale, an astonishingly high figure that has never really been properly explained away. Certainly, when the independent commission reviewed those figures, they seemed unimpressed. “The position that Everton finds itself in is of its own making,” was their comment on the club’s predicament.

The club’s reaction to this second points deduction was, frankly, disingenuous in the extreme. “The Premier League does not have guidelines which prevent a club being sanctioned for alleged breaches in financial periods which have already been subject to punishment”, they claimed in their statement on the matter, when they surely knew—as everybody else did—that the calculations were made on a rolling year-by-year basis. They presumably also knew by the time they made their statement that the commission had already taken into account the peculiarities of the club’s position:

Everton were entitled to credit, in mitigation, in respect of the following matters: a) the fact that the club has already been penalised in the Everton FY22 Proceedings for losses in years that overlap with the years at issue in these proceedings; b) the loss of sponsorship revenue from USM Services Limited; and c) the fact that Everton admitted its breach of the PSR at the first opportunity.

So, in other words, the two point deduction that they did end up being handed was already reduced to take into account those circumstances. And yes, the sudden removal of Alisher Usmanov as the club’s “main sponsor” shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shock to the club, but it’s hardly as though Usmanov severed all ties with Everton, an eye-browsing state of affairs which has never been explained or, it would seem, even really investigated. According to The Guardian’s report, “A second football manager claimed how he was also interviewed for the Everton job with Usmanov present, leaving him with the impression that the club belonged to the tycoon.”

So yes, there are a lot of moving parts to this: the chaotic spending under a succession managers who seemed to be pulled one after the other from a hat with “Football Managers I Have Heard Of” printed on it, the colossally expensive new stadium, and the world-altering pandemic, for a start. And perhaps the biggest mistake that the Premier League has made in this has been promising from the outset that all matters relating to PSR breaches would be sorted by the end of this season.

A lot of people have been complaining about the amount of time that it is taking for Manchester City’s 115 cases to proceed through the disciplinary process. There’s a case for arguing that there should be a considerably more forensic examination of what, exactly, Usmanov’s actual position was within the club, because he sure didn’t look like he was ‘only’ a sponsor when a number of managers claimed that he was present for interviews for the vacant managerial position there after Frank Lampard was given the heave-ho in January 2023.

Instead, Everton supporters—or at least a sizeable and very vocal proportion of them—have sought to focus, without any evidence whatsoever, on Premier League “corruption” rather than the rank mismanagement of club owner Farhad Moshiri. It seems reasonable to point a finger of incompetence at the Premier League over the way in which they have managed this entire sorry farrago, but to accuse them of corruption is a big claim and we still await the receipts for that extremely loaded allegation.

I suspect we’ll be waiting a long time. What would a corrupt motive for Everton being docked points even be? If there was an ‘agenda’ against the club, wouldn’t there be easier ways of manifesting it than this… nonsense? They’ve been in the top flight without interruption for 70 years. If there was an inherent anti-Everton bias within the Premier League, there have been various points over the last thirty years when they could have just been shuffled downwards with a couple of errant referee’s whistles. Their team was so bloody terrible that fans likely wouldn’t even have noticed.

And it bears repeating that Everton’s escapologist acts of the last couple of years have had ramifications for other clubs who did stay within the PSR rules. The supporters of Burnley and Leeds United would be justified in being incandescent at having been relegated by narrow margins when Everton had been overspending or, as some might call it, cheating. (The idea that it’s somehow not cheating if you overspend your money so badly that you don’t even improve the team is bunkum, by the way.)

So, Nottingham Forest will feel aggrieved, Everton are aggrieved, and the show keeps rolling on. There is something tragicomical about this happening at exactly the same time that the Premier League’s Richard Masters, who’d previously claimed that he would not be lobbying for an independent regulator to be abandoned or watered down, should have had an article in The Times (£) arguing that, uh, English football doesn’t need regulation. Don’t worry, Richard. It looks like it’s going to be a completely lame duck anyway.

What is really striking about this case is how riven through it is with incompetence. It’s not that the principle behind these rules is ‘unfit for purpose’, or anything like that. But their implementation has been inconsistent, the timetables given have been both unrealistic and stupid, and while the decision not to have a schedule of punishments was understandable—no-one wants a situation in which clubs are calculating the value of points deductions versus overspending—it has also led to a process which has appeared opaque and inconsistent from the outside.

But that incompetence doesn’t end with the Premier League. You could expand it to the FA, who tamely ceded control of the financial governance of the game to individual leagues years ago. It certainly applies to the senior management of Everton Football Club, who have been extremely fortunate not to become the people who took the club down from the top flight for the first time in almost seven decades, and it might be argued that it applies to a good number of the players they’ve signed, too.

Everton are going to appeal again, so the league table that you see now might be wrong, or it might not be. And that in itself sums up this mess. Perhaps next time, rather than having exclusions, they could have inclusions instead, so wages, transfer fees and so on only. Perhaps they should just have a hard cap for all that spending of £1bn a season, and if owners want to throw money like that on a bonfire, then good luck to them.

But more than anything else, perhaps the game’s financial wealth, of which there is a considerable amount, should be distributed more evenly in the first place, so that the likelihood of club owners (and ‘main sponsors’) don’t treat the Premier League like a Las Vegas casino is reduced. But until everybody in the game starts looking beyond the end of their own noses, the only thing that seems likely is increasing inequity between an ever-diminishing number of clubs that can win trophies and everybody else.