RandoEFC

The only teams that can say they would have stayed up if we'd have been punished earlier are Leicester and Burnley. They can both still fuck off though because Leicester breached the rules themselves and were allowed to pay a settlement and Burnley can fuck off because they're already back in the Premier League to profit from our 10 point penalty now (and are hilariously the only club to be behind us after just TWELVE games even with a ten point penalty applied). Leeds have a better case than Southampton or Forest(!?) who have also been mentioned. Southampton would still have finished bottom if we'd been docked 10 points last season and fuck knows how Forest think it involves them given that they weren't in the league for most of the period in question and finished above us last season anyway, so I'll give Leeds that. Partisan ranting aside though, I stand by the part that the Premier League should be responsible for paying any damages, especially to Leeds and Burnley who they effectively told to do one two years ago when they complained about our finances... which they did because Everton had approached them and worked with them closely to ensure we were compliant... oh I'm back to the start again.

This idea around Leeds etc suing Everton for their relegation surely cannot be stood up legally. Everton have been punished (excessively). They can't also then be held culpable for being punished too late. I'm still staggered by this two days later. The alleged overspend is £20m and there are two mitigations that could make the difference alone. One, Gylfi Sigurdsson was a £45m asset that we ended up losing for nothing due to circumstances completely beyond our control. Of course he wasn't worth £45m by then (or ever) but that's our club record signing and the club claimed they could have at least sued him for breach of contract to the tune of £10m but chose not to because there was no need to kick a man while he's down. Two, Everton decided to fund the stadium themselves because Moshiri could get help from Usmanov to fund it. Then the Ukraine war kicked in and Usmanov had his assets frozen costing the club up to £200m in naming rights. Of course, Usmanov is not a savoury character and I'm glad he has nothing to do with the club but if Everton had known this would happen, they'd have taken a loan to fund the stadium instead and never have ended up with the balance sheet looking the way it does. All that and you end up only £20m outside the threshold you can get away with. The club haven't denied that they've broken the rules but surely with these mitigations you get a fine or a suspended points penalty so you get the opportunity to prove it's a one-off... 10 points is an absolute outrage.

Castellon scored a 95th minute goal to go 4-2 up and take me from a full refund to a £3.25 profit. Glorious .

The Salford one cropped up for me when I was looking through the fixtures, I had them on a double chance. It was a close game and Gillingham's first half goals looked like they were against the run of play. Salford were probably overpriced there but you can't win them all. Shameless off-topic brag coming here but I put together a silly 80/1 accumulator for today based entirely on my own research into mainly the English and German schedules this weekend. It actually came off at reduced odds of 48/1 because one game was postponed. I've been trying to put my maths to good use to calculate some probabilities and take my own biases out of my betting. It's a bit nerdy but I do believe I can be profitable but until I find a good formula/strategy I'm playing with tiny stakes to experiment so sadly the winner above isn't paying for a month's rent or anything .

Dumbarton didn't really turn up and needed a penalty to secure a 1-0 win unfortunately. Now looking at a £10 > £13.25 week at best.

People are mainly talking about it because the central argument against points penalties in that case was that it was the owners who plotted to ditch English football and the fans and footballing side of the club shouldn't be punished for it, yet that logic apparently doesn't apply when clubs go into administration or breach FFP. Anyone who thought those clubs should have been hit with a heavier punishment, possibly points penalties, has been waiting for the moment that another club gets penalised in exactly that manner to call out the hypocrisy and now here we are, Everton taking a sporting sanction because of the incompetent running of the club, i.e. the actions of their owners. The worst thing is, Moshiri, who has overseen this decade-long shitshow, just gets to sell the club off and take the money while the staff, players and fans of the club are left behind to pick up the pieces. This isn't the first time this has been raised. If you go back to the time when the punishment for the Super League Six clubs was being debated, plenty of people were saying we'll hang on a minute, what about when Portsmouth, Leeds, etc. were hit with points penalties? Why was it okay for the fans to suffer for the actions of their owners in those instances? The link is that you can't have it both ways. Either the owners get punished separately and the clubs themselves get left alone from a sporting point of view (which simply couldnt ever work) or the clubs themselves get punished for their actions and the fans just have to deal with it because the nature of football nowadays is that these aren't football clubs that you're a part of anymore, they're businesses that you observe from the outside with an emotional investment.

