Okay, so what has happened to Jack Grealish, then?

One of the Premier League's most narrative-laden players has been reduced to a bit-part role at Manchester City. So is it time to cut his losses and move on?

There were thirteen minutes to play of Sunday’s Manchester derby when the change came. Jeremy Doku off, Jack Grealish on. There was nothing particularly controversial about the substitution. Winger for winger, it was a pair of fresh legs to try and close out a win from a match that had broadly been a pretty unedifying spectacle.

Fifteen minutes later, everything had changed. Manchester United had smashed and grabbed, and the growing cloud of The Etihad Stadium grew another few degrees darker and heavier. And for all the talk–and goodness, there has been so much talk–about Pep Guardiola and what this means for him after having just signed a new contract with the club, the arrival of Grealish to practically no effect whatsoever on this particular day has also raised a question about this particular player. What has happened to Jack Grealish?

It just so happened that the day after this match marked the first anniversary of the last time that Grealish scored a goal for Manchester City. It was the 16th December 2023 when he last did so, and ironically this came at the end of last season’s annual Manchester City blip. The Palace game was the last of an eleven-game League run stretching back to the end of September during which they’d picked up just four wins.

Grealish’s goal that day should have set City on their way. Within ten minutes of the start of the second half they led 2-0 and were coasting, but by the end the score was 2-2 and the home side were stuck in 4th place in the table, behind Liverpool, Arsenal and Aston Villa, having played a game more than any of those three.

Of course, no-one knew it at the time, but at this point the machine was just rumbling back into gear. They dropped just six further points all season–from draws against Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal, and ended their season with nine straight wins to take the title by two points from Arsenal and 23 above fourth-placed Aston Villa. Their stranglehold over the Premier League title wasn’t quite ready to be broken just yet.

But what of Grealish? As seems so often to be the case in situations like this, injury has been the main driver behind the scenes. He made just twenty appearances in the Premier League last season thanks to injury, and this sort of interruption has an effect. Across all competitions he made 36 appearances, but his season goals tally was a fairly paltry three.

These injuries, though, can only be assumed to be a part of the reason. Grealish hasn’t played more than 30 Premier League games in a season since 2019/20, his penultimate one before leaving Aston Villa to join Manchester City in the first place. And perhaps looking at goals is the wrong place to be looking. He has only got to double figures in all competitions in one season throughout his entire career, and that was the ten that he managed with Aston Villa in 2019/20. In other words, scoring goals has never really been a critical part of his game.

But if he was hoping that this season would mark the end of an injury-disrupted last few years, this hasn’t been the case. He missed out on a place in the England squad for the Euro 2024 finals but Lee Carsley seemed happy to give him a chance back in the national squad after they finished, and the temporary manager was rewarded for this faith when Grealish scored twice in three games, against Ireland in September and Finland last month.

Of course, this tail-off very much fits the narrative that has been the story of his career. Everybody remembers those pictures of him very much enjoying what looked like an extremely taxing week long bender at the end of the 2022/23 season, and it’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing that the season and half since then have been a matter of him repenting these Bacchanalian excesses at leisure. But the truth is that the far bigger issue has been a range of niggling injuries that have hampered much chance of getting a lengthy run in the first eleven.

He’s certainly not a young player any more. He’s now 29 and will turn 30 a few weeks into next season, and because of the type of player that he is that raises questions about how effective he’ll be able to be, no matter where he’s playing. And that’s an important question to ask right now, as with the January transfer window looming the possibility that he may have to leave The Etihad if he wants to actually play football is very real indeed. There have been rumours linking him to Spurs, and he does feel like a Spurs player, though not necessarily in the ways that he would appreciate. Would a return to Aston Villa be possible? A lot of water has passed under the bridge since he left Villa Park, but has enough?

This atmosphere of decline manifests itself most obviously through various ex-pros offering their tuppence worth on what he should do next, a subject which is usually presented in such a way that it resembles nothing so much as concern trolling. Troy Deeney thinks that, “a fresh start would be great for him and somewhere where he’s the main man again and everyone is giving him the ball”, while Thierry Henry feels that, “I was at home and I screamed because that’s not the Jack Grealish I saw at Villa, that’s not the Jack Grealish I saw arriving at Man City.”

So, a series of niggling injuries and an inability to hold down a regular place in the first team seem to have been the reason for Grealish disappearing from view, and while it’s all very well talking about this player’s career as though it’s some sort of morality play, a very popular line of discourse in recent years, perhaps it’s worth asking why Manchester City even paid £100m for him in the first place.

With weekend rumours surfacing that they’re interested in giving Paul Pogba yet another chance, it might even be time to pack away that notion that this club have somehow unlocked the key to eternal success until they’ve proved otherwise. Because the current problems at Manchester City seem to run much deeper than one relatively bit-part player, although we all already know that they could snap back into gear and yet win this year’s league title, just as they have in previous seasons.

Perhaps 2022/23 was the high point. Perhaps that end of season beano was as good as things were going to get for Jack Grealish at Manchester City. He’s won three straight Premier League titles, a Champions League winners medal, an FA Cup, a UEFA Super Cup and a World Club Cup since he’s been there. He may even think that this particular itch has been well and truly scratched. At 29 years old, with his injury record and playing in the position in which he plays, it may just be that a couple of years elsewhere would suit him just fine. His current situation doesn’t seem to particularly be suiting him or his current club.

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