The Athletic’s Whites reporter said on The Square Ball (9 September) that the Spanish defender is probably going to stay with the Serie A side long term rather than return to Elland Road, despite being given a new Leeds contract in December.
That deal appears to have made him one of the highest-paid players in the squad with CEO Angus Kinnear suggesting the club paid him “£6million a year” in his interview with The Square Ball on 7 September, before they got him off the wage bill on loan in the Italian capital, which equates to around £115,000-a-week
Dab Moylan said of Kinnear’s reveal (46m 50s):
“When it came up and he said £6m a year I went, ‘ok fine yeah footballers earn millions of pounds a year’ in my head and then thought of the next thing and moved on
“Then when I was editing it I went, ‘I wonder how much that is a week… Oh! That’s a lot of money a week’.”
After he then suggested it may not have been an exact figure given Kinnear’s unwillingness to discuss specific contract terms elsewhere, Hay responded:
“The line we were given when he signed his new contract was that centre-backs are getting increasingly expensive, which is true.
The caveat to that is that good centre-backs are getting very expensive and I don’t think much of what we’ve seen of Llorente has convinced us at all that in leagues like the Premier League he’s what you need.
“Ok he’s gone to Roma and had a couple of loans out there, but Roma specifically didn’t activate the option that they had on him which I think was supposed to be the fee that Leeds had signed him for.
“Taking him on loan again I think there’s probably a high likelihood that he will go there permanently at some stage. “But you saw with Rasmus Kristensen that things didn’t seem to go well for him in Rome, which I think is not a big surprise.”
as soon as possible
You could fill a book about the baffling decisions made at Leeds United in the last year alone, and surely some would.
But rewarding Llorente with an extension until 2026 just before Christmas was one of the strangest, as he looked very below average when starting regularly at the back, which has seen Marcelo Bielsa was sacked and only managed to avoid relegation in the previous campaign, then lost his place in what was arguably the Premier League’s worst defense last season.
It appeared to pay off when Roma agreed to loan him out in January with a permanent option that would have seen the club recoup their £18m fee.
