Horrendous Everton finances make relegation even more dangerous

As if there hasn’t been enough bad news for Everton on the pitch recently, the club’s latest accounts make for truly grim reading.

Everton have been struggling financially for a while now and the latest published numbers underline the scale of the problem behind the scenes.

According to the Liverpool Echo the Toffees’ have made losses totalling £260 million over the past two years.

As the article makes clear a significant part of this is down to the Covid policies, which included closing grounds for basically an entire season last time round.

This situation was a disaster for the Blues’ in particular because they were already significantly in the red after years of extravagant spending on players and managers, including all the pay-outs for past sacked coaches.

Now, on top of all that has come the fallout from the Ukraine war, which led Everton to cut ties with Alisher Usmanov due to sanctions imposed on wealthy Russians with links to Moscow.

This meant the club has lost out on the funds that Usmanov’s companies had paid in sponsorship especially with regards to the new stadium.

And, the Bramley Moore Dock project is another serious financial weight that the club have to carry at the moment.

With all these financial problems and then throw the possibility of relegation into this mix, you’ve got a near perfect storm.

Given all this, the prospect of Everton going down is a truly frightening one and it could possibly see the club in a financially terminal position.

Taking stock of all this chaos, it’s truly shocking to see how far this club has fallen and how quickly. It is almost impossible to imagine how a club can have a billionaire owner spend £500 million more or less on players and coaches, and still end up in this incredible mess facing relegation from the Premier League.

So, if the Toffees’ do go down at the end of this season could the club possibly become essentially bankrupt and go into administration? It’s almost impossible to imagine but that might well happen and that would represent the end of one of English football’s great institutions.

I suppose it’s possible although not certain. But, if the Blues are relegated to life in the Championship, then it seems almost inevitable they will lose most of their best players.

Let’s be honest, would Jordan Pickford who is England’s goalkeeper, Brazil star Richarlison, Dominic Calvert-Lewin also a recent England international stay at Goodison Park? I doubt it.

In addition, others like Demarai Gray and Anthony Gordon are obviously Premier League quality footballers and would almost certainly be on the radar of several such clubs.

If all those players were to go, then that would essentially be the spine of this current side ripped out and there’s obviously no way Everton could replace these individuals with new ones of equivilent ability.

Furthermore, the club wouldn’t get anywhere near the real market value for most of these players if they had to initiate a fire-sale on the back of relegation. So, they wouldn’t be able to do much to plug the financial gaps through player sales.

All-in-all then the next few months are going to be argualbly the most important in this once great football club’s long history.