IF THE Government was serious about punishing Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, they would have allowed him to continue sponsoring Everton and watch them flush his ill-gotten gains down the toilet.
But now it’s left to Usmanov’s sidekick Farhad Moshiri to take sole responsibility for the demise of the worst-run club in football.
If there is any justice in the world, Everton will be relegated for the first time since 1951.
Because God knows they don’t deserve to stay up after six years of shambolic mismanagement on Moshiri’s watch.
Unlike Chelsea under ex-owner Roman Abramovich, the more Everton have spent the worse they have got.
The reverse Midas touch, if you will.
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Since 2016 they have squandered £600MILLION on new players and employed six managers and three directors of football to end up one place above the relegation zone.
Don’t forget that this is the self-styled People’s Club who totally ignored the loud objections of their supporters to appoint Rafa Benitez last summer.
As a consequence they are now in complete freefall, with new boss Frank Lampard seemingly unable to halt the decline.
No club has spent more seasons in the top- flight than Everton, one of the founding members of the Football League and a former powerhouse of the national game.
Before the arrival of Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, they were arguably the fourth-biggest club in the country behind Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.
Yet all that tradition won’t mean a thing as they try to claw their way out of trouble over the next couple of months.
With five of the Premier League’s top seven still to play and a team whose b******s have just been questioned by Lampard (right), it’s difficult to see where the points are going to come from to keep them safe.
To make matters worse, the club is due to release its latest financial figures any day now. And that’s only going to pile on the agony for the Goodison bean counters frantically trying to keep the club afloat.
Between 2018 and 2020 Everton reported net losses of £252m, more than double any other club in the country.
The new accounts will cover the 2020-21 season, when Goodison Park was shut due to Covid and work started on a £500m new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock.
So it’s a good job that the Premier League is expected to waive their financial fair play rules which usually limit clubs to accumulated losses of £105m over a three-year period.
Richarlison, Jordan Pickford and Dominic Calvert-Lewin will be whisked off by vultures picking over the carcass of a team in ruins.
But there will be no getting around the regulations if they drop into the Championship, where no one is allowed to report a loss of more than £39million and a number of teams have been docked points for overspending.
With an annual wage bill of £90m and no relegation clause contained in any of their players’ contracts, it will require a firesale on an unprecedented scale if the Toffees do go down.
Richarlison, Jordan Pickford and Dominic Calvert-Lewin will all be whisked off by the vultures picking over the carcass of a team in ruins.
But good luck getting any kind of fee for the rest of them.
As an Everton supporter old enough to remember them winning League and European titles in the 1980s, this is the sorriest state of affairs I have ever known at the club.
The only ray of light at Goodison is the news that Uefa’s strict new FFP rules will only apply to teams competing in Europe.
Because there’s more chance of Everton playing in the Championship than the Champions League for the foreseeable future.
AT 31 years old, Joe Root seems young to be going through a mid-life crisis.
But how else to explain his decision to take to the field wearing an Alice band? Next thing you know he will be getting himself a motorbike and a Maori tattoo.
But it’s only the latest in a string of poor decisions from an England captain clearly feeling the effects of carrying an entire team on his shoulders for all these years.
Because there is no excuse for ditching the two finest bowlers in England’s history to pin all our hopes on permanent crocks Jofra Archer, Ollie Robinson, Mark Wood and Olly Stone.
FOREST GREEN’S eco-warrior owner Dale Vince has confessed to financing ‘Just Stop Oil’ protesters trying to tie themselves to various Premier League goalposts over the past couple of weeks.
But instead of wheeling out stewards with bolt cutters, why not just ignore them?
Because they would think twice if they were to suddenly find themselves standing in the path of a Ronaldo thunderbolt.
And they would be even less inclined to disrupt matches if they were still chained up hours after the final whistle, the stadium lights had been turned off and they were left all alone until the next home game.
BEN FOSTER must be wondering what he has done wrong.
He is the only English Prem keeper not called into Gareth Southgate’s squad for the game with Switzerland tomorrow.
Mind you, there is still time for the 38-year-old Watford veteran after Southampton’s Fraser Forster, 34, replaced Sam Johnstone this week.
Peter Shilton could soon be on World Cup standby.
