SAMARRAI: EPL must have the guts to ensure their punishment fits the crime

If you’ve watched Succession, you’ll remember the scene. It’s a cracker. Bill is retiring and he’s handed over the cruises division to Tom but he needs him to know a little of what he’s inherited. Not a big deal, Bill explains, but be aware of the ‘death pit’ — bits they covered up over the years. Just a few thefts, assaults, rapes, murders. Probably won’t come to anything, Tom, if you keep the nuclear rods cool.

Great episode. And for whatever reason it makes me think of Chelsea and Todd Boehly, because you never quite know what lives under the floorboards when you move into new digs. You hope for the best, but sometimes you find a death pit.

It might not be murder and rape — ‘the bad ones’, as cousin Greg put it — but it could be a puzzling set of financials logged by the previous regime. Like a mysterious payment to Eden Hazard’s agent, for instance. Or one to an associate of Antonio Conte.

In this of all weeks, with Everton whacked to the boundary rope over financial breaches, you can only wonder how they are feeling over at Stamford Bridge with the drip-feed of disclosures around what may have gone on. If they have any comfort, it might be that they aren’t on Manchester City’s cruise ship right now.

Of course, we can’t say at this point if the success of the Roman Abramovich era was built outside the rules — that is all under investigation. But we do know their current owners spotted some ‘potentially incomplete financial reporting’ in their due diligence last year and promptly flagged it to UEFA once Boehly moved in. And now we are learning via the recent leaks that questions are being asked of transactions involving people close to Hazard and Conte.

They are deals that have the potential to smell like ‘bad ones’.