Everton haven't addressed the question every fan is actually asking: whether one of England's most gifted footballers has a drinking problem his clubs have spent years waving through as charm.
Grealish was left out of Everton's Carabao Cup tie against Newcastle on Thursday for a "breach of Club discipline." He'd already missed Saturday's defeat to Arsenal, which Everton put down to illness. Reports describe the breach as an unauthorised absence from training. Everton haven't said it was about drink. That link is an inference.
You don't need to invent anything to ask the question, because the pattern is already on the record and it runs for years. The 2020 lockdown breach, when he went out and crashed his car. The treble summer of 2023, days of filmed drinking across Istanbul, Manchester and Ibiza, after which he reported for England by his own admission "a bit hungover." His own father talking about a £47,000 drinks bill at a City title party. Then, this year alone, two separate tabloid incidents: the photo of him apparently passed out at a rooftop bar in the spring, and then shots on camera during an England game in the summer. A former Everton scout looked at the second one and said plainly it wasn't "the signs you want if you're going to spend a lot of money on bringing a player into your football club."
He was right, and he was in a tiny minority.
For roughly six years, public drinking episodes that would have ended lesser careers got filed under personality. Managers shrugged. The press ran the photos as a laugh. Grealish himself has been the most honest voice in the whole saga: "At City, I didn't help myself at times, I'll openly say that, but then I don't think it was all down to that." When a player keeps telling you he hasn't picked his moments and you keep clapping, the problem isn't only the player.
Manchester City turned the drinking into part of the brand during trophy runs, a lad with a beer for the cameras, right up until it suited them to move him on. Guardiola flatly denied off-field behaviour had anything to do with freezing him out, pinning it on Doku and Savinho instead: "The only reason he didn't play minutes was me, not because he was incorrect or whatever." That's the official line. It doesn't erase the years of banter that came before it.
Everton are the uncomfortable part. Reporting around Grealish's loan describes Moyes, a hard man by reputation, cutting him more slack than he'd cut anyone else: an unusually warm relationship, a manager who liked him. The club that most needed to hold the line is run by the one manager who was fondest of him. Moyes has been careful this week, calling it "a club decision" he supports, talking up Everton's "real good values" and saying he wants Grealish to be "a senior professional and a role model." Good words. Years late.
This no-show is on Grealish. A 31-year-old on loan for a second season, without a goal or an assist across his first seven games this term, doesn't get to skip training. Own that.
But the bigger failure belongs to everyone who watched a man pass out in public, more than once, and decided the responsible move was to laugh and sign him again.
