Everton defender Conor Coady has admitted that leaving Liverpool 'wasn't a hard decision' despite spending nine year at his boyhood club.
Coady joined the Reds academy in 2005 and progressed through the ranks before being moved into the senior squad during the 2011/2012 campaign. He was named on the substitutes bench twice but never came on. Originally a central midfielder, the academy product did make his first-team debut the following season, starting a Europa League group stage match against Anzhi Makhachkala, but the lifelong Liverpool fan only made one more appearance - his Premier League debut in 2013 against Fulham, which saw him come on late on in a 3-1 win inspired by a Daniel Sturridge hat-trick.
St Helens-born Coady spent the 2013/2014 campaign on loan at League One Sheffield United, where he racked up 50 appearances across all competitions, before he signed permanently for Huddersfield Town and then Wolves, where he remained for seven seasons before joining the Reds' rivals Everton on loan in the summer.
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“I’ll be honest with you. I’ve said this quite a lot of times to different people who’ve asked me. It wasn’t a hard decision,” Coady told Everton’s website when asked about leaving Liverpool. “People were like, ‘it must be [so hard] because you’ve been there all your life’. But it was because I’d had such a good experience going to Sheffield United where I was involved and I was fighting every week.
“I was never a guaranteed starter but I was fighting every single day with the first team, working my socks off to make sure I had a chance to play at the weekend under a fantastic manager [Nigel Clough] who was pushing us every single day. I felt that and I didn’t want to go back to not having that. That’s where I was at when I came back from Sheffield United.
“You mention it being a big decision. It was, but that was to pick the right club that was right for me. Brendan Rodgers was fantastic at that at the time in terms of how he helped me. But the big decision was picking the right club, not leaving Liverpool because that was something that I wanted to do.
“I had such a good taste of being at Sheffield United. It didn't matter to me - League One, wherever it was - it was an incredible football club that pushed me and made me better as a player and a person. It wasn’t hard to move on and I was lucky enough to get another fantastic club in Huddersfield.”
Coady spent one season at Huddersfield before moving to Wolves, where he made 317 appearances across all competitions before joining Everton.
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