- Barcelona tabled a €100m bid for Richarlison in January 2020 – Everton said no
- Ancelotti publicly told him he could score 30 goals and win the Ballon d’Or
- This summer, Ancelotti leads Brazil at the World Cup – but Richarlison won’t be there
In January 2020, Barcelona came in for Richarlison with a €100m offer and Everton told them, without a moment’s hesitation, where to go. It was one of the most Everton things that has ever happened – and somehow, also one of the most brilliant.
If you read the piece we ran this week about the strange, slightly surreal experience of having Carlo Ancelotti as our manager, here is the footnote that makes the whole thing even harder to process.
Because while Ancelotti was the headline act of that brief little golden period, Richarlison was the player at the centre of it – and the Barcelona story is, when you sit back and think about it, absolutely wild.
January 2020. Barcelona, scrambling for a striker after Luis Suarez was injured, put a €100m offer on the table. Roughly £85m in real money. Everton knocked it back straight away. No deliberation, no counter, no drawn-out saga. Just no.
A club that had spent the better part of a decade flogging its best players to stay afloat turned down nine figures for a 22-year-old and went back to lunch.
At the time, under Ancelotti, it felt entirely right.
Don Carlo’s faith
That is what that period did to you. It made things feel possible that really should not have felt possible. And a big part of that was the way Ancelotti talked about the players around him. This was a man who had managed Ronaldo, Drogba, Zidane – and he looked at Richarlison and told the press, with a straight face, that 30 goals a season should be the minimum expectation.
He told Richarlison privately – and Richarlison later shared this – that he could win the Ballon d’Or one day. Now, you can choose to read that as a manager being nice to a player he liked. But this was Carlo Ancelotti. He did not need to say things like that. When he did, it landed differently.
The road since
It did not pan out the way either of them might have imagined, it has to be said. Richarlison went to Tottenham in 2022 for big money and, to be generous about it, things did not exactly go to plan up there. The 30-goal seasons never arrived. The Ballon d’Or chat aged… very badly.
And here, perhaps, is where the story takes its most bittersweet turn. When Ancelotti named his Brazil squad for this summer’s World Cup, Richarlison’s name was not in it.
The man who once told him he could be the best player in the world, who talked Barcelona out of the running with sheer force of belief, looked at the options available and decided the moment had passed.
That is football, of course. It is also, if you were an Evertonian watching on from a distance, just a tiny bit sad.
We had both of them, for a while. The greatest manager of his generation and a player he genuinely thought could be the best in the world. It didn’t last, it didn’t end the way any of us hoped, and it turns out the manager who believed in him most is now the one who has left him at home.
But it happened. And on a grey Tuesday in June, with the Hackney negotiations dragging on and the window barely open, that is worth remembering.
