Nathan Patterson has a knack for making an exit memorable, and his farewell to Everton this deadline day was no different, closing out a difficult four-and-a-half-year Goodison Park chapter with a goodbye message that Toffees fans and Scotland supporters alike were quick to spot was carrying a subtle sting in its tail. The former Rangers academy graduate has completed a permanent move to Serie A outfit Torino, bringing to an end a spell on Merseyside defined as much by injury and a lack of regular selection as by any sustained run of top-flight football, and he chose to mark the occasion with a parting message on Instagram that doubled, whether by accident or design, as a pointed little dig at David Moyes.
The joke itself requires a little context to land properly, and it stems from an Everton press conference in late August in which Moyes, addressing the club’s ongoing right-back situation, appeared to momentarily forget which of his defenders he was even discussing. In attempting to explain the club’s search for cover in that position, a role Patterson himself had spent the best part of five years occupying at Goodison Park in one capacity or another, Moyes accidentally referred to his own player as “Craig” rather than Nathan, an innocuous enough slip in the moment but one that, given Patterson’s fading role within the squad by that point, took on a certain symbolic weight once the transfer rumours around his Torino move began to gather pace. Patterson, evidently, had clocked the gaffe and filed it away, because when the time came to write his farewell to the club’s supporters, he did not let the opportunity pass him by.
The message itself, posted to Instagram as Patterson’s move to Italy was finalised, read: “To all the Toffees. Sometimes in life things don’t go as planned. Nevertheless it was an honour to play for such a fantastic club and meet so many great people along the way. I always gave my best and pushed as hard as I could, even if things were going against me. I hope that came across. It goes without saying that I wish everyone at Everton all the best for the future. I hope it’s a great season.” On its own, that is a fairly standard, gracious departing statement, the kind of measured, largely diplomatic message most departing players tend to post when a move has not gone entirely to plan and there is little to be gained from burning bridges on the way out. What turned it into a genuine talking point, and earned it the “hilarious” tag being attached to it across football media, was the accompanying visual: Patterson signed off by crossing out the name “Craig” and replacing it with his own, a small but unmistakable callback to Moyes’s press conference slip that supporters and journalists alike were quick to seize upon as a knowing, good-humoured parting shot at a manager under whom he had rarely been able to command a regular place.
To understand why that little moment of mischief resonated so strongly, it helps to look back at just how difficult Patterson’s time at Everton ultimately proved to be. He arrived on Merseyside from Rangers back in January 2022, in a deal reported to be worth up to sixteen million pounds, a genuinely significant fee for a young full-back still in the relatively early stages of his career, and one that reflected the excitement around a player who had broken into the Rangers first team as a teenager and quickly established himself as one of Scottish football’s most promising academy graduates. What followed, though, was a spell repeatedly disrupted by fitness problems and a struggle to nail down a consistent starting role, even during periods when Everton’s options at right-back were themselves far from settled. In total, Patterson made sixty-eight appearances for the club across four and a half years, a modest return for a player signed with genuine long-term ambitions attached, and last season in particular painted a stark picture of just how peripheral he had become, with only nine appearances across all competitions as injury problems ate into the campaign and Jake O’Brien was increasingly preferred in his position by Moyes. This season offered little in the way of a fresh start either, with Patterson restricted to a single outing, in an EFL Cup victory over Preston, while Merlin Röhl, a player operating outside his natural midfield position, was handed the nod at right-back ahead of him in each of Everton’s opening Premier League fixtures.
That level of detail matters, because it explains precisely why a player who arrived at Goodison Park with such promise ultimately found himself heading for the exit door on deadline day, moving to Torino on a three-year contract for what has been described as a comparatively small fee relative to his original transfer, with Everton retaining what has been reported as a significant sell-on clause should his career in Italy take off. It is a familiar and slightly bittersweet pattern in modern football, a talented young player signed for a substantial fee, undone not by any single dramatic failure but by a steady accumulation of injuries and shifting managerial preferences, eventually moved on for a fraction of his original valuation as both club and player conclude that a change of scenery offers the best route back to consistent, meaningful football. For Everton, there is at least the consolation of that sell-on arrangement, giving them a stake in whatever comes next for Patterson in Serie A. For Patterson himself, Torino represents exactly what his Everton career increasingly failed to provide: a genuine opportunity to rebuild his reputation with regular first-team football in a major European league.
