Seamus Coleman to end 17-year Everton career this season

Seamus Coleman’s Everton playing career will end when the season closes, drawing a line under 17 years at a club that became his footballing home. Coleman confirmed on Everton’s YouTube channel on Friday that the 2025-26 campaign would be his last as an Everton player, although he stopped short of announcing retirement and said he intends to play for the Republic of Ireland this summer before deciding his next step.

The 36-year-old arrived from Sligo Rovers in January 2009 for £60,000 and has gone on to make 433 appearances in all competitions for Everton. His Premier League total has been listed at 372 in some club records and 369 in others, but either figure leaves him among the most durable figures in the club’s modern history. He captained Everton 140 times, a measure of how often managers turned to him when results, standards and dressing-room order mattered most.

Coleman’s final season at Goodison Park has already been shaped by the physical cost of a long career. He was limited to five league appearances in 2024-25 because of injuries, yet he still remained part of the club’s leadership structure and briefly stepped into interim management alongside Leighton Baines after Sean Dyche was dismissed in January. Everton later celebrated his service with a special 116-page official magazine in April, a rare gesture that underlined how deeply his name is tied to the club’s recent era.

His departure also marks a wider shift at Everton. A one-year contract extension signed on 27 June 2025 kept him at the club until 30 June 2026, specifically so he could be part of the move from Goodison Park after 133 years to the Hill Dickinson Stadium. Everton described him as one of the club’s best-ever signings, while David Moyes said Coleman’s “leadership, professionalism and humanity are second to none” and credited him with helping explain what it means to be an Everton footballer.

That kind of continuity is becoming rare across the game. Coleman’s exit is not only the loss of a captain who knew the dressing room, the city and the demands of the shirt. It is also the fading of an old football economy, one in which a £60,000 signing from Sligo could stay long enough to become institutional memory. At Everton, that memory is now heading out with one of the club’s most trusted servants.