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Everton officials set to come face to face with Premier League chief at Tuesday meeting after points deduction
Everton officials are set to come “face to face” with Premier League CEO Richard Masters just days after the club were hit by a 10-point deduction for a profit and sustainability breach, Paul Joyce reports.
According to the Times journalist for the paper’s website on 20 November acting Toffees chief executive Colin Chong will be representing the club at the league’s shareholders meeting on Tuesday 21 November.
The event comes just four days after the independent commission, to which Everton were referred by the Premier League, imposed a record-breaking top flight penalty on the club for a single spending breach.
Masters gave evidence at the hearing held last month [The Athletic, 17 November) and has now been the recipient of direct communication from Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram who is furious about the “grossly unfair” punishment against the Toffees.
While Chong himself released a statement immediately after the points deduction announcement on Friday indicating the club were “shocked and disappointed” by the “wholly unjust” sanction, and they would appeal.
Frosty
It is next to impossible for the fallout from the commission hearing not to dominate discussions among the 20 top flight clubs and the league representatives.
Any direct contact between Chong and Masters is bound to be far from warm given the feelings of injustice at Goodison Park as a result of the heavy punishment.
The club had been working closely with the league prior to the referral to the commission, and while they have since accepted they breached the spending limit they feel that their case for mitigation was strong.
With an appeal set to come before the end of the season in front of a separate board it is possible that direct communication between Everton and the Premier League on this specific issue may have to be limited on the basis that they are in opposition on the case.
But with the league office one of the various authorities who must be satisfied in order for the pending 777 Partners takeover to go through, and the shareholders meeting necessarily covering league-wide business, they will clearly not be entirely separated.
Quite how the points deduction will effect the working relationship between the top flight and one of it’s original members remains to be seen, but it is highly unlikely that it will have had a positive effect.
In other Everton news, Chris Sutton has been left shocked by a suggestion that the Premier League “would never recover” from.