Everton passed on the £50m option, and Grealish now has five days to choose
Fabrizio Romano says the decision comes within days. Everton want another loan, Villa are the homecoming, and Manchester City want £300,000 a week off the wage bill.
Aug 27, 2026
Jack Grealish has five days to work out where he plays this season. Fabrizio Romano reported that Everton and Aston Villa are both in contact with his camp and that the player will decide in the coming days, with the English window shutting at 11pm on Tuesday. Romano also poured cold water on the Sunderland links, saying nothing concrete is going on there.
Everton had him at £50m and passed
Everton’s loan deal last season carried an option to buy at £50 million. They chose not to use it. That was not a verdict on the player so much as on the price, because the club has spent the months since trying to talk Manchester City down, with reported ceilings that have wandered from the £15m to £20m range in the spring to as little as £5m to £10m more recently.
What Everton would prefer now is another loan. It is easy to see why. They paid £225,000 of Grealish’s £300,000 weekly wage last season while City covered the rest, and a second loan lets them keep a player their supporters took to without committing a fee for a 30-year-old whose last season ended in an operating theatre.
His first month on Merseyside was the best of his career. Four assists in August, double the next-best in the league, two of them in a 2-0 win over Brighton and two more in a 3-2 win at Wolves. He won the Premier League Player of the Month award for the first time at 29. Then he broke a bone in his left foot in January and did not play again.
Villa are the other option, and the sentimental one
Villa sold Grealish to City for £100 million in 2021, a club record that stood until Chelsea paid £117m for Morgan Rogers this summer. Bringing him back would be a good story and, on the current evidence, not a bad piece of squad-building either. Villa have sold Rogers to Chelsea and Ezri Konsa to Arsenal, which is two of Unai Emery’s better players gone and a lot of money in the building, and they were beaten 4-0 at Brighton on 23 August.
Romano’s reporting suggests Grealish’s own preference is Everton. That is the version of this that makes sense on football terms. Villa is where the emotional pull is.
City just want the wages gone
Grealish is contracted at the Etihad until June 2027 on the six-year deal he signed in 2021, and £300,000 a week for a player who is not in the plans is the kind of number that gets a transfer done at a discount. Atletico Madrid were in the conversation earlier this month, and there have been approaches from Saudi Arabia and MLS across the summer.
Under Enzo Maresca he has not been frozen out so much as left behind. He missed City’s pre-season tour of Hong Kong and South Korea while finishing his rehab, and his first football in seven months came in the Community Shield on 16 August, the 3-0 defeat to Arsenal in Cardiff.
Five days is not much time for a deal involving three clubs, a fee nobody agrees on and a wage bill somebody has to swallow. Grealish is 30, he turns 31 next month, and this is the final year of his contract. This is not a decision he gets to make many more times.