Cod Almighty | Diary
If it's hanging, pull it
23 November 2023
At the start of this week, Everton Football Club were deducted 10 points for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules. It had taken a couple of years for an independent commission to arrive at this conclusion given the complexities of the case and the volume of the evidence submitted.
That was one single charge. Manchester City Football Club, meanwhile, are facing 115 charges.
At what point will the Sky Blues be cleared, or brought to justice? This could rumble on for literally decades. What kind of world are we living in where a club could allegedly break the rules to such a degree that it basically becomes impossible to investigate and draw conclusions before the year 2065?
Until then, presumably, Man City can continue doing what they’re doing. Maybe it’s in their best interests to add to that figure of 115? You know, just so no one ever gets to the bottom of it. By 2065, they will have secured their status as the greatest and most successful football club in English history, and it’ll never ultimately be known whether they did it legitimately or not.
Man City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, has a reported net worth of £17bn. To put that into some perspective, if he spent £10 every second of every day, it’d take him 55 years to run out.
Everton, like the other 19 Premier League clubs, are allowed to make a loss of £105m over any rolling three-year period. They lost over £300m up to the end of the 2021-22 period, and even after deducting £175m of ‘good spending’ (on things like women’s football, youth football and community projects) they were still £19.5m over the accepted amount.
On the The Rest Is Football podcast, Sporting Intelligence’s football finance expert Nick Harris listened as Alan Shearer said he felt that, in the context of where modern football is at, it seemed "incredibly harsh" to be arguing over a figure of "just" £19.5m — to which Harris replied, "Has football lost all perspective when we’re talking about only £19.5m?"
Your West Yorkshire Diary won’t labour the point, because we all know it by now, but £19.5m would go a long way in the fourth division. Split fairly between 24 clubs, that would give Grimsby Town over £800,000. I get your point, Alan, but clearly Justin’s elbow never did knock any sense into you.
Everton’s mistake was in making just one. Had they made another 114 it might have bought them enough time to finish in the top half by 2030.
It’s like another world, isn’t it? I found myself watching YouTube videos the other night of NASA’s Mariner space program of the 1970s. I find space fascinating, but I know I’ll never go there. I’m not sure I’d want to go into space, in all honesty. You might never come back. You see where I’m going with this analogy.
Back on earth, down in the fourth division, Town are preparing for the visit of bottom side Sutton United this weekend. The Amber & Chocolates, as they’re only sometimes known, began their season by thumping Notts County 5-1, which now feels like an ethereal event. They’re not too shabby these days, having beaten Bradford and drawn against Colchester and Tranmere, Their last league defeat was a month ago.
But let’s not go down this path of bigging up the opposition. Have they scored 13 goals in their past four games? No. Do they have four attacking players who have scored 23 goals between them? Probably not (I haven’t had time to check).
Danny Rose is doing what we all hoped he would, with seven to his name already. Rekeil Pyke has exceeded expectations with six, while getting five from Donovan Wilson feels very acceptable given his limited availability. And Abo Eisa bagged five before we’d even had chance to work out whether this team was any good or not.
Afraid I can’t be so complimentary about our defence, but Harvey Cartwright has shown improvement and Anthony Driscoll-Glennon has rediscovered some confidence. There’s plenty for Sutton to ponder, so let’s leave them pondering.
UTM!