Does it? I don't know if I agree with that but either way, there's no way the reputation allows damage of having to kick them out of the league or even reassign the titles they've won in retrospect wouldn't do worse reputational damage.

I get why you're saying this but Everton were referred for this breach back in March where there was every chance we could have been relegated anyway by now, and there's no way they could have known by that point what this season would look like. Nobody would have looked at Burnley pissing the Championship at that point and said they'd be as bad as Luton this and not many people would have said that if Everton stay up, next season they can probably survive even if we smash them with a massive points penalty. What's fishy is that Everton approached the Premier League back in 2019 when we were getting close to being in trouble, asked them to advise on how we could make sure we didn't commit a breach, did everything they said and then suddenly this March they decided they wanted to go after us. It's all linked to the independent regulator that's been suggested and the Premier League wanting to show they can police the league properly themselves.

I'm really not worried about finishing below Burnley, Luton or Sheffield United. We're only two points from safety even if this sanction isn't reduced on appeal. It's the principle of it. A 10 point fine for a single breach of less than £20m of over spending while we have built a new stadium from scratch and which hasn't even made us better as a team is an objectively unfair punishment. One breach of anything in 30 years. No suspended sentences, no slaps on the wrist, just straight into the largest sporting penalty the competition has seen in its history.

We'll see in good time. I'm all for clubs being punished if they broke the rules and Everton very well may have but a 10 point penalty for a single breach of £19m is totally excessive I'm afraid. They've gone way overboard in their efforts to show that they don't need an independent regulator. I think if they'd have given us 4-6 points or something then enough of the media would have shrugged it off but early indications on social media suggest to me that 10 points is raising plenty of eyebrows outside of the Everton bubble. You've already got Jamie Carragher, Martin Samuel, TalkSport weighing in on Everton's "side". This could all get very messy between Everton's appeal and the legal action taken by the other four relegated clubs against Everton which has been legitimised by this judgement. Although I don't see what case Southampton and Leeds have because they didn't finish 18th and therefore would have been relegated even if this was acted upon at the time or last season.

Everton are in that tier of club which are big enough for the Premier League to go "look, we made an example of one of our football clubs so we don't need an independent regulator to come and interfere with us, thanks, bye" but also not in the group of clubs that the Premier League depend upon for their commercial revenue. This is why some clubs are, for example, hit with a £20m fine for trying to create a Super League which would have effectively put an end to the Premier League as we know it, but not a competitive penalty because "you can't punish the fans for the actions of the owners", but other clubs are smashed with the greatest sporting sanction in the competition's history, greater than what you'd get for going into administration, for spending £19m over the threshold needed for an FFP breach. "Special" is one word for it I suppose. @Dan I don't think you'll have much luck with yours because I think it relates to the season before last which means Burnley are the club who would have stayed up at our expense. Maybe you have an argument that if Burnley had been in the Premier League last season instead of Everton then you'd have finished above them and stayed up but I don't see how that could ever be legally proven either way. I'm sure Leicester, Burnley and Leeds will all be exploring their options. People have talked about those clubs suing us but I don't see how we could be held responsible for the Premier League failing to charge us until two years after the breach occurred. Not to mention the fact that they've signed off on every penny we've spent over the past 2 years leading up to this referral. Surely they're the ones who should be subject to legal action and not Everton.

The club are set to appeal a 10 point deduction and I'm sure that'll get it reduced but I really think that punishment is objectively wrong unless some details come out that we're not aware of. See my previous posts for reasoning regarding the fact that the Premier League have babysat Everton's finances for the last two years only to turn around and cry foul for political reasons. Thankfully I think we can afford a 10 point hit without ending up relegated this season. All I'll say is that I look forward to seeing what City get in that case.

