Gary Lineker has lifted the lid on his move to Everton and recalled how he spent the night of his signing after a tribunal drinking champagne with Howard Kendall.
The ex-England international joined the Blues in the summer of 1985 from boyhood club Leicester City for a fee of £800,000.
Lineker went on to score 40 goals in 57 appearances in the solitary season he played for the club, including goals in all three Merseyside derby matches he contested.
And now speaking on how football has changed, the Match of the Day presenter recalled how he initially feared the worst about joining the club when sat in the tribunal as the Blues and Leicester attempted to agree on a fee for him.
“I remember signing for Everton and I’d left Leicester, my hometown club, and it was the end of contract,” he told the Eddie Hearn: No Passion, No Point podcast.
“So it got to the stage in those days where you weren’t a free agent back then, the clubs had to try and agree a fee and if they couldn’t agree a fee, which is probably like your world, they couldn’t agree a fee it used to go to a tribunal at Lancaster Gate.
“So I went down with Howard Kendall as the manager of Everton and the chairman was there as well and we was in this tribunal and it felt like a court case. It was really weird.
“So up gets Gordon Milne, the Leicester manager, he says, ’we’ve got a great player here, we’re losing a great player he's going to play for England for years and years. Everton don’t know what they are getting. He’s worth, like £1.8 million’, or something like this.
“And then Howard Kendall gets up and he says, ’Listen we are taking a bit of a punt on this kid. He’s very raw, he’s very green’.
“So in the end, I’m standing there thinking: ’What I have done here? I’m signing and I’m not gonna get a game.’
“So it goes to the tribunal and they come back and they come back with I think they come out with a fee of £800,000 which was £300,000 more than Everton wanted to pay.
“I was thinking, not only, have they got a player they are not that keen on, they have had to pay over the odds.
“So we walk out of the tribunal, we go out of the front door, we walk down the street and Howard Kendall puts his arm around me and he says, ’Don’t believe any of that’, he says, ’Don’t believe any of that, you're’ going to be my man, you're going to be in the team’, he says. ’I just needed to do that to get the price down a little bit.’
“He walked into Sainsbury's, he got like four bottles of champagne, got them in his bag. We got on a train back to Merseyside, we arrived then went to Southport.
“We went to his favourite Chinese restaurant and I left there absolutely legless about 2 o’clock in the morning with my manager of my new football club.
"So yeah, times have changed a little bit.”
