One of the roles of the FAB is to ensure that Everton’s Board and senior executives understand the views of Evertonians in their discussions at a national policy level with government, the Premier League, the Football Association and other national bodies.

To help shape this feedback, the FAB ran a survey from 9-22 February exploring areas such as the the European Super League, the Premier League’s ‘New Deal for Football’ proposal and Independent Regulation.
The results relating to the European Super League showed that Evertonians thought that:

• Promotion and relegation should only be based on sporting merit.
• There should be no ‘closed leagues’ or ‘franchise football’ across Europe.
• Domestic football should be the priority with weekends being preserved for this.
• There should be no ‘golden welcome’ to join a new competition, as leagues need to remain competitive.

The New Deal for Football questions focussed on financial support to the pyramid, cost control mechanisms and fixture congestion.

The majority of Evertonians who completed the survey felt that there was no need to change the current process of parachute payments. However, it was also felt that the Premier League should ringfence funding for capital projects and this money should be sourced from Premier League teams on a sliding scale, based on a sliding scale of total club income.

The majority of survey respondents thought that there should be changes to rules to reduce the ratio of income spent on wages, transfers and agent fees; albeit not all of these were supportive of the figures suggested by UEFA.

In terms of fixture congestion, Evertonians were clear that there should be no changes to the format of domestic cup competitions; with 68% in favour of retaining replays and strong support for UEFA-qualified teams continuing to pick teams from the first team squads.

The question that received the strongest support referred to the need for an independent regulator of football within England and Wales; of which, 85% of Evertonians were supportive.

The FAB wishes to thank all those who completed the survey and the full results can be found here.