Everton’s Double Jeopardy and the Farce of the Premier League’s PSR

In November, Evertonians felt for the first time since two and a half years of uncertainty and agony, two unsuccessful management stints, numerous near-relegation scenarios, and a stunning 10-point deduction from the Premier League, as to where they stood.

Whatever the outcome of Everton’s appeal against a historic and utterly unjust sanction may be, rally behind the squad, Sean Dyche, and the players; cheer, entice, and support the team to Premier League safety before pausing to assess the situation this summer. That appeared to be a realistic option because of the manager’s performance between early October and mid-December, as well as the possibility that he would accrue enough points in the 17 games left in the season.

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, if it seems 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 five points for transgressing and then one point for every £5m by which they went over the permitted £105m threshold.

And, although informing competing teams in March of last year that the intricacy of the case would make it impossible to reach a verdict on Everton’s case in time for the ruling to take effect in the same season, the entire procedure, including appeals, can now be completed by the end of May. Yes, we might not find out who has been demoted for another week until the 2023–24 season ends!

In any event, the League has quietly conceded that the current spending regulations, which might force Everton to drop points based on the resolution of their appeal against the deduction made in November, will be eliminated in August in favor of a new structure that is more heavily weighted toward wages-to-turnover ratio than absolute spending caps.

All of those 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. 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…

The Premier League has devolved into a joke as a sporting event, which is quite disheartening. It was no longer a legitimate competition many years ago, undercut by poor match officials and weekly controversies surrounding Video Assistant Refereeing. 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.

Today, unfairness and inequality are ingrained in both elite English football and the

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 English clubs from competing in Europe following the tragedy at Heysel.

Introduced in 2014 PSR, under the guise of protecting clubs from spending beyond their means, simply cemented 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, that cartel began the process of pulling the ladder up behind them, and attempted 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.

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. 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 while 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 PL 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.

That gamble demonstrably failed, 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 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 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.

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, having already whacked them with the biggest sporting sanction in English topflight 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.)

Inversely, the Premier League’s actions are pushing Everton toward an unsustainable state that might ultimately lead to the club’s collapse. At this point, everything feels like revenge, with the main point of contention being the consideration of interest payments on loans to fund the one thing that could make the club sustainable: the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock.

Unfortunately, in yet another damning indictment of the modern game, it appears that the Toffees’ immediate future will be determined in a courtroom rather than on the field; the club’s most important addition is a “super silk” KC who can potentially focus on “double jeopardy, autrefois convict, and the flawed nature of an entire process that, With all the uncertainties surrounding the club’s future ownership and the unfair playing field in the Premier League, Everton will still feel like they are at the foot of Mount Everest even if Laurence Rabinowitz and his team are successful. however, they will at least live to fight another day.

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