Everton have avoided having to pay an extra £10m for Dele Alli as the England international can no longer accumulate enough appearances to trigger a clause negotiated with Tottenham Hotspur. The midfielder moved to Goodison Park from Spurs in January 2022.

The deal between the Premier League rivals stipulating that the Goodison Park club would need to pay £10m when Dele reached 20 appearances for the club before the end of his two-and-a-half-year contract, which is due to expire in the summer. However, he has only made only 13 appearances for Everton, and none this season due to injury.

And with just six games of the 2023-24 campaign remaining, the 28-year-old, who will guest as a pundit on Sky Sports’ coverage of the Blues’ trip to Chelsea tonight, is now unable to hit the tally of 20, which would trigger a lucrative payment for Tottenham.

In November, Sean Dyche revealed that Everton sporting director Kevin Thelwell had talked with Spurs about potentially renegotiating a deal for Dele. “Kev has had a couple of phone calls just lightly in the background: ‘Look, where do you see it?’ But nothing that has changed at the moment,” said Dyche.

Dele’s last Everton appearance was in August last year. He endured a tough spell on loan to Turkish side Besiktas last season, before going public in the summer with a candid admission about mental health problems and a sleeping-pill addiction.

In an emotional interview with The Overlap, a YouTube channel and podcast hosted by Sky Sports’ Gary Neville, Dele also opened up on his troubled upbringing. He became upset when speaking about how, at the age of six, he was molested by a friend of his mum, who was an alcoholic, before explaining how he was sent to Africa to live with his biological father in an attempt to instil some discipline into his life.

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