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Misfits Mysteries and Nearly-Men — Henry Onyekuru

Player recruitment under Steve Walsh showed ambition even if things didn't work out

Steve Walsh's somewhat brief stint at Everton has become synonymous with waste and a lack of long-term thinking and there are few who would argue that he burdened his successor, Marcel Brands, with a number of expensive millstones that have complicated the rebuilding project that was required following the departures from Goodison Park or Ronald Koeman and Sam Allardyce.

His promotion from highly successful scout at Leicester to the Toffees' first ever Director of Football may have proved to be premature but his work at the club was not without its merits. Idrissa Gueye, aided by his almost criminally low release clause, was unquestionably Walsh's best piece of business but there is something to be said also for a couple of his more speculative signings that held enormous promise, didn't pan out but still netted Everton a profit regardless.

One of those was Henry Onyekuru, a hitherto mostly unknown young Nigerian striker plying his trade with KAS Eupen, a partner club of the Qatari-backed Aspire football academy, whom he had joined as a 13-year-old and helped to fire into Belgium's top flight for the first time.

Arsenal, Celtic and Hoffenheim all expressed early interest in him following those goalscoring exploits but it wasn't until the summer of 2017 that he was primed for a move to one of Europe's big leagues, with the Premier League, where he was tipped to follow in the footsteps of Yakubu, Obafemi Martins and Nwankwo Kanu as the next Nigerian goalscoring star, seen as his most likely destination.

Having brought the likes of N'Golo Kante, Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy to Leicester, Walsh had built a deserved reputation for unearthing hidden gems in his time at the King Power Stadium and he had already brought another Super Eagle to the Premier League in the form of Ahmed Musa, albeit with limited success. (The winger had lit up the 2014 World Cup in Brazil for Nigeria but struggled mightily in England with one of his few bright moments coming against Everton in an FA Cup tie at Goodison in which the Foxes dumped the Blues out at the Third Round stage.)

Five years Musa's junior and being pursued by none other than Paris St Germain during the 2017 close season — he went as far as having a medical with the Ligue 1 giants — Onyekuru was deemed to be an altogether brighter prospect and Walsh no doubt felt he had picked up another bargain when he paid Eupen £8m for him. All that the forward who had scored 28 times in 57 league appearances in Belgium needed was to qualify for a work permit, something Everton hoped he could achieve within the next 12 months.

“The best-laid plans of mice and men…” and all that. Onyekuru would never make a senior appearance for Everton; that elusive work permit was stymied by injury and the young forward's lack of international appearances during his two years at Everton.

As Onyekuru explains in a recent article by The Athletic, even Dani Alves was tipping him for stardom after the two met in the Champions League while the Nigerian was playing on loan back in Belgium with Anderlecht: “He told me that I was a good player and I could be one of the best in Africa.

“I remember Everton sent me a message saying they had seen the game, were happy with my progress and that hopefully they'd see me in the national team soon so I could get my work permit.”

It was at that point that his path to the Everton first-team, where another of Walsh's misfits, Sandro Ramirez was struggling and the loss of Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United was being keenly felt, looked open. His form for Anderlecht was promising and he was increasingly involved at international level for Nigeria who were preparing for the World Cup in Russia which was coming up the following year.

He was struck down with a serious knee injury in December 2017, however, and a period of wrangling between his parent and loan club followed, with Everton insistent that the problem didn't require surgery while Anderlecht were of the opposite opinion. In Onyekuru's view, the Belgian club and coach Hein Vanhaezebrouck, in particular, were annoyed by the Blues' stance and took it out on the player once he had returned from a period of rehabilitation on Merseyside by relegating him to the bench. Though he had reached double figures for goals during his loan spell with the Brussels club, he made just a handful more starts that season and lost traction in the senior Nigeria setup at an important juncture.

The upshot was that Onyekuru failed to make his country's World Cup squad, a major blow to his hopes of playing the requisite number of international matches to qualify for a work permit from the UK Department of Employment.

“The plan to go from Everton to Anderlecht was because I didn't have the permit,” Henry explained. “The best chance for me to get a work permit was for me to go to the World Cup. It was a big disappointment and was like a bomb had hit me. It's the biggest tournament in the world and everyone wants to be there.”

He had no option but to go back out on loan in 2018-19, with Galatasaray stepping forward to sign him for the season. Onyekuru appeared to settle quickly in Turkey, sending regular clips of himself swanning around Istanbul to social media and cementing a regular spot in their first team. He played 38 times for the Turkish side, scoring 14 times, including the late goal that won the title for Galatasaray in dramatic fashion against rivals Besiktas.

There was plenty of talk of him returning there on loan for the following season but Everton were reluctant to let him go there on loan twice. Regardless, Onyekuru's focus was increasingly on finding a permanent move elsewhere, be that sooner or later. With a work permit still nowhere on the horizon and perhaps because his experience in Liverpool while he recovered from his knee injury had been a “difficult” and lonely one, he was, by his own admission, no longer thinking about playing in the Premier League.

“I didn't have the work permit and my head wasn't there (at Everton) because I knew I wouldn't get it,” Onyekuru told The Athletic. “I was about to go back to Galatasaray after the Africa Cup of Nations but all of a sudden I received a call from the sporting director of Everton saying they'd found a good club for me.”

That club was Monaco in a league that the striker had always been reluctant to play in but he felt he had no choice. For Everton, the £12m fee agreed with the French club was too good an opportunity to pass up and Henry Onyekuru's initially promising but ultimately unproductive move from Eupen to Everton was over. He would return to Galatasaray on loan anyway in 2019 when Monaco agreed to let him go on a temporary basis to resume his development playing first-team football but, for now, his dream of playing in England's top flight is on hold.

Though he is still only 22, the jury is still out as to whether Onyekuru might ever have been a success in England — he missed the 2018 World Cup but was included in Nigeria's squad for the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations where he was called upon just once, for a 12-minute cameo in the Super Eagles' semi-final defeat to Algeria. To date, he has earned just 11 international caps, below the threshold required for a work permit in England.

As such, the Onyekuru transfer has, predictably, been criticised in some quarters of the Everton fan-base as another failing by Walsh, but the club deserve credit for managing his time at the club well enough that he enjoyed two successful loan spells in different countries to the point that they were able not only to move him on without losing money but make a tidy profit in the process.

Like that of Ademola Lookman, the Onyekuru move was the kind of speculative, low-risk, high-reward move that Everton should be looking to make as part of a holistic transfer strategy, particularly one focused on developing younger players. (Not that Walsh, who signed a number of players on the wrong side of 27 for massive transfer fees during his time at Goodison, appeared to be focused enough on youth.)

If you've ever found yourself asking why some teams are able to find future stars when they're young, cheap and potentially able to either save the club or make the club millions, then it's this kind of strategy that needs to be in place and one that has been working at Finch Farm in recent years. That's how, for example, Arsenal were able to pluck Robin van Persie from Feyenoord as a raw 20-year-old for a couple of million pounds and nurture him to become a world-class striker, and, of course, how Manchester City picked up Vincent Kompany at 22 for £6m, how Tottenham acquired Dele Alli for £5m, how Manchester United found Ole Gunnar Solskjaer for just £1.5m and, of course, how Everton signed players like John Stones, Mason Holgate and Dominic Calvert-Lewin for relative buttons and have reaped the rewards.

With Marcel Brands now in the sporting director role at Everton, it's likely that this modus operandi will continue and there will be plenty more hits and misses along the way… the hope being, of course, that there will be more Calvert-Lewins and Holgates than Onyekurus and Lookmans but, with younger players, you never really know for sure until you try.

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