Sixty will always be a special number at Everton thanks to Dixie Dean’s goalscoring exploits in the 1927/28 season but having also reached that number, another Blues record breaker is as enthusiastic as ever to still be in the game.
Preki, or to give him his full title, Predrag Radosavljevic, who with 20 characters had the longest ever name of an Everton player (he now shares the title with Diniyar Bilyaletdinov), has just celebrated his 60th birthday but is looking forward to many more years in football – and why not given that he’s always been something of a late bloomer. He’s currently assistant coach at Major League Soccer club Seattle Sounders to Brian Schmetzer who is 10 months his senior, a post he’s occupied since 2018 but after previous stints in charge of Chivas USA, Toronto FC, Sacramento Republic and Saint Louis FC, the former Blues midfielder maintains that he’s always keeping an eye out for better times ahead.
After all, this is the man who didn’t make his Premier League debut until he was 29 and earned his first international cap aged 33. His football story is far from conventional and he arrived at Everton ahead of the first Premier League season in 1992/93 having spent – apart from a few months in Sweden with Raslatts in 1990 – the best part of the previous seven years playing indoor soccer in the USA.
