From the moment Everton put out a video statement following their 10 point deduction by the Premier League, questions swiftly turned to: What about Manchester City and Chelsea.

The Merseysiders were deducted 10 points for their apparent transgression, then what could – or indeed should – happen to their Premier League rivals if they were also found guilty of breaching financial rules… and on a far greater scale at that!

http://matchsportnews.com

Financial Fair Play, Profit and Sustainability rules, whatever you want to call them, were brought into football to, apparently, protect clubs. To ensure they didn’t spend beyond their means.

and to also make sure that the playing field wasn’t so markedly distorted with, not just billionaires, but the arrival of sovereign states into the ownership equation.

But can those rules and regulations even be believed in any more? Are they fit for purpose? Were they ever? Or does the entire system, particularly in the richest league in the world, need an overhaul to keep up with the modern game and the sheer amount of money in play? Heck, perhaps it needs an independent regulator?

The current system seems massively unfair. Everton did break the rules, and therefore punishment was inevitable.

 But 10 points seems so harsh against a club who cooperated with the Premier League and is busy trying to build a new stadium.

Similarly, Chelsea’s new owners put their hands up when going through the accounts, highlighted concerns, and, again, surely that should be taken into account. Football’s financial constraints are a problem because of creative accounting, hidden payments, and shady business practices.

Salary caps like in MLS just do not work. It skews any squad. Nor do these punishments against Everton.

How could they be punished worse than the Big Six who attempted to form their own independent league and join the newly formed European Super League? I suppose there needs to be a tipping point at which we declare that the past is history and that whataboutery in football must end.

It would be so hard to police but I do think transfers and player contracts have to be separate from stadium development.

How can you argue that what Manchester City have done for their area and community is not a good thing?

It’s the same for Everton – a real community club. Chelsea People should be mature enough to realise that Roman Abramovich did fantastic things for his football club and its supporters.

Everton have a real opportunity to build and develop in the city. How can they be punished for doing that? It’s so short sighted.

We have to find a way to separate the football from the club structure. Football is good for cities, for people, and we need to remember that.

I’m not expecting many Everton fans to share this view right now because the anger over the excessive 10 point deduction will still be very raw, but there is an argument that Financial Fair Play has just saved the club. So in one sense at least it is working.

Without it, Everton would still have continued to spend excessively on players they believed they needed while attempting to combine the really impressive Bramley-Moore Dock project, which will result in one of the best stadiums in the nation, with other commitments.

Their current situation, where they have depended on the unwavering support of the supporters to lift a severely underperforming team out of the bottom three, is the result of those transfer missteps.

The red flag in Everton’s three-year financial report, which finally proved to be fatal, was that they were overspend by £19.5 million, or slightly more than one Vitaly Mykolenko. However, punishing the players to this degree for this is unjust.

Instead, I’d like to see FFP make more of an impact in the boardroom, at least initially. Punish owners and directors for mismanaging the club behind the scenes before point deductions hit, and of course treat everyone equally regardless of how expensive their lawyers are.

Supposedly, the noble goal of FFP is to prevent clubs from going bankrupt by prohibiting them from spending more than they bring in.

In reality, though, the introduction of FFP has simply served to preserve the status quo, to protect the existing rich clubs, and to ensure those with much smaller revenues are kept in their place.

Changes need to be made to the existing format of FFP to ensure greater competitiveness within the Premier League and a bridging of the chasm between the haves and the nots.

A salary cap would be a step towards achieving greater parity, given Manchester United’s latest wage bill of £331.4 million, which is 10 times that of Premier League newcomers Luton Town.

Yet with the Premier League’s top four clubs banking a minimum of £70 million each season just for qualifying for the Champions League group stage, a salary cap alone will not address the issue.

FFP has to be more sophisticated; considering Everton’s continuous compliance and the mitigating factors they presented, their 10-point deduction for violating the profit and sustainability regulations was disproportionate.

Given the severity of that punishment, there is even greater focus on the 115 charges faced by Manchester City for allegedly inflating the true value of sponsorship deals to comply with FFP.

Everton’s 10-point deduction doesn’t mean a hill of beans unless financial fair play rules are applied to ALL clubs, not just the chaff Premier League hawks think they can chase into a dead end.

How do they explain the Toffees’ brutal sanction on a single indictment when 115 charges against Manchester City are still in the pending tray? How do they reconcile fair competition between Everton’s fate and Roman Abramovich’s alleged largesse beyond the books at Chelsea? Could it possibly be that the Premier League simply cannot afford to take on the big guns’ battalions of lawyers as their learned friends kick the can down the street in the hope it will be forgotten?

Financial Fair Play, in its current form, is ungovernable. The football industry does not have enough resources to police clubs suspected of cooking the books or creative accounting, so let’s go back to brass tacks.

Although FFP seems like a fantastic idea in theory, it is obviously not working. There appears to be no stopping the large clubs’ disparity from the others.

The only things that can unsettle the elite are a takeover like Newcastle’s or a brilliant strategy like Brighton’s, and even then, it will be a difficult assignment.

Something like a salary cap or tighter restrictions around transfers could help, but I can’t see either happening anytime soon.

Football has almost gone too far now, and the desperation for success or merely to survive in the Premier League has sent wages and transfer fees spiralling beyond control, particularly when you consider the wealth of the owners involved.

Some regulations that might make sense, though, would be to cap the number of high-paid players each team is allowed to have and to lower the number of Premier League squads from 25.

Dropping the squad numbers, say 20, might open up more chances for younger players when an injury crisis hits.

More importantly, though, is that players who are not considered top earners at major teams may be persuaded to transfer down the division.

it would decrease the number of top players being stockpiled on the bench at big clubs and ultimately make the so-called weaker teams more competitive as a result.

That said, where there are rules, someone will always try to bend them.