Wayne Rooney’s fairytale return to Everton is over. 12 months after rejoining his boyhood club from Manchester United, the Croxteth-born striker has moved to MLS side DC United on a long-term deal. This, for all intents and purposes, feels like club rejecting player rather than the other way around. Maybe it was always going to be this way.
After jilting his boyhood team in 2004 for the bright lights of Old Trafford, now the tables have been turned. 14 years ago it was Everton who were not good enough for Wayne Rooney. Now it is the 32-year-old who cannot keep pace with the change in direction at Goodison Park.
While this was a logical move designed to reduce both the Goodison Park wage bill and the average age of the playing squad, there's also a certain symbolism attached to the gesture. Where last summer, Rooney's signing was seen as the start of a process designed to take big-spending Everton back to the top of English football, his status this season as a relic of faded grandeur quickly helped highlight the fallacy of the overall vision. In placing him on the scrapheap, the Blues are cutting ties with that model and starting the process of renewal.
Such has been the nature of this protracted saga that in the end, even those that initially wanted Rooney to stay were seeking a speedy resolution. Once it became apparent that he was unlikely to be a part of new manager Marco Silva's plans, finality was sought by all concerned. Everton have that now. And so the next chapter begins in earnest.
A younger, fitter replacement will now be a matter of priority for technical director Marcel Brands over the next few months. Even though Rooney had waned significantly physically, in certain contexts he was still one of the Blues' best players in possession. His departure means vast amounts of work must now be done to restructure and revitalise a midfield that rarely seems to excel in any particular aspect of play.
Key to that will be the technical prowess of any replacement. In practice, Gylfi Sigurdsson will now be free to assume the role of playmaker-in-chief, also opening up a berth on the left of the attack for either the likes of Ademola Lookman and Nikola Vlasic or a new signing. With Sigurdsson assuming more creative responsibility and youngster Kieran Dowell waiting in the wings too, it would make greater sense for Brands to focus either on a box-to-box option or someone to set the tempo from deep. Extra goal threat will also be essential during the close season, given the frequency and importance of Rooney's goals for Everton over the course of the season.
Predominantly, though, new additions must be younger than before, more dynamic and on the way up. Lessons should be learned from the experience with Rooney, with the recruitment of top-six drop downs unlikely to yield the sort of success required by both major shareholder Farhad Moshiri and the Goodison fanbase. A move for rumoured target Jack Wilshere, then, would serve only to repeat the same mistake. As Brands himself has suggested, Everton's business must now be in locating the next batch of players destined for the top; not ones that have been there already and failed.
Rooney, quite evidently, had no place in such a blueprint, but does hold sentimental value for a certain group of Evertonians - and so his exit comes as a sort of welcome relief. There were moments of happiness, namely against Stoke, Liverpool and West Ham, while the boyhood blue didn't stay long enough for the fairytale to totally become a nightmare.
That, in itself, is something for the sentimentalists.
This, though, may not be the end of the story for Rooney and Everton after all. Indeed, the smart money is on the veteran coming back to Goodison as a coach in the future after his three-and-a-half year deal in the US capital expires.
Everton, meanwhile, will move on in a new direction under Silva and Brands, hoping to make strides in the post-Rooney era.
