Everton have paid the price for Manchester City's actions, and now one thing must happen, writes Chris Beesley. The Blues have long felt the impact of City's spending, and the recent independent commission report has confirmed the extent of the financial irregularities.
Moyes's warning 15 years ago
Everton manager David Moyes could see this coming with Manchester City 15 years ago. The Blues boss had spent nothing on transfer fees in the summer of 2011 but lost Mikel Arteta to Arsenal while Roberto Mancini had splashed out almost £80million on the likes of Sergio Aguero, Samir Nasri and Co.
Moyes had steered Everton to seven wins in their previous eight matches against Manchester City but ahead of their meeting at the Etihad Stadium on September 24, which the hosts would triumph 2-0 in thanks to goals from Mario Balotelli and James Milner, the Glaswegian uttered his now famous words of: “This is like going into a gunfight and I have got a knife.
“I am going to have to do the best I can. We have to find a way of stopping Man City. It was the same last year and we won the games. It was the same in that we needed to go there and find a way of stopping them doing what they do but at the same time also playing our own stuff.
“I thought they were better last year on the year before and this year they are better again.”
The scale of City's wrongdoing
The “knife to a gunfight” remark became iconic, but this wasn’t just any gun. City were able to assemble a super team that dominated the Premier League and would later go on to grow into being Champions League and FIFA Club World Cup winners from the base that the independent commission has described as “sham contracts” as well as “relying on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs.”
Their mammoth report, which was based on documents that ran to many tens of thousands of pages with the index alone more than 750 pages, found that City recorded £360m in sponsor fees in the three seasons they won the Premier League (2011/12, 2013/14, and 2017-18) yet only £43m of it was legitimate as the rest came from their owners and was disguised.
It also describes “deliberate or reckless conduct intended to circumvent the Premier League rules” and that the “sham” scheme devised by City allowed the club “to avoid recording what would otherwise have been the largest single-season loss in Premier League history in 2009/10.”
What punishment should City face?
Although it was reduced on appeal, Everton’s original 10-point deduction in 2023/24 – for a single PSR rule breach – was at the time, the biggest sanction in English top-flight history, but given the scale of what City have been found guilty of, unless they were to win an appeal, then their punishment for disguising secret funding of more than £830million, even given the capriciousness of sanctions handed out to date, would seemingly have to be considerably harsher. Also, with it understood that there is no appetite to strip City of past titles, then they also need to be forward facing.
A single season outside the Premier League alone would not cut it for this correspondent. In my eyes, I agree with my colleague Joe Thomas in calling for City to go down to League Two, but rather than just having the inevitable quickfire jamboree back up through the divisions, winning lots of games and scoring plenty of goals in the process like Rangers were able to enjoy north of the border when they were forced to reform after their financial meltdown, this current set of owners HAS to be removed.
They have built an entire sporting dynasty and infrastructure around years of lies. There was non co-operation with the investigation with the report stating: “A number of important club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence.”
Everton's 'what ifs'
City have now won 10 league titles – one more than Everton – but only two of these were collected in the 128 years before Abu Dhabi United Group came on board. Since then, they have taken a series of the Blues’ biggest talents: Joleon Lescott (2009); Jack Rodwell (2012); John Stones (2016) and then on September 1 this year, Iliman Ndiaye.
Everton, like so many other clubs in football have been left with many years of 'what ifs?' In 2014/15, under Roberto Martinez, they recorded their highest ever Premier League points tally of 72. But in a season in which City were crowned champions, they finished fifth and missed out on Champions League football.
Where might they have been had they made it into the game’s land of milk and honey (or should that be money?) it would have certainly given them a better chance of holding on to Romelu Lukaku, head and shoulders their best striker of the modern era, for rather longer. The tables have certainly turned though on those City supporters who in December 2023 chanted to their Evertonian counterparts: “You cheating b******s, you know what you are.” But regardless of what happens, after years of living in Manchester United’s shadows, the upstarts who Sir Alex Ferguson dubbed ‘the noisy neighbours’ will always have those memories of the most successful period on their club’s history.
