Jack Grealish: From £100m Star to Everton's Disappearance
As England shrank deeper into their own penalty area in Atlanta, inviting Lionel Messi to toy with their World Cup semifinal dreams, the inquest began before the final whistle.
Tactics. Mentality. Selections.
And, inevitably, absentees.
Thomas Tuchel’s decision to leave some of England’s most gifted technicians at home looked increasingly costly as Argentina turned a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 win. For anyone who watched Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City at full tilt in 2022/23, one name, now strangely distant from the elite conversation, cut through the noise.
They could have done with Jack Grealish. A fit, focused, fully plugged‑in Jack Grealish.
From Villa cult hero to Guardiola’s problem no one solved
Grealish’s story was supposed to be simple. The local idol at Aston Villa, the kid with rolled-down socks and a playground swagger, cashed in his boyhood dream for a British-record £100 million move to Manchester City in 2021.
The first year was a blur of adaptation and scrutiny. Then came the payoff.
In City’s treble season, Grealish became one of Guardiola’s key levers of control. He took the ball in impossible areas, rode challenges, drew fouls, slowed games down or quickened them up on command. He carried City up the pitch and made the right choices in the tightest spaces.
Few in world football were better at that specific, priceless art.
England still don’t have that player. Tuchel’s latest squad for the November internationals underlined the gap. Manchester City don’t really have him anymore either.
Everton do. On paper. On loan.
Yet they have won their past two games with him nowhere near the squad.
The Everton disappearance
The slide into his latest exile began quietly enough.
Grealish missed Everton’s 2-0 defeat at Arsenal on October 24, the club citing illness. Five days later he was absent again, this time for the 3-1 Carabao Cup win over Newcastle United. The explanation changed: “a breach of club discipline.”
He stayed out of sight for the 1-0 league win at Newcastle on Monday and will also be missing when David Moyes’ side host Coventry City at the Hill Dickinson Stadium on Friday.
“Jack’s not available,” Moyes said, clipped and careful, in his pre-match press conference. “I wouldn’t give you the plan, but we will be working with Jack again soon.”
Was Grealish even at the club at the moment?
“I would rather not answer your question,” Moyes replied. “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 in public, stressing that this is not simply a manager’s whim. Senior figures at the club are involved. The matter has gone upstairs.
Nights out, days missed, patience frayed
The outline of the story is familiar, and that’s part of the problem.
It has been widely reported that Grealish’s disciplinary breach centres on an unauthorised absence from training in the week after the Arsenal defeat. That week was busy off the pitch.
On Monday, October 19, Grealish attended the Pride of Britain awards in London. Reports in The Sun and the Daily Mail said he extended the night at Bam Karaoke Box in Victoria. He trained with Everton the following day, then headed to a Cheshire pub to watch Paris Saint-Germain vs. Barcelona in the Champions League with teammates, including England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford.
Everton’s players had Wednesday off. Using that time as they see fit is not unusual, within reason. The Athletic reported that Pickford left the pub early. Grealish stayed.
The friendship between the two is genuine. In March 2025, the pair were out together during a rare quiet spell for Grealish, the day after he played in City’s 3-1 FA Cup win over Plymouth Argyle. He put £500 behind the bar at a social club for regulars, a gesture that fed into his image as football’s approachable superstar.
He doesn’t hide. He doesn’t float above people. In a sport where the top players often exist behind tinted glass, Grealish has always looked like he could just as easily be on the other side of the bar.
Those qualities, combined with his talent, have bought him time and forgiveness across his career. They have also brought him here: more than two years without an England cap, on a second successive loan in the final year of his City contract, his parent club long since moving on.
By the time of that March 2025 night out, his relationship with Guardiola was effectively over. The manager who defended him in public, who bent his structure to accommodate him, no longer felt he could rely on him. Minor injuries, absences, lost rhythm — they stacked up. His minutes disappeared.
The City years: brilliance in flashes, frustration in between
The easy version of Grealish’s City spell paints one bright stretch of six months, wrapped in a lot of expensive drift. That’s too harsh.
Even in the final two seasons, City were often better balanced when he was fit and sharp. The issue was getting him to that point often enough.
When injuries bit into the squad in the middle of 2023/24, Grealish stepped up. He helped drag City through a difficult patch in their pursuit of a record fourth consecutive Premier League title and played a significant role in winning the Club World Cup.
Then he vanished again.
He was not in the matchday squad for the FA Cup final defeat to Manchester United. He missed Euro 2024 with England.
February 2025 brought one last, cruel snapshot of what he can be.
Guardiola had not started Grealish in a Premier League match all calendar year, yet threw him into a Champions League tie against Real Madrid. On the wing, under the Bernabéu lights and the weight of the occasion, he was superb. He slipped a brilliant pass in the move that led to Erling Haaland’s opener.
Thirty minutes in, he limped 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 in April when paparazzi pictures emerged of Grealish asleep at a Manchester rooftop bar. He was recovering from the foot injury that had cut short what initially looked like a restorative 2025/26 season at Everton.
Inside the club, not everyone was convinced about bringing him back to Merseyside for a second loan, even after Iliman Ndiaye’s move to City opened a clear gap in the squad.
Maresca’s warmth, no way back
At City, Guardiola’s successor Enzo Maresca spoke warmly about Grealish when he took the job in July. He called him a player with “a big heart” and “a very good guy.”
Maresca used him from the bench in the Community Shield defeat to Arsenal and the Premier League win over Bournemouth in August. Grealish, for his part, talked with real affection about Maresca, who had been on Guardiola’s staff during the treble run.
But the reunion always felt short-term. City were already building a different future.
Elsewhere, his peers never lost sight of his talent.
“D’you know how good Jack is?” Declan Rice asked in October 2024, after both scored in England’s 3-1 Nations League win in Finland. Rice has since made the Ballon d’Or list and become the heartbeat of Arsenal’s title-winning side. Grealish has not played for England since that night.
“You watch him in training and you watch him in games, he’s got something that’s really special as a football player,” Rice said. “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 a different era now.
A talent running out of road
Happy. Smiling. Playing well.
That version of Jack Grealish is starting to feel like an old highlight reel rather than a live feed.
Rice’s question hangs in the air: does Grealish truly know how good he is — and, more importantly, does he respect it?
At City, he looked overawed at first, sharing a dressing room with Kevin De Bruyne and a squad built to suffocate opponents with perfection. He grew into that world, then slipped into a damaging loop of misfortune and self-inflicted setbacks.
Managers, executives, teammates — across Villa, City, England and now Everton — have decided, at various points, that he was worth the complications. They bent for him. They waited for him.
Right now, as he sits outside an Everton squad that badly needs creativity, it feels like the equation has flipped.
For the first time, Jack Grealish may need to decide whether he still believes he is worth the hassle — and whether he’s ready to fight for the unwritten final chapters of a career that should never have been this close to drifting away.
