Interest from elsewhere in Iliman Ndiaye is something most Evertonians were dreading this summer but, even without the winger making a huge splash at the 2026 World Cup, it was fairly inevitable.
There were times last season where Ndiaye’s talents became unmissable to the wider football world. He may have fallen short of his goals return from his maiden season at Everton, notching six compared with the 11 he scored in all competitions in 2024/25, but he drew plenty of attention for his mesmeric ability on the ball.
In terms of pure skill and trickery, Ndiaye is surely among the most gifted players to play for the Blues in the Premier League era and those talents have attracted plenty of admirers.
Liverpool and Manchester United were mooted as potential suitors but with less than four weeks to go before the new season kicks off, the first tangible move to pry him away from Bramley-Moore Dock appears to have come from the same club that have just signed Crysencio Summerville in a £60m deal.
Al-Hilal have reportedly have contacted Ndiaye’s representatives to sound out a potential switch to Saudi Arabia, putting a sizeable wrinkle in Everton’s summer transfer plans.
At the time of writing, that is as far as things have gone — Everton have yet to field formal contact from the Saudis and, obviously, until they do nothing tangible can happen. Nevertheless, with Ndiaye having spelled out his Champions League ambitions in an interview a few weeks back, one that caused a stir among Blues fans, and the market for forward players of his ilk having become hugely inflated, the pros and cons of cashing in on the former Sheffield United and Marseille man have dominated chatter on social media.
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The potential deal does raise a number of questions, not least whether it makes sense for either the player or Everton.
Seeing 26-year-old Ndiaye follow 24-year-old Summerville to the comparative backwater of Middle Eastern football feels like a waste. Yet, playing in Saudi Arabia for a year two does give the players an opportunity to earn an ungodly amount of money, tax-free, before they try and secure a move back to Europe and Champions League football just as they are hitting the peaks of their respective careers.
For Everton, who have been trying, unsuccessfully, in recent months to tie Ndiaye down to a more lucrative extended contract, the draw will be in the size of the potential transfer fee the Senegal international could command.
If you canvassed the Everton fanbase, though, you’d probably get a broad consensus that our club should no longer be in the business of selling our best players. PSR constraints and the frustrations of the Farhad Moshiri era, where a general failure to progress gave way to financial chaos, meant that in recent years the Toffees have often had no choice.
Romelu Lukaku used Goodison Park as a stepping stone, first to Old Trafford and then to the San Siro and Stadio Maradona, once it became clear his ambitions weren’t likely to be realised with Everton; Manchester City’s offer for John Stones was too good to turn down; while the combined £100m or so that Everton received for Richarlison and Anthony Gordon were vital in keeping the lights on.
Ever since the chickens of Moshiri’s largesse between 2016 and 2020 came home to roost, Everton have, necessarily, been a selling club. The fervent hope was that, under The Friedkin Group, those days were over.
Yet a remark made by David Moyes at the end of last season, where he suggested that it might behoove the Blues to behave a bit more like the likes of Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford — three clubs who have become the poster children for smart business, sound recruitment and a savvy transfer policy of buying cheap and selling players for big profits — encapsulated where we currently are.
Everton are, unquestionably, a huge club but one which has under-performed for so long that our commercial performance lags well behind our former peers that now make up the so-called “big six”. Under the new Squad Cost Ratio framework that has now replaced the controversial Profitability and Sustainability Rules, even if TFG were moved to do so (the jury is out on that score) the Blues simply aren’t able to to spend hundreds of millions on players each year.
This summer’s business to date is testament to that. With €20m already committed to SC Freiburg for Merlin Röhl, Everton’s transfer committee and head of player trading, Nick Hammond, have patiently negotiated favourable deals for Hayden Hackney and Tyrique George which took the outlay so far to roughly £53m. A deal for Jack Grealish, either on loan or a permanent basis, also remains a desired goal before the deadline.
A move for their rumoured top target at right-back, Guéla Doué, meanwhile, remains on the back-burner because of Strasbourg’s initial valuation, with the Blues opting not to overpay so as to make the 2026 transfer budget stretch as far as possible.
In that context, the potential sale of Ndiaye, with a fee of £70m not out of the question given the crazy nature of the current market, is sound business. The massive profit they would make on the £15m acquisition from Ligue 1 could allow the club to address a number of areas of need in the squad where they might otherwise either need to prioritise certain positions.
The manager and the committee are known to be looking for a defensive midfielder and would be in the market for a second right-back and left-back cover as well, if possible. It’s conceivable, meanwhile, that should Hackney enjoy a full, injury-free season that based, on his form for Middlesbrough, he could replace Ndiaye’s goals and surpass the Senegalese’s assists contribution from last season allowing Iliman’s departure to open up funds to acquire a true goal-scoring winger who is capable of playing across the front line to boost the team’s effectiveness in the final third.
The key, quite evidently, will be if and how the club replaces someone of enjoys ability and entertainment factor but things are rarely as straightforward as that at Everton — at least, they often haven’t been. Just because a player has been sold, it hasn’t always followed that the entire transfer fee would then be available to spend on replacements. In theory, under TFG, it should be but Blues fans are all-too scarred from the years when it wasn’t and they can be forgiven for being sceptical as question marks over the extent of the new owners’ ambitions continue to linger.
Therein lies the concern, even for those who agree that the club still needs to be operating on a footing of buying low, selling for big profits and repeating the cycle all while hoping the current restructuring of the Finch Farm academy also bears fruit.
When he’s in the mood and on fire, Ndiaye is almost unplayable. No wonder, then, that he is a fan favourite with his own terrace chant. He has scored some wonderful goals for Everton, and lit up an otherwise functional team under two less-than-dynamic managerial tenures.
There is a strong argument to be made that with a natural, overlapping full-back behind him, he’s have been even better but memories of his alarming drop off at the end of last season are difficult to shake. Did his iffy form betray a wandering eye, fatigue following the Africa Cup of Nations, or a desire, subconscious or otherwise, to keep himself fresh for Senegal’s World Cup campaign? Or was, as his public comments hint, he frustrated playing in a team that “wasn’t working” by the tail end of 2025/26? Whatever the reason, the bond between club and player appears to have loosened.
No one wants to lose their best players, but, again, the cold truth is that Everton remain a selling club (in the same way that Aston Villa had just sold one of their key players to Chelsea for a massive fee) and there are times when pulling in the biggest fee possible for a player who has shown hesitation in committing their future to the Blues and moving on is the best course of action in what is a cut-throat business.
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