I think we can all agree that the only truly fair way to settle all this is to say that the validity of all football during the period 2000 to the present day can't be trusted, so its best to just nullify all the results domestic and european during that time and reset

Southampton, Derby, West Ham, Leicester, Bradford, Wimbledon, Sheff Wed and Watford will take the place of any current club who wasn't in the Premier League for the 1999/00 campaign.

This, exactly.

I think the thing that gets me is there's been years of people going "the game's gone".
Then this happens and it's all "I can't believe this, it's almost as if the game's gone.".

I find it all quite entertaining - I'm not bored or particularly furious about it either way.

Aye, the reality is if they’d have abided by the rules but pumped in the maximum they could have within the rules, they’d have probably still well outspent us and had a better side than us most of the time for that period.

And the money they paid out is great point, the Grealish dough in particular was transformational for Villa wasn’t it.

The complete lack of interest in the PL’s own corruption, eg the 50 million quid exceptional Covid allowance to prevent Utd breaching PSR getting barely a mention, really irks me. Surely the actual league behaving corruptly should be more of a story than one of its clubs doing so.

It's a tricky one: they, along with Chelsea, broke up a thirty year near monopoly on the title between three clubs in a way that hadn't been done before - in so far as they didn't burn brightly and fade (like Forest, Everton, Leeds, Blackburn), but established themselves as regular title winners.

Inevitably that leads to other fans such as Evertonians just seeing them as part of a closed shop at the top, but the reality is that they and Chelsea have never been accepted by Shelbyville, United and Arsenal in the time honoured fashion that old money never accepts, say, a lottery winner as being of their class: City and Chelsea are seen as nothing clubs.

There's a weird kinship between the three when it comes to being "proper clubs".

Timely reminder for Arsenal and United that Everton were second only to Arsenal and Shelbyville* in terms of titles won when the Barclays began..:and that "massive" Tottenham have won the league twice, the last of which was shown on Pathé News.

*cheers, Mers!

I’ve just got really annoyed again that we didn’t hang on to beat them last season. The dads army centre backs being half way up the pitch for their kick off after we scored, grim.

Better than 'normal/ok' surely? I seem to remember us beating them pretty regularly under Moyes Mark I.

The 'just f-ing hit it' game is one I recall, then there was one described by SKY as 'Everton beat City's ten men' when we won 2 - 0 and they had a player dismissed in the 92nd minute.