The fate of many Everton Academy graduates who have departed Goodison Park in high profile exits over recent years serves of something of a cautionary tale to both Anthony Gordon and Chelsea. While the respective players’ attributes and abilities plus reasons behind their leaving have varied greatly, most of them have one thing in common, a sense of disappointment at what happened to their careers after the Blues.
One of the early Everton Academy graduates to move to a Premier League rival was David Unsworth. It was an absolutely wretched deal from the Blues’ point of view as in his third spell as manager, the club’s most-successful boss Howard Kendall, once such an astute judge of player, found himself badly outmanoeuvred by Harry Redknapp, who somehow convinced him to swap the England international for Danny Williamson, with the east End outfit also getting a further £1million.
The Cockney midfielder made just 15 largely ineffectual Premier League appearances for Everton in his first season, then never kicked a ball for the club for another two years due to a foot injury before his contract was terminated and he retired from the game aged just 26. Unsworth for his part, returned to Goodison Park just a year after he left – via a bizarre month-long spell at Aston Villa – but at least he got a second chance.
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Richard Dunne, originally crossing the Irish Sea from his native Dublin as part of the tie-up with his local club who became Home Farm Everton, was another to progress from the Blues youth system to be sold on to a top flight rival and after joining Joe Royle’s newly-promoted Manchester City in the autumn of 2000, he went on to enjoy a long Premier League career with them, Aston Villa and finally Queens Park Rangers.
Those who have departed Goodison in the 21 st century though have generally flattered to deceive. Back in an age when the country’s brightest teenage talents would be packed off to the FA’s National School of Excellence at Lilleshall, Francis Jeffers was lauded as something of a sparkling gem from a young age.
Always part of the England set-ups at different levels, he made his Everton first team debut as a half-time substitute for legendary captain Dave Watson as a half-time substitute against Manchester United at Old Trafford on Boxing Day 1997 while still just 16. After Kevin Campbell joined the Blues, he struck up an effective strike partnership alongside the senior pro and his intelligent play, highlighted by slick running off the ball, made him the ideal foil for the target man.
Such displays prompted Everton to offer Jeffers a new contract during the 2000/01 season but after several months of protracted negotiations, it remained unsigned and the player was sold to Arsenal for an initial £8million in 2001 with Arsene Wenger dubbing him his “fox in the box.” Jeffers flopped at Highbury though and after an injury-hit two-year spell he was allowed to return to the Blues on loan for the 2003/04 season but manager David Moyes found him to be a shadow of his former self, with the striker failing to find the net in 18 Premier League outings that term.
Everton proved to be the only club he struck double figures for throughout what proved to be a nomadic career with subsequent spells at Charlton Athletic, Rangers, Blackburn Rovers, Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Motherwell, Accrington Stanley, Australian side Newcastle Jets and Maltese outfit Floriana.
Jeffers was considered to be the Blues’ most-gifted home-grown hero until Wayne Rooney came along with the precocious man-child from Croxteth terrorised seasoned professionals at an age when the majority of his peers would still be playing youth football. One of the game’s most-astute tactical minds Colin Harvey, someone never prone to hyperbole, once described a schoolboy Rooney as being like Kenny Dalglish but quicker.
After launching himself into prominence during Everton’s run to the 2002 FA Youth Cup final, Rooney of course proved to be the real deal in the Blues senior side with some show reel highlights between the age of 16-18 – including his first two Premier League goals against Arsenal and Leeds United – but it was his displays for England at the 2004 European Championships that convinced Sir Alex Ferguson to take him to Manchester United for what was a world record fee for a teenager at the time of £20million plus significant add-ons. Rooney won every major honour in club football with the Red Devils, finishing up as all-time leading goalscorer both for them and the England national team so he has to be considered the only unqualified success on this list but while it might seem somewhat churlish, for those who had witnessed him as such a force of nature while turning out for Everton – where he returned for the 2017/18 season – perhaps he never quite hit the truly dizzying heights expected of him.
Those record scoring hauls owe a lot to sheer longevity due to Rooney’s early start and while he collected both the PFA Players’ Player of the Year and FWA Footballer of the Year in 2010, there was never a Ballon d’Or unlike the distinctly more one-dimensional Mersey star Michael Owen in 2001. It would be naïve in the extreme though to suggest that the now 36-year-old DC United head coach could have done any better had he stayed with the Blues.
Jack Rodwell was the next big thing to depart down the East Lancs Road some eight years later, this time to United’s “noisy neighbours” as rival boss Ferguson had referred to them, nouveau riche Manchester City whose petrodollar-fuelled spending was taking them to the top of the table. Already an England international, great things were expected of the silky-smooth holding midfielder after he moved to the Etihad for £12million shortly after the club’s first Premier League title but a combination of underwhelming form and injuries saw him out of the door just two years later.
A move to Sunderland was supposed to revive Rodwell’s career but as the Black Cats slid down the divisions – suffering back-to-back relegations in 2017 and 2018 (the former under Moyes his old Everton manager) – he somewhat unfairly became regarded as a kind of pariah at the club because he was unwilling to take a pay cut. Since then there have been stints at Blackburn Rovers and Sheffield United but still only 31, Rodwell is now plying his trade Down Under, first with Western Sydney Wanderers and now Sydney FC.
A year after Rodwell left, Victor Anichebe, who for a time was something of an effective substitute for Everton but not in the same kind of bracket as the aforementioned names, was sold to West Bromwich Albion for £6million. He failed to pull up many trees at either the Hawthorns or Sunderland though – joining Rodwell and Moyes at the latter for the 2016/17 relegation season – and was just 29 when he turned out for his last club Beijing Enterprises Group in the second tier of Chinese football.
Finally, and perhaps most pertinently for Gordon given that it was a move to Chelsea, there’s the story of Ross Barkley. Earlier this year, Gordon told the ECHO : “I’ve never wanted to leave Everton. It’s my home, I’m a Scouser and a home bird as well. The thought of leaving home scares me. It probably wasn’t for me and I never really considered it.”
In contrast, some of Barkley’s reasons for departing his home city were supposed to be to get away from the ‘goldfish bowl’ of Liverpool nightlife after a high-profile incident when CCTV footage showed him being punched to the floor by a man in a bar but like Dick Whittington, he has found out that the streets of the capital aren’t paved with gold, even on the King’s Road. Arriving at Stamford Bridge for £15million in January 2018 – it could have been £35million the previous August but he sat tight – in terms of raw talent, Barkley, once described by Roberto Martinez as a mix of Paul Gascoigne and Michael Ballack, was probably second only to Rooney but he hasn’t kicked on at Chelsea and at the age of 28, when he should be at the peak of his powers, he now finds himself surplus to requirements.
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