So the journey of rediscovery begins, Jack Grealish peeling back the Pep Guardiola layers in search of his essential self at Everton. Welcome back Jack the Lad.
Grealish is a football nut, his world is football-shaped, the pitch his happy place. The enthusiastic embrace of good time to which he is also prone forms part of the same cultural hinterland that claims working class boys, but football came before the big night out and trumps all.
Anybody can put a bottle to his lips but few can drop a shoulder and glide past an opponent with the ball glued to his toes like Grealish. It is the elemental Grealish in whom David Moyes is invested, the very part of Grealish that Guardiola lost sight of in his infatuation with tactical perfection.
Guardiola loves skilful types but not individualists. Only one player of supreme ability was allowed his freedom, but then Lionel Messi is arguably the best there has ever been. His uniqueness was so overwhelming the team necessarily benefitted from his instinctive prompts.
Others with mercurial feet like Andres Iniesta and Thierry Henry at Barcelona, Arjen Robben and Thomas Muller at Bayern Munich, David Silva, Riyad Mahrez and Bernardo Silva at Manchester City, were subordinate to the team, respectful of role and details. Their skills were harnessed to the system, to which they happily submitted because the results were undeniable.
BOURNEMOUTH, ENGLAND - MARCH 30: Pep Guardiola Manager / Head Coach of Manchester City with Jack Grealish of Manchester City during the Emirates FA Cup Quarter Final match between AFC Bournemouth and Manchester City at Vitality Stadium on March 30, 2025 in Bournemouth, England. (Photo by Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images)
Grealish fell out of favour under Pep Guardiola (Photo: Getty)
Grealish seemed to have made the adjustment following his £100m arrival from Aston Villa four years ago, hitting a peak vein in the Treble year.
If Grealish has a weakness, it is believing that his skill itself will always be enough, but as Robben explained in an interview with The Guardian 10 years ago, that is never sufficient for Guardiola.
“When I started working with Pep 18 months ago I noticed how he goes much deeper into football,” Robben, who was 29 at the time, said.
“His intelligence is obvious. Tactically he’s one of the best in the world and under him I have made more steps in my development. I’ve come quite a long way these 18 months.
“These days you have guys who are 19 or 20 and they’ve played their first game and they feel they’ve made it. It’s not true. There’s always so much to improve, no matter your age. That’s why I’m really enjoying working with Pep. Young players can learn a lot and even at 26, 27 you can still make big steps.”
Like most fanatics, Guardiola is wedded to an idea. Those who fall foul of his principles rarely recover. In 2009 Barcelona’s big move under Guardiola was to bring in Serie A superstar Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Inter Milan with Samuel Eto’o moving the other way. Within a year he was back in Milan on loan at AC.
His mistake, Ibrahimovic said, was to try to fit in, to adapt to the demands as Robben had, instead of being himself. He was used to being the man. At Barca, Messi was in the way.
Guardiola expected him to bend the knee to Messi, but that was not the mentality of Ibrahimovic. To thrive he needed to dominate, to be Zlatan*,* but Guardiola was justifiably attached to Messi and was not for turning.
There is some of that with Grealish, who at Villa had always been the daddy. He arrived at City expecting to be given the role of Grealish but found himself shackled to a system.
Since he does not have Ibrahimovic’s powerful egotistic tendency and so stuck at it, adapting well enough without ever capturing the sense of the freestyler he was at Villa Park. Yet over time Guardiola’s demands cost him his identity and his explosiveness. He was effectively estranged from himself.
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Just as Ibrahimovic acknowledged Guardiola’s qualities as a coach, so does Guardiola recognise the talents of Grealish.
“Jack is an exceptional player,” Guardiola said before the Club World Cup this summer.
“The only reason why he didn’t play last season is of course my decisions. We decide that he has to play. The club was honest, he was honest.
“We decide the best is to stay [behind] and have a place that he can feel like he can come back to be the player like he was in the year of the Treble or all his career in Aston Villa. The fact is in the last two seasons he didn’t play much minutes. He has to come back to play and have the butterflies in his stomach that he can play every three days, every three days and show again the quality he has.”
Enter Moyes and Everton, for whom the signing of Grealish makes perfect sense, a talismanic footballer at a club seeking to re-establish its own identity in a new setting.