Man City cannot escape awkward truth over 115 charges after needless Everton dig

You couldn’t make it up, in the same season that the Premier League threw the book at Everton, Manchester City with 115 charges for alleged financial irregularity hanging over with them stand on the cusp of becoming the most-dominant dynasty in English football history.

For all ups and downs, chaos and unprecedented levels of off-the-field wrangling, as the 2023/24 Premier League campaign prepares to close on Sunday, there is ultimately an air of inevitability about proceedings. Providing that Luton Town don’t beat Fulham at home with Nottingham Forest losing at Burnley and the Hatters also enjoying a 12-goal swing, then the three newly-promoted clubs are going straight back down.

Things are only slightly more interesting at the top but does anyone really think that petrodollar-fuelled serial winners Manchester City aren’t going to beat West Ham United? Just in case though, Pep Guardiola has tried to take out some insurance by attempting to do Sean Dyche’s team talk for him ahead of Everton’s trip to Arsenal and followed the Premier League’s lead by using the Blues as a punch bag.

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Ahead of the showdown against his fellow Catalan and former assistant Mikel Arteta’s side, Guardiola proclaimed: “If you are thinking Everton are going do something, forget about it.” If only his employers’ accounting was as transparent as such amateur psychology.

Some 15 months after Manchester City were hit by their 115 charges, we’ve finally been given a breakdown and they consist of failure to provide accurate financial information from 2009/10 to 2017/18 (times 54); failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009/10 to 2017/18 (times 14); failure to comply with UEFA’s rules including Financial Fair Play (FFP) 2013/14 to 2017/18 (times 5); breaching Premier League’s PSR rules 2015/16 to 2017/18 (times 7); failure to co-operate with Premier League investigations December 2018-Feb 2023 (times 35).

But whereas the Premier League recommended that Everton be deducted 17 points this season – it shows just what an incredible job Dyche has done given that the club endured their lowest-ever equivalent points total 12 months ago but would have still stayed up this term despite such a penalty – for a single breach from 2021/22 and then another for 2022/23 (with the club arguing that three quarters of the time period had been covered in the first case), the complexity and longevity of City’s case has led to the can continually being kicked down the road.

What sort of a message does that send though? Such a twisted logic suggests that if Everton – and Nottingham Forest – had done more over a prolonged period of time then it would have just muddied the waters, making it more difficult to prosecute.

City strongly deny the charges but some reports suggest it could be another year before any kind of verdict is even reached. In the meantime, they are – regardless of what happens at the Emirates Stadium, potentially making Guardiola’s statement a moot point – now just one win away from becoming the first team to be crowned champions of England for four consecutive seasons.

Several sides have won three in a row, starting with Huddersfield Town (1924-26) followed by Arsenal (1933-35), Liverpool (1982-84) and Manchester United (1999-2001 & 2007-09) but if they beat West Ham United on Sunday evening then Manchester City will have four on the trot. That’s as many League Championships as Everton have lifted since the Second World War pocketed in the relative blink of an eye after Liverpool’s ‘asterisk’ triumph behind closed doors due to coronavirus restrictions in 2020 and it would move them above the Blues to 10 in total.

While Everton’s position in the football food chain has plummeted in recent decades and reached new lows under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership – no team has surely spent so much to become so bad – City’s riches, provided by Sheikh Mansour and his Abu Dhabi United Group have transformed them from being an under-achieving basket case to a global super power. Dominance in the club game has always been about having wealthy benefactors since day one – the Blues of course were dubbed ‘The Mersey Millionaires’ when John Moores bankrolled them – but we still don’t know whether City’s remarkable rise has been carried out legitimately.

In the time that it has taken for the whole thing to unravel – and we’re still not there yet – they have collected a treasure trove of honours, including last season’s Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League treble with the UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup also being subsequently added for good measure. The silverware has been collected, the medals handed out, memories of magical nights forged for lifetimes.

Those glory days cannot be erased, even if the worst happened to City and they were to be retrospectively stripped of honours or demoted from the Premier League. With their Sugar Daddy owner and lucratively-funded infrastructure then their fans would probably just treat the inevitably swift and smooth journey back to the top as one big jolly.

For loyal but long-suffering Evertonians though, the agony continues. Dyche has worked a miracle at Goodison Park to keep their heads above water with former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan questioning whether Guardiola himself could have done any better in such circumstances.

Everton, whose ownership issues drag on with 777 Partners’ chances looking increasingly dead in the water over eight months after Moshiri struck a deal to sell his entire 94.1% stake to them, still aren’t out of the woods when it comes to PSR scrutiny and potential future breaches. So sorry Pep, if doing you a favour isn’t the most-pressing matter on beleaguered Blues’ minds as some clubs are already having to deal with the consequences of fiscal investigations and haven’t been given carte blanche to carry on regardless in the meantime.