Everton’s announcement that they are returning to Seamus Coleman’s previous team Sligo Rovers has brought back memories of the two clubs’ previous connection when the Blues’ most-celebrated player Dixie Dean was lured across the Irish Sea in a sensational transfer. squad will begin their preparations for ’s historic final season at Goodison Park with a trip to The Showgrounds to face League of Ireland Premier Division side Sligo on Friday July 19. Killybegs-born right-back , now captain of both club and country, left Sligo for the Blues in 2009 for his now famous bargain “Sixty grand” fee, immortalised in the Goodison Park terrace chant but some seven decades earlier it was the promise of a bumper pay day that persuaded Dean to make his switch to the Emerald Isle.
While over the past year Saudi Arabia has become the fashionable destination for players to go for a bumper payday, upping sticks to what was perceived as one of football’s backwaters seemed a curious choice for over 80 years ago. Paul Little sheds light on this curious tale though as he explores Dean’s time at Sligo Rovers in Pitch Publishing’s . The title comes from the large flat-topped rock, part of the Dartry Mountains, which dominates the landscape around the seaport on Connacht’s wild Atlantic coastline where record goalscorer briefly went to play in 1939.
Affectionately known by their supporters as the ‘Bit O’Red’, Sligo’s team had only been formed in 1928 – the year of Dean�.
