Life as a fan of the team that people mostly laugh at
The last few years have been tough on Everton fans. And the most recent indignity may be the worst
Last spring, I wrote about my frequently problematic relationship with rooting for one of the English Premier League’s saddest sacks in Everton. But this season, after a rocky start, was starting to look promising. Manager Sean Dyche had gotten the team all the way up to 14th place! 14th!
However, there was one giant storm cloud on the horizon. Everton was being investigated by the Premier League for violating the league’s “Prof and Sustainability Rules.” In other words, the team lost too much money. And since there are few ways to punish such behavior in a sport with no amateur draft, Everton was given a ten point penalty in the standings. They went overnight from 14 points to 4 points. They went from 14th to 19th. It was a punishment that Draco would say “Hey, leave my name out of this.”
Effectively, Everton had three wins and a draw changed to losses. However, the standings show Everton with the same record and just an asterisk by it explaining why things don’t add up.
So just what was this big crime commited by Everton? Each year, the Premier League calculates a figure stating how much money a team can lose in a season before facing sanction. For the year 2020-21 season, that figure was £105 million. Everton lost £121 million. The ten point deduction was figured from a baseline of six points, plus one point for each multiple of £5 million the team went over. And they round up!
Everton management, such as it is, was displeased. The team said it had cooperated fully in the investigation and was transparent in its accounting. The Premier League acknowleged this, but still made its ruling. Everton is appealing the decision, but it is unlikely to be overturned before the season is over.
The Premier League hadn’t handed down a points penalty midseason since 2010 when Portsmouth went into what the Brits call “administration” or effectively what the Dodgers were like under the last year of Frank McCourt. That penalty was NINE points.
Since most people reading this are North American sports fans, you may ask, “who cares if a team loses a lot of money in one year?” The Mets and Padres spent a lot of money last year and got nothing to show from it. They’re both going concerns and their worst penalties is that people make fun of the teams on social media.
And the Premier League, unlike North American leagues, isn’t really big on competitive parity. Fans may not like Manchester City’s recent domination of the league, but they can live with it. Very few leagues in Europe have surprise winners except in smaller countries where smaller team payrolls lead to more fluctuation in the standings. Even with that, most counries just have 1-3 dominant teams.1
As I have heard it explained, the Premier League is not keen on having a mediocre team, like Everton, overspend, and drive up spending for even worse teams. This would then make all the teams at the bottom of the table financially unstable and not able to fill their roles as cannon fodder for Manchester City, Arsenal, and Liverpool.
The Premier League needed to make an example of some team to show that it means business when it says teams can’t incure huge losses. And the League has the biggest fish in its sights in Manchester City, who are facing over 100 charges of financial impropriety because they have tried to hide their losses with creative accounting.
But does the Premier League really need to worry about its teams going out of business. The only team in the top four leagues of English football to fold was Bury, which folded in 2022 while playing in the fourth tier2, League Two. A new version of the club has been restarted and is playing in the ninth tier of English football.
Usually losing ten points would be a death sentence, but Everton has one advantage this year: the bottom of the Premier League is really bad. The three teams that won promotion this year: Burnley, Sheffield United, and Luton Town are pretty bad. If the Everton squad stays healthy, they should be able to pick off enough points to stay up.
If Everton had won its match Sunday against Manchester United, they would have been safe, But they gave up a goal early and never got going and lost 3-0. Everton travels to play at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
However, the damage to Everton’s reputation, which was pretty bad to begin with, may last a long time. The team has become an unholy monster that looks it was crossbred from Frank McCourt and Donald Sterling.
The club was hoping for a financial infusion before all this went down, but the money man, Alisher Usmanov, was a Russian oligarch, and his money is no longer welcome in the U.K. Usmanov would likely have bought the naming rights to the new stadium that Everton is building and pay an inflated price for it in order to balance the books.
The team also spent £40 million on a transfer for Icelandic midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson. That money went down the drain for two teasons. First, Sigurdsson turned out to be not as good as advertised. Second, he was Sigurdsson was connected with an investigtion about sex with a minor and he didn’t play for two years. He was ultimately not charged, although privacy laws in the U.K. never said he was explicitly under investigation to begin with. But it was easy to piece together the person the police were interested in. Sigurdsson left Everton when his contract expired and he had zero transfer value. In general, Icelandic football has been doing some bad shit.
Everton may be sold to a US investment group called 777 Partners that has owned a few other European teams and they have been uniformly unsuccssful. The group seems under capitalized too. But I’m sure that won’t be a problem.
The least competitive league may be the one for Northern Ireland, where Linfield FC has won the championship 56 times. FIXTY-SIX!
For those not pyramiding at home, the top four levels of English Football make up the Football League and consist of: The Premier League, The Championship, League One, and League Two. All leagues lower than League Two are considered “nonleague” and are usually set up geographically. There are eleven recognized tiers, but they’re are still teams below the 11th tier.
How will the penalty help their finances? If the goal is to compel more reasonable spending, how does making a team more desperate help?