No Premier League club needs the top flight quite like Everton

Everton have published their company accounts for the 2020/21 season and they show why staying in the Premier League is so important.

So the international break is at an end, but whether the time off felt like a chore or a holiday really depends on which team you’re talking about. For one club, the messages going into the break were mixed. Everton’s 1-0 win against Newcastle United offered a small degree of breathing space between them and the three clubs below them in the Premier League table, but their 4-0 defeat at Crystal Palace three days later reopened the wounds. For weeks, the FA Cup had been a glimmer of light in a dismal season. With that gone, the task for the rest of the campaign is simple: stay in the Premier League.

But even as international matches were taking place, Everton found their way into the headlines with the publication of their company accounts for the 2020/21 season. People had been expecting them to be dire; they were. The club lost £120.9million in the year, which equates to an average of £331,232.87 every day. Everton have attributed £103m of these losses to the pandemic, but the club has been spinning a lot of plates, with a very high wage bill at a reported average of £85,000 per week per player – the seventh highest in the division – while this season they’ve had to contend with the sudden (and broadly unexpected) loss of Alisher Usmanov as their main sponsor.

In short, there may be no other Premier League club that needs to stay in the top flight quite as much as Everton. The 2020/21 figures are bad and they’re following a trend. Everton reported a loss of almost £140m in 2020 and a further £111.8m in 2019, with losses totalling almost £400m over the past four seasons. Those among you