Blackburn’s sales include Adam Wharton to Crystal Palace for £18m (a boyhood fan born in Blackburn), Adam Armstrong to Southampton for £15m, Sammie Szmodics to Ipswich for £10m (last season’s Championship top scorer), Jordan Rhodes to Middlesbrough for £9m, Rudy Gestede to Aston Villa for £6m, Grant Hanley to Newcastle for £5.5m, Shane Duffy to Brighton for £4m, the academy product David Raya to Brentford for £3m (and a subsequent £3m sell-on clause when Raya joined Arsenal), Tom Cairney to Fulham for £3m and the Belgium international Thomas Kaminski to Luton for £2.5m.
Parachuted in after the messy exit of Jon Dahl Tomasson almost exactly one year ago, Eustace guided Blackburn to safety and this season the team, despite being tipped as relegation candidates, have been in the top six for much of the time.
The only players Rovers have signed for more than £1.5m in that period are Sam Gallagher (sold in a cut-price deal to Stoke last summer), Ben Brereton Díaz (who joined Villarreal in 2023 on a free transfer), Armstrong and Szmodics.
That Eustace has spent the past year living in a Blackburn hotel suggests he never envisaged staying long term, and no doubt made a potential return to the family home all the more inviting.
Even in the Championship, players are hard to sign and sell but managers remain relatively cheap to sack and hire, something Eustace knows too well after he was inexplicably replaced by Wayne Rooney at Birmingham in October 2023.
