This is a team who have been forced out of the reckoning at the top of English football by the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City.
Consider the evidence. Along with Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, David Moyes has been the one manager given time to build a team in the Premier League. They possess good players, some excellent players, though the likes of Joleon Lescott and Mikel Arteta have been lured away by the enticement of Champions League football.
They even finished ahead of Liverpool in the league in the season they won the Champions League, and were unfortunate enough to be drawn against a side in Villarreal who reached the semi finals of the competition in the next year’s preliminary round.
It is a team who were set to break into the upper echelons of the league but were never quite able to. Why? Money.
Unlike Arsenal, their fortunes have not been self inflicted. This is a team who could have competed at the top, but the arrival of Chelsea meant that a place in the Champions League for life was booked for them by the bottomless pit of money that is Roman Abramovich’s pocket.
Then there were Manchester City, another team with an even bigger pot of money in the dodgy Sheikhs from Abu Dhabi. When you can spend as much as you could ever dream of, there is very little that can be done to compete without significant wealth. Not necessarily unlimited wealth, but Manchester United style wealth. United of course, remain top of the pile thanks to the combination of good management and huge revenues. Liverpool should be the same, but their managers have not been as good as Ferguson. But Chelsea and City are at top thanks to their owners.
Had they not come into the English game, Everton would probably have been a side who could have become a Champions League regular. Tottenham of course have done well over the years within their means, shrewd management of the club’s finances by Daniel Levy and the sound management of Martin Jol and Harry Redknapp, with the blip of Juande Ramos in between. But Redknapp, their current boss, is inherently short term. A manager who buys Peter Crouch as often as he sells him, who Portsmouth and Southampton with regularity. Sure, he is a great manager, but he has never been one to stick at a team long term and build a club like Moyes, Ferguson or Wenger. When he inevitably leaves sooner rather than later, without City and Chelsea, Everton would be set for the Champions League.
But they are not. Instead, they are stripped of their best players by teams who can qualify for the Champions League, and are pushed further down the league by the increasing wealth of the top sides. It is symptomatic of the cult of money. When a team’s failure is due to the wealth of others, rather than their skill on the pitch, football should fear for its future. There is no point in a game where a bottomless pit of cash is more than the players.
