As much as the Sky Sports type agenda would love to have you believe Everton spending money badly as the reason we've struggled - the stadium, previous board and Russia's war got us into the current situation. Sure, one window under Koeman we spent a bit of money. Like Fulham, Bournemouth and West Ham have since. And nowhere near the amounts Nottingham or Villa have.
Teams spend money, teams invest money into the playing squad - we haven't. The only team to not have done the last 4 years. Any team, like Wolves have seen - will struggle with that.
Our squad value for fees, including players we have on loan who we didnt actually spend is 19th from 20 teams.
Not sure this is quite right. We've definitely been screwed more than most clubs by
events - you can point to COVID depressing the market for selling players off, the failures of the board to secure proper stadium financing, the impact of Russian invasion of Ukraine and so on. I agree that the lazy pundit types ignore this far too much.
But we did spend *way* too much money relative to what we could "sustainably" spend - partly driven by some very dodgy forecasting about where the team could expect to finish under Koeman, Silva, and Ancelotti and the subsequent European money we would get. We know this from the findings of the Independent Commission - that Evertons "sustainable business plan" projected that the club would regularly finish in the top eight of the Premier League, which we haven't done since 2018 (and not in Europe for even longer). Yes this was exacerbated by COVID - but it was a very risky strategy regardless.
The Ancelotti season is especially egregious - all before COVID, we made a £112m loss in 2018/19, a £140m loss in 2019/20, all clear warning signs that things were going badly wrong financially. Poised to appoint Moyes for a 2nd spell to start curbing the damage - then appointed Ancelotti, spent £60m on Allan Doucs Godfrey, gave out exorbitant contracts to James Rodriguez, Keane, Holgate, and so on. We eventually finished 10th, making another £121m loss in the process. That's 3 of the 11 highest losses ever made by a Premier League club (at time of 1st points deduction).
I totally agree with everything else you've said mind you; I saw that our net spend over the past five years is lower than half of the clubs in the Championship, truly mad. But the lesson of the past half decade
has to be that we need to be much, much more clever in the way we spend money. Thankfully, Moyes at the helm seems to be part of correcting our trajectory - and Everton are on the up and up
