Wow! Everton football club has been punished. Penalised. Some might say ‘crucified’ (that’ll be the Everton fans), by the full might of the Premier League. And deservedly so. They know the rules. They know how keen the League is to implement those rules and come down hard as fucking nails on those teams which break them. And yet still they blatantly and (almost) intentionally overspent the allowable overspend by 7.9 million pounds!!!! Holy shit! That’s enough to buy… a footballer. Like, a non-league one maybe, not a good one. That’s enough to refinance the entire… shower room at one end of the ground. So it’s a lot of money!! And Everton fucked up, BADLY, which earned them a 10-point deduction. Plummeting them to the (2nd) bottom of the table. Where they’ve been lingering for the last few years anyway. So they’ll probably get relegated, get sued by a bunch of horrible clubs who felt ‘unfairly relegated by Everton’s excessive spending’, spend a year in the Championship before getting fined again because they can’t unload their expensive players and their income’s reduced by 90%, whilst their brand new stadium (they’re cheap) hasn’t even opened yet. Everton in 2025 will mean just a particular kind of mint. No-one will remember the club. It’ll be gone.

And you get exactly what you deserve in this world. Especially under the vigilant and watchful eyes and immense powers of the… The Premier League!!!

Unless you happen to be Manchester City. Or Chelsea. In which case the rules are different. They have to be. Because they use much cleverer lawyers and forensic accountants than Everton could ever afford. Or that the Premier League could afford. And they’re just too rich to ever receive any kind of proper punishment. A financial punishment would affect neither club, however many hundreds of millions it was.

All clubs are allowed to overspend (ie have a loss) of £109million over 3 years. Everton exceeded this by 7.9 mil. Because of hiked interest rates on their new stadium, and the loss of a 200million pound contract for naming rights because it was with a Russian company who were obviously banned one the shit hit Kyiv.

Manchester City’s don’t have such an issue. Their naming rights are owned by the company which owns the club. Oh no, that’s ‘illegal’. Sorry. What was I thinking? The naming rights for the Etihad stadium are with Etihad Airlines, who, amazingly coincidentally, kind of, like, ‘share’ an owner with the company who own the Football Club. What are the chances?? And no-one can find in the Man City filing cabinet the actual naming agreement. So how much they pay for ‘naming rights’ can vary every year. And it does. To an amount very close to the amount of debt the club has in excess of what its allowed. Again. Just a coincidence. Correlation is NOT causation. And there are 115 such ‘irregularities’ about to come to court in the new year.

And you know that whatever happens, City won’t lose points. By applying simple maths, they should receive a deduction of 473 points. But no-one said life was simple.

Unless you’re Everton, then it’s easy peasy. And very depressing. If grossly fucking unfair.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx