The rag doll who became as strong as a bull Marouane Fellaini at Everton

June 2024 · 9 minute read

They wore wigs on Wembley Way in tribute to his curly locks, they cheered his audacious pirouettes and close control.

They took his unconventional style to their hearts and savoured the powerhouse performances.

Everton fans might have raised their eyebrows when, from nowhere, Marouane Fellaini became their club’s record £15 million signing in September 2008.

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But by the time his Goodison career came to an end in 2013, they knew and loved Fellaini the player.

Fellaini the person, though, was more of a closed book. To outsiders at least. The softly-spoken giant from Brussels often shied away from interviews, pretending his English was less serviceable than it really was.

But behind closed doors, the 6ft 4in midfielder left a mark at Everton even more indelible than that of his elbows and quick feet on opposition defenders across the Premier League.

He almost did not become an Everton player.

David Moyes had been tracking Fellaini throughout the 2007-08 campaign. His scouts regularly checked on the youngster, who was a key cog in a vibrant Standard Liege midfield that also contained Axel Witsel and Steven Defour.

By the time that team pushed Liverpool to extra time in their Champions League qualifying tie in August 2008, the cat was out of the bag. Clubs across Europe were interested in the Belgian of Moroccan heritage, the player who had run Rafael Benitez’s star-studded engine room (which included Steven Gerrard and Xabi Alonso) into the ground.

Everton’s chairman Bill Kenwright, who was friendly with Fellaini’s agent at the time, the suave Christophe Henrotay, had already registered his interest. Nevertheless, negotiations to complete the deal went right to the wire.

The story of Fellaini’s deadline-day move to Merseyside has been told before. It was a football transfer version of wacky races that lurched from Kenwright’s favourite Les Ambassadeurs club in Mayfair, via Luton airport to, in the end, a business centre in an airport hotel in Brussels.

“The talks took a whole day. We only reached an agreement around half past 10,” Moyes recalled in an interview with Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws in 2018. “It was a race against time to finish everything. I rushed to Luton airport. Then there was that terrible, turbulent flight across the Channel. And then the challenge to find a working fax machine in the Sheraton Hotel on Zaventem. Just minutes before the deadline, a hotel worker took us to the business centre and we found one that still worked.”

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The papers were filed just in the nick of time. It was a record fee for the club and a Belgian player and it was quickly apparent that he had the potential to become a top performer in England. But although he ended his debut campaign as a star man for an Everton team that reached the FA Cup final and finished fifth in the Premier League, Fellaini did not adjust overnight.

“It took him about three months to get to grips with the Premier League. He just couldn’t get used to the pace of the game,” Everton’s then-head of sports science and performance, Dave Billows, tells The Athletic.

“He sat down in the dressing room after one game, I think it was his third or fourth, and just blew out his cheeks and goes: ‘Coach, Coach’ — he called all of us Coach — ‘in Belgium it is 45 minutes hard, 45 minutes easy. Here it is 90 minutes hard. This is crazy’. I just told him he better get used to it and to be fair to him, he did.

“He was like a rag doll when he first came to us. Tall but like a string bean — he didn’t have much power. We had to work on building his strength and we did and eventually he became so good at it he was unplayable.

“It helped that Sylvain Distin latched onto him and took him under his wing. Sylv thought Felli was funny and could see how good he was and he started taking him for gym sessions. Felli was such a character he’d make the lads roar with laughter.”

Different, occasionally odd but always endearing, Fellani quickly became a firm dressing-room favourite. One former player from that era remembers the Belgian’s gym mantra, “Strong like a Bull”, which he would repeat when lifting weights much to the amusement of the others.

Marouane Fellaini Everton Manchester United 2012 Fellaini’s goal against United in 2012 is fondly remembered by Evertonians (Photo: Andrew Yates/AFP/Getty Images)

“Before training on Fridays we used to do an optional thing in the gym with the ladders on the floor called ‘Fast Feet’,” says Billows, who is now back with former boss Moyes at West Ham United. “It helped improve mobility and proprioception. Felli started to come along to keep his hips mobile. He was a bit ungainly doing it at first but he was keen to improve and catch up physically so he threw himself into all of the extra stuff.”

