Jack Grealish is killing the 2024-25 FA Cup. Dominating it. That’s his playground. More assists (three) and big chances created (five) than any other player. Salford decimated. Leyton Orient vanquished. Confirmation, if we needed it, that the seventh-most expensive footballer ever would tear up League One and Two.
But perhaps England’s most over-romanticised competition is the ideal home for its most over-romanticised player. Among the overwhelming power of brand Grealish, among the moments and love and charm, among how much we want him to be great, a mythos has developed around him.
He is now cast as permanently shackled, just one good unleashing from a return to greatness. The reality is murkier. This is a talent which breathed in brilliant flashes, as precocious as it was inconsistent and untameable. But the idea of Grealish has always been grander than the reality, a reputation led by what he represents and how he makes you feel. What he could be, rather than what he is.
On the evidence of the past four years, he should never have joined Manchester City, nor should he have been a £100m player. The club and price tag has diminished a player whose defining characteristics were ingenuity and wantonness. This was, at best, a blind spot in City’s scouting and recruitment, and at worst a deep failure.
Of course, £100m doesn’t just buy you Jack Grealish, as City were well aware. It also buys Jack Grealish vibes, “Himbo King energy” (a genuine headline), the most marketable English footballer of his generation and perhaps the nation’s most potent combination of good looks and ability since David Beckham.
Charming, white, just the right degree of relatable, the childhood Aston Villa fan turned club captain. Unashamedly unable to point out England on a map of the United Kingdom; perfectly imperfect. Comfortable with himself, but not uncomfortably so. No man has worn a hairband that well since Bjorn Borg. The hair. The teeth. The calves. The calves.
In March 2023, he signed the most-expensive boot sponsorship deal ever with Puma, around £10m per season. Despite not scoring in the Premier League last year, Grealish anchored Sky’s dire “Merry Football Dartsmas” advert.
He is a global ambassador for Gucci, has deals with Pepsi and Bose and is the face of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, so popular it basically didn’t matter he led their 2024 Euros advert after being dropped. Just smile and grill.
In an inauthentic, homogenised game, trapped behind layers and layers of PR and communications “experts”, there is Grealish. He is an ambassador for the Special Olympics and one of the most generous players to fans with his time and money, especially those with disabilities or serious illnesses. This is good. More of this.
And then there’s the football. At his best, Grealish thrived in a system forged around him, in a team which revered him, at a club which loved him as son and brother. He was never prolific, but largely produced when it mattered. He was conductor and orchestra. He inspired joy, represented hope and possibility. That was enough.
Grealish is the first to say statistics cannot measure everything he does, but this raises more problems than solutions. What does he actually do? Where does he fit? What is a Jack Grealish and how can you tell if yours isn’t working properly?
At the base level, he is a winger. Except modern wingers have long been assessed as either goalscorers or creators, and he is not quite elite at either. He has never scored more than eight goals in a league season or made more than 10 assists.
In his book Pep Confidential, Marti Perarnau wrote that Pep Guardiola considers Grealish to be City’s “Rest Station”, someone who can hold up the ball or win fouls to allow his teammates a break. This is largely what he’s become: a cog, a facilitator, a capable drone.
This was one of the great English dribblers, except now he is encouraged to not beat more than one man at a time. He has a knack for scoring from distance, but is told not to shoot from outside the penalty box. It’s not hard to deduce where underperformance has come from.
Somewhere during his time at City, the idea that Grealish would get better by becoming more complete took hold, but that simply isn’t true. This Grealish is worse than the Villa iteration. Just because he’s capable of being a “Rest Station”, that doesn’t mean he should do it. Bill Gates probably would have run a mean Domino’s franchise.
For England – the high church of Grealish mythology – he has been helped by always existing as a theoretical alternative, a Third Way, a shorthand for uninhibited, un-English play, for letting the handbrake off and just letting the boys play, for goodness’ sake.
And because he has never really been allowed to test that theory, because he has started just one major tournament game, he will always exist as a untested supposition. But on the facts – 39 caps, 18 starts, goals against Andorra, Iran, Finland and Ireland – Gareth Southgate was right not to depend on him.
As was trialled under Lee Carsley and has been occasionally continued at City, a move into central or attacking midfield might be next. Maybe it will help. But really what he needs is a move away from Manchester, away from Guardiola, away from a world in which he is a £100m footballer, a world which wants him to be complete.
This is the only hope Grealish has to genuinely revive his career, a return to his natural state, where expectation no longer restricts and exposes his flaws quite so sharply.
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