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Martinez still confident of cracking glass ceiling

Roberto Martinez has welcomed the new deal with Chang, which stands to bring the club an extra £4m over the next three years, but he insists that while the gulf between Everton's financial resources and those of the current top five clubs in the Premier League table exists, it's going to take a lot more than a record shirt sponsorship deal to propel the club into the Champions League.

Chief Executive Robert Elstone put pen to paper on the extended agreement with the Thai beer company whose logo has adorned the Blues' jerseys for 10 years now and hailed the extra £1.3m it will put in the club's coffers in each of the next three seasons.

It's a deal that is dwarfed by those agreed by the likes of Arsenal (£30m per year), Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham (all between £19m and £20m per season) which leaves Martinez in familiarly pragmatic mode when he discusses the potential benefits to his team-building plans.

"The way I assess it is it's much bigger than we've had in the past so we are making progress and we are getting more finance from the same source," he says in The Guardian.

"We're going to continue trying to get the best we can from our resources and I have to find a way for us to be as competitive as we can with the resources we have. Nowadays, if you want to challenge Man City or Chelsea financially it's not going to come down to getting a good (sponsorship) deal or not, it's a lot more than that because the disparity in finances is huge. So I'm not too worried about that."

Like his predecessor, the Spaniard is more concerned that as much as can be made available for buying players is being provided to him as he draws up plans for the summer.

"The board has been very supportive, the chairman has been very supportive and he's allowed me to manage the football club in a way that means everything we produce can be reinvested," he continues. "That's all I want. It's not about the number, it's what you can do with the finances that come in.

"Sometimes you're in a position where you need to meet payments and you can't reinvest in the squad; that's not the case at Everton. Whatever comes in can be reinvested in the squad."

Martinez has always maintained since joining from Wigan Athletic last summer that he is happy to work within the financial realities at Everton and that there are ways of bridging the gap to the top flight's moneyed elite:

"There's no good feeling inferior to others if you haven't got the same finances as them," the Everton manager added. "You take what you've got in football and take the most from it. That's why you look at the loan market and you look to youngsters. If you asked me would I like to have more finances, of course, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee you success.

"We need to find a way to challenge and I think the youth we've got in this squad, as long as we keep it and keep developing it, is going to be the unknown quantity that will allow us to challenge the other sides who've got bigger finances. I don't think lack of finances will stop us from challenging the top four. There is a way with the quality we've got at the club to bridge that gap but a lot is going to come down to how well we can do in the next 10 games because there's a point when you have to master what you're good at."

 

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