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Fellaini’s father Abdellatif, a former goalkeeper for Raja Casablanca who moved to Belgium and became a bus driver when his football career fizzled out, was a strong influence in his son having a driven mindset. To hone his oldest boy’s work ethic, he would sometimes make Marouane run behind his car to training instead of giving him a lift.

“Physically, he really started to come into his own towards the end of that first season,” says Billows. “He was like a professional 400-metre runner and he could keep it up for the full 90 minutes.

“We would do a grading exercise test in pre-season on the treadmill which would go to 10 kilometres then, two minutes to get to 12, then 14 and so on as it got harder and harder. Felli was always the last man standing. The others would jump off gasping and he’d still be going. His stamina was exceptional.

“His dad used to come and watch him at every home game and I knew someone who sat near him. He was very tough on Felli. All you’d hear was him shouting ‘Marouane!’ and cursing if he made a little mistake. He was obviously a tough taskmaster.”

Fellaini might have become Everton’s record big-money transfer, but he did not always grasp the financial trappings of a Premier League footballer.

“Sometimes he’d come into training and would look really scruffy,” says Billows. “He just didn’t care. He wasn’t bothered about the expensive clothes and he didn’t care about cars. At first he used to drive into Finch Farm in this old clapped-out Vauxhall Astra.

“The lads gave him loads of stick so Bill Ellerby, the player liaison officer, told him he could get a club car and found him a C-Class Mercedes, which was small compared to the Ferraris and other luxury cars the others would drive.

“But Felli was made-up. That was more than enough from him. You realised he’d come from a humble background and wasn’t that bothered about splashing money about.

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“He was very different. A character. He had a bit of mischief in him and was so funny. Everything he said came with a dramatic exclamation mark.”

On the pitch, Fellaini became a player’s player. Someone both team-mates and managers knew they could rely on.

His impact was not lost on any Everton player, which was reiterated by former loan sensation and USA legend Landon Donovan when he spoke to The Athletic in April. “Fellaini! Man, people underestimate how effective he is,” he said. “He doesn’t always look the smoothest but he was the most effective soccer player I ever lined up with. Every week after the last game, they would put up the running stats and every week, Fellaini was top.

“The other team would have a goal kick and Fellaini would come and drop on (Everton centre-backs) Johnny Heitinga or Phil Jagielka’s heels and he would win the header. We’d get the ball, Leighton Baines would bring it forward and then the guy in the box when he crossed — it was Fellaini. He would do everything on the field.”

At Everton, Fellaini had a manager who valued him highly from that first day to the last. Moyes privately recalls a man with impeccable manners who would thank him incessantly for everything.

Others close to the player recall him being in tears when Moyes left to become Manchester United manager in 2013. “David was a second father to him,” says one.

It did not take long for the midfielder to follow his manager across the M62, with Moyes persuading his new employers to pay £27.5 million for a player by then established as a key member of Marc Wilmots’ excellent Belgium team.

Fellaini remained a performer Moyes could rely on, then won over an initially unconvinced Louis van Gaal before Jose Mourinho also sang his praises.

“Managers throughout his career knew he would be consistent, hard-working and there for them,” says one figure close to Fellaini. “He got a lot of criticism in the season when Mourinho won the Europa League with United but in the end, he was a star man in the final against Ajax.

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“He said he would break a leg for Mourinho and in turn Mourinho would say to him, ‘Don’t believe anything you read in the press, I won’t sell you. You’re one of my main men’.

“Like at Everton, he was very popular at Old Trafford. I remember once the club photographer was doing some pictures of him and the photographer had all these heavy bags with lenses and equipment. Afterwards, most players can’t get away quickly enough but Marouane was picking up the bags and helping the photographer take them to his car.”

It was typical Fellaini: as humble and gentle off the pitch as he was fearsome and committed on it.

“He’s in China now and I can only imagine what he has made of the Super League,” says someone close to Fellaini while he lived in the north west.

“He had come out of his shell in recent years and started to talk more freely in interviews. The last I heard he was saying he could fill a few chapters in his book with stories of life in China (where he plays for Shandong Luneng).”

Whenever Fellaini chooses to tell it, it will be a book worth reading.

(Top photo: Clive Mason/Getty Images)

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