Conor McGilligan offered his thoughts on Leeds United’s chances of signing and links to Ryan Kent on the One Leeds Fan Channel.
Kent has been admired by Marcelo Bielsa for a while now, with Leeds even seeing a bid rejected last summer for the Rangers winger, who remained with the club and ended up winning the league title with Steven Gerrard.
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Bielsa may be more optimistic of potentially landing the winger now that Rangers have been knocked out of the Champions League by Malmo in the qualifying rounds, so links to the winger won’t be going away anytime soon.
McGilligan spoke about his thoughts and where Leeds stand on the pursuit of Kent.
“I would be so interested to see if Leeds would just stick a cheeky £20 million bid in for him. Opportunism is what I keep saying on all of the rumours.
“I think it’s realistic, I think it’s obvious, but an opportunistic market – if Leeds slapped down £20 million in front of Rangers’ face; they’ll have lost all the money now from European progression in that competition.
“Obviously, they’ve won the league, which is great, Rangers are definitely a club on the up and we’ve got to fully respect that, but he’s had his time at Rangers, for me – two or three years now, might have been more – is it now time to move on? Will he ever get an offer from the Premier League again? Is it now time to move?
“We know players in Scotland obviously have ambitions to come to the Premier League, of course, it’s the best league in the world. Leeds are consistently after Ryan Kent. Bielsa loves him – from what I’ve heard, from what I’ve been told, he absolutely loves Ryan Kent.”
TIF Thoughts on Kent…
The winger enjoyed yet another very successful campaign at Ibrox in front of goal, managing to score 13 goals and register 15 assists in all competitions, which helped see the Gers lift their first league title since 2011, although that may have raised interest in Kent from teams south of the border.
Kent was signed from Liverpool for £6.5 million in 2019, but now with the club out of the main European competition, he may want to test himself in a different league instead of in the same competitions as last season.