There is also a broader Scottish football dimension to the move that will not have gone unnoticed by supporters north of the border. Patterson departs Everton as a twenty-nine-times capped Scotland international, a genuinely significant international career built in no small part on the platform his early years at Rangers gave him, and his switch to Torino sees him link up in Serie A with Scotland teammate Che Adams, giving the pair the chance to continue their international partnership in a domestic setting as well. Italian football has increasingly become a landing spot of choice for Scottish players in recent transfer windows, and Patterson’s move adds another recognisable name to that growing contingent, a reminder of just how far the current generation of Scotland internationals has spread itself across Europe’s major leagues in search of regular football and fresh challenges.
As for the goodbye message itself, and the gentle dig at Moyes buried within it, it is worth placing in the context of Patterson’s overall tone throughout his exit from the club. This was not an angry or bitter farewell in the mould of some deadline day departures, where relationships between player and manager have visibly soured to the point of open conflict. Patterson’s statement was, on the whole, warm and appreciative, thanking supporters, acknowledging the honour of representing the club, and wishing Everton well for the season ahead, language that suggests a player leaving with more disappointment than genuine resentment about how his time at Goodison Park ultimately unfolded. The “Craig” reference reads far more as a knowing wink than a parting shot fired in anger, the sort of light-hearted, self-aware humour that allows a player to acknowledge an awkward, slightly humiliating moment from his final weeks at a club without descending into anything approaching genuine bitterness. It takes a certain confidence, and arguably a healthy dose of self-deprecation, for a player who has just endured a frustrating, injury-hit, opportunity-starved spell at a Premier League club to sign off with a joke rather than a grievance, and it is that lightness of touch which explains why the message spread so quickly across football social media and earned itself headline treatment on multiple outlets within hours of being posted.
It is also worth noting the wider chaos surrounding Everton’s own deadline day business, which provides useful context for why a player like Patterson found himself so far down the pecking order in the first place. Reports from deadline day paint a picture of a club dealing with its own share of late-window disruption, including a reported collapse in a move for Folarin Balogun that left the club “shocked” and “stunned” according to multiple outlets, alongside various other pieces of deadline chaos playing out simultaneously across Merseyside. A club scrambling through its own eleventh-hour transfer complications is not necessarily one with the bandwidth or the settled squad planning to prioritise a full-back who had already fallen so far down the depth chart that his own manager had, if only for a moment, forgotten his name in a press conference. Patterson’s exit, in that context, looks less like an isolated footnote and more like one small piece of a genuinely turbulent deadline day at Goodison Park, albeit the one piece that managed to generate a laugh rather than a headache.
For Torino, meanwhile, the acquisition of an established Premier League right-back with genuine Scotland international pedigree represents a sensible piece of business at this stage of the window, the kind of experienced, proven-at-a-higher-level signing that Serie A clubs outside the traditional elite have increasingly targeted from the British market in recent years. Patterson arrives in Turin still only twenty-four years old, meaning there remains every reason to believe the disrupted, injury-affected version of him seen at Everton over the past eighteen months is far from a true reflection of his ceiling as a player. A fresh footballing environment, a manager who has not yet formed any settled preconceptions about where he ranks in a pecking order, and the kind of clean slate that a genuine change of country and league can provide, all offer Patterson a realistic route back towards the consistent, high-level football that first persuaded Rangers to develop him through their academy and Everton to spend up to sixteen million pounds bringing him to the Premier League in the first place.
There is a neat, full-circle quality, too, in a Rangers academy graduate signing off from a difficult Premier League chapter with a moment of homegrown Scottish wit rather than simple resignation. Patterson’s journey from Ibrox breakthrough to Premier League move to a frustrating, injury-disrupted stretch on Merseyside and now on to Serie A mirrors the well-worn path so many talented young Scottish players have followed in recent years, chasing regular first-team football wherever it can most reliably be found, even when that means absorbing a difficult spell at a bigger club along the way. What made this particular departure stand out from the usual crop of largely forgettable farewell statements was simply Patterson’s willingness to have a laugh at his own expense, and at his manager’s, on the way out the door, turning what could easily have been a flat, purely functional goodbye into a moment that Everton and Rangers supporters alike will remember rather more fondly than the underlying numbers of his Goodison Park spell might otherwise have suggested. Sixty-eight appearances and four and a half years of largely frustrated promise may be the headline statistic Patterson leaves Merseyside with, but it is the crossed-out name “Craig” that Toffees fans will likely be sharing screenshots of for a good while yet.