This week's offering. Castellon vs Atletico Baleares takes us to the Spanish third tier. Castellon top the table with 10 wins from 12 this season. Their last eight victories in a row have been by 2+ goals. At home especially they have a 100% record with all but the first of their 6 wins being by 2+ goals. Baleares sit second from bottom with 1 point and 0 goals from their six away games, with four of their five defeats being by 2+ goals. The second pick is slightly riskier. Dumbarton are 3rd in League Two and host second from bottom Elgin. Dumbarton have a decent home record but it's more about Elgin's away form. Five defeats in a row, three of them by 2+ goals including a 6-0 and a 5-1. If you look further back and include last season, Elgin actually have 11 defeats in their last 12 away games, 8 of which have been by 2+ goals. Should be a good double at 2.25.

Braverman also got sacked towards the end of the Liz Truss era because she broke the ministerial code and/or was responsible for some sort of leak linked to national security, then was reappointed by Sunak within a couple of weeks. Incredible that she got the job back.

I haven't been paying that much attention lately but I've just seen on Twitter while I was having a shit that David Cameron has just been made Foreign Secretary. What the fuck is going on? How that party are allowed to burn through three horrendous prime ministers in one term and allowed to bring another one of their failed former prime ministers out of retirement to become a minister of state by putting him in the House of Lords overnight when he hasn't even been democratically elected to an actual seat, all without the public having any means to recall them for a fresh general election until they're legally forced to, really doesn't seem like a functioning democracy.

@Viva la FCB is listed in the Hall of Fame for a ninth time following his victory in the first round of this season's league. His streak of 9 consecutive correct picks is one short of the record for a single round. Congratulations!

The 2023-24 table after one round with @Viva la FCB at the top:

Yeah pretty much all of our fans have compared Branthwaite to John Stones. The conversation now isn't about building a team around him but about when he moves on and for how much. Great defender.

Arsenal got their eventually. Juventus managed to get their two goal lead and then conceded one so that leg gets a push. £10 > £12.40 in what will surely be the smallest win of the season . But instead of focusing on the £2.40 element I'm going to choose to focus on that being £12.40 better than another -£10 would have been.

Nothing particularly inventive for me this week. Juventus have won their last 4 home games in a row while Cagliari have picked up 2 points in 5 on the road, scoring just 3 goals, two of which were at hapless Salernitana the other week. I think Arsenal vs Burnley speaks for itself. A very low price for that leg but just trying to get a winner this weekend.

It's not really on though is it? The Saudis paid nearly £50m for him reportedly. You can't have clubs getting around FFP to get their hands on a £40m+ player like that because their owners have clubs in other leagues. And I'm not saying the Watford/Udinese situation was any better, nor do I think it would be any better if 777 completed their takeover of Everton and then started using the other clubs they're a part of to help each other out with players or FFP or whatever. Even if Neves only did mostly fill Newcastle's bench, get away with that then this summer Al Fateh will be signing Mbappe for £300m and then sending him on a 3 year loan to St James' Park. Not an entirely serious example but this needs putting to bed before it becomes a "thing". Another reason state ownership in football can get fucked.

Cartagena dominated the first half to be fair. 8 shots vs 2 for Leganes. They crumbled though after the first goal.

Should have just gone for this as my tip @Dan . Midtjylland won 4-1 as well. Hate it when a red card ruins a bet.

Glentoran got a red card at 2-1 up and ended up losing. ️

This is me for the weekend. Glentoran have had a few iffy home results earlier on this season but won their last two home games 6-0 and 3-1. Carrick have conceded 37 goals in 14 games this season, losing 5 of their 7 away games including scorelines of 0-4, 0-9 and 1-4. Hvidovre are newly-promoted and have 3 draws and 12 losses in their 15 games this season. They haven't necessarily been getting battered all the time but have had some heavy defeats to the stronger sides in the league. Midtjylland are unbeaten in 7 league games so should be a safe bet to at least bag a win here and hopefully by more than 1. Going for selections this time where minimising the risk of the team not winning is my priority over looking for teams that are likely to dish out hammerings but may be less consistent.