Folarin Balogun’s £40 million switch to Everton unravelled extraordinarily just after the summer transfer window slammed shut, capping one of deadline day’s most chaotic sagas and leaving the Toffees without the forward they believed they had already signed.
According to reports, the American striker was at Everton’s Finch Farm training base and was expected to sign a deal worth around £40 million ($54m) before instead opting not to put pen to paper and leaving the club’s training ground. Sources described genuine shock inside the club given how close the deal had appeared.
Sources told TEAMtalk there was genuine disbelief inside Everton when Balogun decided against completing the move, after the club had spent much of deadline day working through issues with Monaco and the player himself.
The move had briefly looked in serious jeopardy before being revived. Insiders reported that Everton’s deal for the 25-year-old Monaco striker was being renegotiated with a lower fixed fee and higher performance-based bonuses.
Complicating matters further, there had reportedly been back-and-forth between the two clubs over the findings of Balogun’s medical, though those concerns were said to have been resolved before the fee was renegotiated at around £40 million.
With the Balogun deal wobbling earlier in the day, Everton hedged their bets. The club explored an alternative by making an offer for Manchester United’s Joshua Zirkzee, only for that proposal to be rejected, before Everton managed to revive talks with Balogun and believed they had finally reached an agreement. Instead, the striker changed his mind and returned to Monaco, stunning a club that thought the transfer was all but complete.
The fallout stretched well beyond Goodison Park. Balogun’s withdrawal derailed a separate deal further down the chain: Monaco had a full agreement in place to sell midfielder Lamine Camara to Chelsea but withdrew from that transfer as the 11 pm deadline passed once Balogun pulled out, leaving the Blues furious.
The collapse leaves Everton dangerously short of firepower up front for the new campaign, having already sanctioned Beto’s exit.
The timing was especially awkward given the club had agreed to sell Beto to Fiorentina earlier the same day, with Balogun lined up as his direct replacement.
Manager David Moyes’ side did tie up other late business, a season-long loan return for Jack Grealish from Manchester City for a second successive year, and the £4.29 million signing of defender Ainsley Maitland-Niles from Lyon, but the misfiring pursuit of a senior striker has been widely criticized.
Commentary questioned how the club had ended up halving an attacking line that was “far from prolific” to begin with, arguing that letting Beto leave before a Balogun deal was signed and sealed “looks amateur at best,” and noting the failed pivot to Zirkzee only deepened the sense of a chaotic window.
It is the latest twist in a turbulent year for Balogun, who arrived at the World Cup this summer as a rising star before being engulfed in controversy.
His red card in the USA’s last-32 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina initially ruled him out of the last-16 match against Belgium, a suspension controversially overturned by FIFA after intervention from President Trump, a decision that drew sharp criticism of FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
The USA lost that last-16 tie 4-1, with Balogun later conceding that the furore around the incident had affected the team’s performance.
Born in New York and raised in London, Balogun has scored 31 goals in 91 appearances since joining Monaco from Arsenal and, for now, remains a Ligue 1 player, leaving Everton to regroup and find another forward option before the new Premier League season gets fully underway.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Everton’s £40m deal to sign Folarin Balogun from Monaco collapsed at the last minute when the striker himself pulled out after arriving at the club’s training ground despite the transfer appearing all but done.
This wasn’t a fee or medical issue in the end, but a genuine change of heart by the player, which left Everton short of attacking options for the new season and triggered a domino effect that also scuppered Chelsea’s separate deal for Monaco’s Lamine Camara.
