Everton: Andy Burnham fumes at ‘injustice’ compared to Nottingham Forest sanction
Andy Burnham has issued an Everton rallying cry against Premier League “injustice” visited on the club after the second points deduction.
The Greater Manchester mayor took to Twitter on 8 April, after the Toffees lost two more points, to call for a “fight back” to “keep all options open”.
Burnham wrote: “So we now know that the Premier League have tried to take 17 points off Everton this season. We have ended up with double the penalty despite a similar level of breach as Forest.
“We should fight back against this injustice with everything we have got and keep all options open.”
It emerged in the written decision that the Premier League had actually argued for a further five-point sanction on the club (page 21, paragraph 96), on top of the 10 points they wanted and initially got in the first hearing (page 27, paragraph 87), suggesting Burham was out by two although he likely based his claim on an earlier Telegraph report (23 October) that suggested the league was recommending 12.
And after the appeal of that first sanction dropped the amount to six for a breach of £19.5million, the two latest added for a further £16.6m overspend mean Everton have currently lost eight points for a pair of breaches totalling £36.1m, with Burnham not impressed that is double the punishment of Nottingham Forest who breached their limit by £34.5m.
Manchester mayor furious with Premier League attack on Everton
On the surface of it the Premier League arguing for the Toffees to lose 15 points in a single season, not least when the league changed the rules to allow both cases to be heard in the same campaign, makes it look very much like they want the club relegated.
On the other hand the way that this system has been set out, which appears to have proven itself to be completely unworkable since the rules have already been voted out for next season, is the same as other legal cases where each side argues for their own best-case scenario and the verdict and the panel likely decide somewhere in the middle.
For the first commission to have then ended up delivering the sanction the league wanted, albeit via different workings, was partly what made that so outrageous to Everton and their supporters.
And the complete lack of uniformity between rulings is also a function of this system, where so far both Everton’s commissions, their appeal hearing, and Forest’s commission have all been heard by different panels, with various representations doing the arguing, leading to completely unequal outcomes.
The club are fighting back against this sanction as they are set to appeal, but what else they can do in terms of keeping options open is hard to say, aside from actually controlling their spending to prevent the current risk of a third breach following next term.
Those in charge of Everton have caused themselves plenty of these issues so can’t escape blame for the current predicament, but it isn’t a huge leap to form a picture of a league office that seems determined to come down on the club like a ton of bricks, which hasn’t always equally appeared the case elsewhere.
In other Everton news, a lawyer has predicted the maximum size of the possible extra points deduction to come in the dispute over stadium interest payments.
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