Chelsea face same Premier League fall from grace with no return as Everton – Martin Samuel
Chelsea are faced with the same fate as befell Everton amid their huge downturn in fortunes since their change of ownership, according to Martin Samuel.
The Times writer said in his column for the paper’s website on 6 February that there is no guarantee that Mauricio Pochettino’s struggling side will return to the Premier League’s elite, with the Toffees held up as evidence.
Samuel points to Everton’s presence in the then ‘Big Five’ teams in 1990 compared to the fact the club were facing relegation 31 years later and not part of the ‘Big Six’ group of teams that attempted to join the European Super League so suggest that if club’s aren’t careful they may never reach their former heights.
He wrote: “There isn’t always light at the end of the tunnel. Some tunnels can be pretty long. Chelsea will not inexorably rejoin the elite. After all, Everton didn’t.”
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It might be easy for the younger generations of Toffees supporters to overlook the fact that when the Premier League was formed in 1992 Everton had been English champions within the past five years and were part of the elite when the new top flight began.
The drop off may have been more gradual to start with, but since the Farhad Moshiri era began the decline has been far more spectacular.
There are plenty of unflattering parallels between the exit-bound majority shareholder‘s time in charge of the club and that of Todd Boehly’s at Stamford Bridge.
Both have thrown money around with abandon only to see nothing like the expected returns, with the financial concerns surrounding Goodison Park amid consecutive battles to even stay in the top flight the current legacy on Merseyside.
By contract the American ownership in West London is doing the whole thing on steroids, but a year and a half into the new Boehly-Clearlake Capital regime look no closer to getting it right.
Everton supporters might struggle to muster up too much sympathy for their Chelsea counterparts after 20 years of Roman Abramovich-funded trophy success, and the fact that the Toffees have now had two profit and sustainability referrals from the Premier League while the wild spending at Stamford Bridge under the Russian and the new owners hasn’t, yet, seen anything similar result.
But it is the sad truth of the matter at present that Everton, the dominant force in English football through the mid-1980s, are now seen as a cautionary tale for other would-be fallen giants.
In other Everton news, a pundit insists that one Toffees star deserved to be screamed at by his teammates for what he did.
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