The eye-opening Jack Grealish stats that should tell Everton exactly what to do amid transfer links

While the majority of Manchester City’s first-team squad are in the United States preparing to compete in the revamped Club World Cup, one player will be spending the next month less worried about Wydad Casablanca than by his future – and, perhaps, by whether a move to Everton could rejuvenate his career. Jack Grealish has some decisions to make.

It's now four years since City threw £100m at a piratical winger who was winning games for Aston Villa all by himself. Now, Grealish is out of the City squad, out of the England squad, and is struggling to step out of the shadow of the player he once was. Everton, according to The Daily Mail and other outlets, might offer an unexpected escape route. But should the Toffees take what could be an expensive gamble on a player whose form has desperately declined over the past two seasons?

Why Jack Grealish is on Everton’s summer shortlist

At his best, most of which came for Aston Villa - a successful 2022/23 season at the Etihad notwithstanding – Grealish was among the most exciting players in the Premier League to watch. It’s a bit a while, but only those with the shortest of memories won’t grasp why Everton may want to make a bid.

It’s the same reason that Newcastle United are supposedly debating an offer. If Grealish can recapture the sparkle and zip that defined his rise at Villa Park, he will win his team matches. Buying him would be a gamble, but one with a high return.

The stakes would be substantial, however. While reporting on the financial details of any potential bid has been patchy, to say the very least, Grealish has two years remaining on a colossal £300,000 per week contract, and while it’s eminently possible that he would be prepared to take a pay cut to rekindle his career, any deal, be it on permanent or on a loan basis, would come at a hefty cost.

Neither Everton nor Newcastle are in especially good positions with regards to the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules as it stands. Neither are believed to be at risk of a points deduction (another one, in Everton’s case) but the amount they can afford to lose over the coming year is likely to be relatively limited.

In Everton’s case, they are likely to cut it fine on the maximum allowable loss this season. The rolling three-year system means that a £62.7m loss from 2022/23 will be off the books come the end of June, which allows a fair amount of breathing space, but The Friedkin Group still have their hands lightly tied as they work to rebuild the squad after years of misplaced spending under Farhad Moshiri.

Even if Grealish arrived on a heavily-subsidised loan, then, adding a player who would massively up the wage bill can’t be done lightly. Should Grealish arrive and struggle to get back to his best, then any financial commitment made to him risks becoming a short-term burden which would hamper the new owners’ ability to improve the team. So what chances are there that Grealish does indeed return to form next season?

Is there anything left of the old Grealish?

The surface-level reading of Grealish’s time with Manchester City is that Pep Guardiola ripped his game apart and rebuilt him not as a marauding wide forward but as a system player, someone who looked for a pass instead of taking men on time and again, looking to do it all himself. But while there’s some truth to that, the stats tell a more complicated story.

Grealish has actually dribbled with the ball often at the Etihad than he did at Villa Park, and in 2022/23 he attempted to beat a defender one-on-one an average of 4.79 times per game – more often than he ever did with his former club. Overall, he runs at defences every bit as frequently as before, shoots just as often, tries most of the same things. The difference is how successful he is.

In his last three seasons at Villa, Grealish never dropped below a 61.6% success rate when taking his man on. In the last three years at Manchester City, that rate has never moved above 44.7%, and it was just 37.8% this past season. For a player whose game was, at its peak, based on dribbling, that’s a damning data point.

The same trends continue with the number of fouls he draws, another good stat to track for how effective a player is when running with the ball. While at Aston Villa, he became the most fouled player in the top flight, drawing an average of 150 fouls per campaign over his final three years in the Midlands. Last season, he was fouled just 46 times, an average of 2.71 times for every 90 minutes he played – nearly half of his highest rate with Villa.

Then there’s his finishing. Never a truly prolific scorer (an all-competitions tally of 10 in 2019/20 remains his high watermark), he scored just three times last season and his percentage of shots on target dropped precipitously. He shoots a little less frequently at City than he used to, evidence in part of his changed role under Guardiola, but the quality of the shots he does take is the real concern.

In short, Grealish isn’t just playing differently, but worse. Whether it’s technique or confidence or the knock-on effects of an altered playing style, his returns are dropping in almost every key statistical area. The eye test isn’t telling any lies. In other words, Grealish would have a lot of ground to make up to justify Everton, or any other side, taking a chance on him, and that justification becomes even trickier when the financial implications are so significant should he fail.

Not that there aren’t some numbers which are more promising. Grealish still played a direct role in creating 5.44 shooting chances per full match in 2024/25, a little way down on his Villa prime but not by much and comfortably more than any Everton player managed over the last year – Dwight McNeil, top of Everton’s chart on that front, was responsible for 4.73 shooting opportunities per game this past season, and nobody else even came close.

The fact that City enjoy far more possession and territory in the average game than Everton do will account for some of that gap, of course, as they’ll simply generate more shots and chances as a team, and if he does move to the shiny new Bramley Moore Dock Stadium then the odds are that Grealish’s numbers would decline to some extent, unless David Moyes really does do an extraordinary job. It’s rather hard to find statistical justification to sign Grealish, and those that do exist feel stretched.

Signing Grealish will be a major gamble, then, a roll of the dice on the opportunity to prise a brilliant performer out of whatever shell he has become stuck inside of. A club with the means to shrug it off should it fail can afford to take a risk – but based on what we know of Everton’s finances, it may be foolish for them to be the team that tries.