Following Friday’s ruling on alleged Premier League financial regulations violations, the Toffees are now in the bottom three.
Everton have won four times, drawn twice, and lost exactly half of their Premier League matches this season. They now have only four points to their name and are one place above the bottom of the table.
The Toffees were docked ten points from the Premier League on Friday morning for violating the league’s profit and sustainability regulations. Perhaps they should have spent less money on players and infrastructure and more on hiring the same lawyers as Manchester City. Facetiousness aside, this appears to be a particularly harsh blow for the Merseyside club, which has responded to the punishment by stating that they are “shocked and disappointed.” The charges brought against Everton are thought to be related to interest payments on the cost of building the Blues’ new stadium at Bramley Moore Dock.
Football finance expert Kevin Maguire told Sky Sports News about the alleged breaches: “Everton are very aggrieved.” It arose as a result of a couple of accounting issues concerning the new stadium. Everton borrowed money, and they felt that interest should have been factored into their PSR calculations. The Premier League disagreed, resulting in the points deduction. Because of Covid, there are reasons. Everton felt that, given the softening of the transfer market, they should have been treated with more compassion to account for the severity of the penalty. Covid has been somewhat overlooked in terms of their inability to sell players for the prices they believed they would have achieved otherwise.”
Never before in Premier League history has a team been docked so many points. Indeed, this is only the third time in the division’s history that such a sanction has been imposed, and neither Middlesbrough’s three points for failing to fulfill a fixture against Blackburn Rovers in 1996/97 nor Portsmouth’s nine points for going into administration in March 2010 exceed Everton’s double-figure tally.
But, after falling into the bottom three, how likely are the Toffees to survive? At first glance, things don’t appear to be too bad. They are only two points behind Luton Town in 17th place at the time of writing, and it must be said that rarely in Premier League history have three teams looked as knackered as the Hatters, Sheffield United, and Burnley. (Bournemouth, with two wins in their last three, is avoiding the same level of criticism.) In fact, you could argue that if there was ever a season where you could take a 10-point deduction and still come out on top, this is it.
But, for the sake of argument, let us pretend for a moment that this will turn out to be a normal relegation battle of normal proportions. The average number of points required to definitely survive in the Premier League over the last decade, without accounting for goal difference, has been 35, rounded up to the nearest whole number. There are statistical outliers within that mean, ranging from the 29 required in 2020/21 to the relatively inflated 38 in 2015/16, but 35 points will get you there on average.
Everton, as previously stated, is currently on four points, which means that they will need 31 points from their remaining 26 games to reach that mark. In other words, they must maintain a point-per-game ratio of 1.19. Prior to their deduction, the Toffees had 14 points from a possible 12, giving them a PPG of 1.16. It’s very bloody tight, diplomatically speaking.
Recent history is also not on the Toffees’ side. No Everton team has surpassed that average since 2020/21, and they have barely scraped by in each of the last two seasons.
That said, there’s a different vibe at Goodison Park this season, one that’s almost – whisper it – functional. Only one defeat in five had dragged the Blues to a position of relative comfort before Friday’s meteor strike, and if they can maintain that kind of form over the next few weeks, they could be out of this mess by the end of January. Regardless, there are reasons to believe that, while it may feel like a hammer blow right now, this deduction will become nothing more than an inconvenient footnote in Everton’s long and storied history.
