Everton snubbed bargain Rodri transfer to sign €30m defender scout had warned them off

Future Ballon d'Or winner Rodri was one of a trio of players who would later move to the Premier League who scout Dave Worthington recommended to Everton

An Everton scout is said to have told them to sign Rodri in the 2017/18 season. But with the future Ballon d’Or winner going on to join Atletico Madrid for €20million the following summer, the Blues reportedly went against the same talent spotter’s advice to spend even more on Yerry Mina.

An article in The Athletic highlights the work of Dave Worthington, who for many years operated as a scout for the likes of Everton, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Chelsea, Hull City, Leicester City, Sunderland and West Ham United. But now, at the age of 80, is back in his native West Yorkshire.

Worthington’s new autobiography Worthy tracks his fascinating career with the former Halifax Town, Barrow, Grimsby Town and Southend United right-back recording his observations of players through extensive dossiers that are now kept in crates at his home.

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The piece states: “Leafing through one of the files, from the mid-2000s, familiar names jump off the page: Karim Benzema, whom he first saw as a 16-year-old at Lyon, alerting Bolton to the possibility of a €1million deal and later telling Chelsea: ‘This boy will go to Real Madrid, Barcelona or Milan if we don’t get in quick’; Manuel Neuer, then a teenage goalkeeper at Schalke, and former Tottenham and Belgium midfielder Mousa Dembele, then a teenager at AZ, both of whom he proposed to Chelsea.”

However, some of Worthington’s most high-profile recommendations fell on deaf ears at Goodison Park during a period of transfer profligacy that owner Farhad Moshiri later apologised for, ahead of a brace of points deductions for PSR rule breaches.

This is outlined through a passage in the report that reads: “Another file contains more recent reports, urging West Ham to sign Marco Asensio from Mallorca before (as with Benzema) Real Madrid arrived on the scene. A list of his firm recommendations for Everton in 2017 includes Pedro Porro, Bruno Fernandes and Rodri, then at Girona, Sporting and Villarreal respectively, now at Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and Manchester City.

“Rodri gets the highlighter treatment again and again. A typical example is Worthington’s assessment of the midfielder, then 21, in a La Liga match against Deportivo La Coruna in January 2018: ‘Easily won headers, always makes himself available, won tackles, good positioning + awareness, strong, keeps ball well, does not make a pass if tackled, wants to help everybody, rarely wastes a pass, brilliant changes (of) play etc, movement superb.’

“The letters ‘AP’ in the right-hand margin signal an unequivocal recommendation for Everton to try to sign Rodri, who has gone on to become one of the pre-eminent players in world football with Atletico Madrid, City and Spain, and the winner of the 2024 Ballon d’Or.

“‘He stood out so much,’ Worthington says. ‘He could do everything and play anywhere – not just midfield but at the back, across any of the defensive positions. I’m pretty sure I saw him play up front in one game. Had the lot as far as I was concerned. A clever, clever footballer.’"

Instead, Everton ended up splashing out an even greater fee on injury-plagued centre-back Mina, who turned out in just 86 of the 190 Premier League matches during his five-year stay at Goodison Park before departing on a free transfer. The report adds: “It is natural to wonder whether Everton were really in a position to sign Rodri, given he ended up rejoining Atletico Madrid later that year in a deal worth an initial €20million (£17.4m/$23.3m at today’s exchange rates).

“But this was near the height of the Merseyside club’s spending under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership. What’s more, they spent €30million that summer on Barcelona and Colombia defender Yerry Mina — a player Worthington had, after scouting him extensively, specifically advised them against signing, warning that his aerial threat from set-pieces did not outweigh the reservations the scout had about other areas of his game.

“All of that came at a time when Worthington could feel the tide of opinion turning against older scouts and traditional methods. He didn’t last much longer at Everton, out of tune with a regime that on one hand extolled the virtues of a more sophisticated approach to player identification and on the other seemed to be driven by the whims of Moshiri.”

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