Jack Grealish: From £100m Treble Talisman to Everton Exile
As England folded deeper and deeper against Argentina in that World Cup semifinal in Atlanta, inviting Lionel Messi to finish the job, the inquest began before the final whistle.
The shape was wrong. The energy was wrong. The bench options were wrong.
One name, though, stuck in the mind for anyone who watched Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City at full throttle in 2022-23.
England could have done with Jack Grealish. A fit, sharp, fully engaged Jack Grealish.
Instead, the £100 million winger who once helped power City to a treble is currently frozen out at Everton, absent from squads and at the centre of a “club issue” no one on Merseyside wants to discuss in detail.
From Villa idol to Guardiola’s problem solver
Grealish’s story was supposed to be straightforward. The Aston Villa cult hero, the kid with the rolled-down socks and street football swagger, became Britain’s most expensive player when City paid £100m in the summer of 2021.
The first season was about adaptation. The second was about domination.
In 2022-23, he became a key cog in Guardiola’s machine. He gave City control on the flank, took the ball under pressure, drew fouls, slowed games when they needed a breather and quickened them when they needed a knife through the lines. Few players anywhere were better at carrying their team up the pitch and making the right call at the end of it.
City trusted him. Guardiola trusted him.
England never quite found that version. And now, neither have City nor Everton.
Everton’s invisible No. 10
The current chapter is a bleak one.
Grealish missed Everton’s 2-0 defeat away to Arsenal on October 24, the club citing illness. Five days later, he was absent again, this time for a 3-1 Carabao Cup win over Newcastle United, ruled out due to what Everton called “a breach of club discipline.”
The 31-year-old stayed out of the picture for the 1-0 league win at Newcastle. He will not be involved when David Moyes’ side host Coventry City at the Hill Dickinson Stadium on Friday.
“Jack’s not available,” Moyes said before that game. “I wouldn’t give you the plan, but we will be working with Jack again soon.”
Pressed on whether Grealish was even at the club at present, Moyes shut the door. “I would rather not answer your question. Right from the start, hopefully you picked up on my words. I said it was a club issue and it continues to be that.”
Everton have kept the shutters down. This is not just a manager’s whim; senior figures at the club are involved.
The picture painted around Goodison, though, is familiar.
Nights out, days missed, chances slipping
Reports suggest the disciplinary breach stems from an unauthorised absence from training in the week after the Arsenal defeat. It slots uncomfortably into a long-running narrative around Grealish’s off-field choices.
On Monday, October 19, he attended the Pride of Britain awards in London. The Sun and the Daily Mail reported that he extended his night at Bam Karaoke Box in Victoria.
He trained with Everton the next day, then watched Paris Saint-Germain vs. Barcelona in a Cheshire pub with teammates, including Jordan Pickford. Wednesday was a scheduled day off. Players going out on their own time is nothing unusual, within reason. The Athletic reported that Pickford left early. Grealish stayed.
Pickford and Grealish are close. In March 2025, during a spell of downtime after Grealish played in City’s 3-1 FA Cup win over Plymouth Argyle, the pair were together at a social club where Grealish put £500 behind the bar for regulars. It was a small gesture that captured his everyman charm. He has never felt like a distant superstar.
Those traits, combined with his talent, have often bought him leeway. Managers, directors, teammates, fans – many have been willing to forgive, to wait, to hope.
But the pattern has become impossible to ignore.
Grealish is now more than two years removed from his last England appearance. He is on a second successive season on loan away from City, in the final year of his contract. His time under Guardiola effectively ended long before he physically left Manchester.
There was no dramatic bust-up. Just a slow erosion of trust as niggling injuries, absences and off-field distractions mounted.
City’s nearly-man
It is easy to frame his City career as six golden months wrapped in disappointment. That does him a disservice.
Even in his final years at the Etihad, when Guardiola could get him fit and focused, City often looked more balanced with Grealish on the pitch. The problem was getting him there often enough.
In the middle of the 2023-24 campaign, as injuries bit into the squad, he helped keep City’s push for a historic fourth straight Premier League title on track and played a central role in winning the Club World Cup.
Then, as the season reached its climax, he faded from view.
He did not make the matchday squad for the FA Cup final defeat to Manchester United. He missed Euro 2024 with England.
One night in February 2025 captured the contradiction. Guardiola had not started him in a Premier League game that calendar year, but threw him in from the start against Real Madrid in the Champions League. Grealish was excellent, sliding a brilliant pass in the build-up to Erling Haaland’s opener. City led.
Half an hour in, he went off injured. City lost 3-2.
He started one more league game that season, in a heavily rotated side against a doomed Leicester City.
“Grealish’s problems haven’t been technical, tactical, or due to a lack of trust from [Guardiola], who clearly loves the player,” a source told The Sporting News that summer. “I think we all know that Jack’s issues have been of a different nature. And yes, it’s a shame.”
The shame deepened when paparazzi photographed him asleep at a Manchester rooftop bar in April, during his recovery from the foot injury that cut short what had been an encouraging 2025/26 season on loan at Everton. Inside the club, not everyone was convinced bringing him back for a second year was wise, even after Iliman Ndiaye’s move to City opened up a straightforward path.
Enzo Maresca, Guardiola’s successor, spoke warmly about Grealish at his first City press conference, calling him a player with “a big heart” and “a very good guy”. Maresca even used him off the bench in the Community Shield defeat to Arsenal and the Premier League win over Bournemouth in August.
Any idea of a full City revival, though, never really felt realistic.
The talent no one doubts
Ask those who have shared a pitch with him what Grealish can do and the answers are emphatic.
“D’you know how good Jack is?” Declan Rice said after both scored in England’s 3-1 Nations League win in Finland in October 2024. Rice, now a Ballon d’Or nominee and the heartbeat of Arsenal’s title-winning midfield, has gone from strength to strength. Grealish has not played for England since.
“You watch him in training and you watch him in games, he’s got something that’s really special as a football player. And I’m not just saying that because he’s one of my best friends in football.
“The way he takes the ball under pressure and takes touches and relieves you of pressure as a team is just incredible. I’m buzzing for him because when we’ve got a Jack Grealish who’s happy and smiling and playing well, he’s a massive boost for England.”
Those words feel like they belong to another era now. Happy, smiling, playing well – that version of Grealish has become a flicker in the background, not the main picture.
A career at a crossroads
So here he is: 31 years old, out of the England squad, on loan from a club that has already moved on, currently unavailable to play for a team that could use his quality but cannot keep excusing his absence.
The question Rice asked that night in Finland still hangs in the air.
Does Jack Grealish truly know how good he is – and does he respect it enough?
At City, he once looked slightly overawed sharing a dressing room with Kevin De Bruyne and the rest of that treble-winning cast. Now he looks trapped in a loop of bad luck and self-inflicted damage.
Coaches, executives, teammates and friends have all, at different times and with varying doubts, decided he was worth another chance. Everton are the latest to wrestle with that calculation.
Right now, it feels as if Grealish needs all the support he can get just to reach the point where he believes he is worth the trouble again. Because until he does, the final chapters of a rare talent’s career will keep writing themselves – and they are getting shorter, and darker, by the week.
