Leon Bailey

[Brazilian Villain]

I think he has been one of our better players this season and consistent which is unusual for a wide man, I'd imagine the posters that were saying "he's a wrong un and should be first out of the club in January" have had a change of heart.

Well done Mr Better-Fan-Than-You, here, have a sticker.

He mightn't have given him as much time if his name were James McClean.

[Clark W Griswold]

Or in Harry Enfield speak Mr ‘considerably better fan than yow’.

He has been very good though and I’m quite sure it’s because the pressure has been off more so with the even more expensive signings we’ve made and the fact that he can be rotated with other good players. Plus he’s now had a full 2 years to settle in. Plus Emery is an elite coach.

The talent was always there, but you could say that about plenty of players that have failed for us over the years. The club is run properly these days.

[pauliewalnuts]

I think he has been one of our better players this season and consistent which is unusual for a wide man, I'd imagine the posters that were saying "he's a wrong un and should be first out of the club in January" have had a change of heart.

Yes. What fucking idiots those posters were.

Oh, hang on…..

I would like to see upgrades on Bailey and Buendia, Bailey offers very little when fit and Buendia keeps giving the ball away cheaply.

Oh and…

Bailey offered very little and we certainly need an update, imagine how much better we will be when Emery gets his type of players in.

Just to check - is it alright for everyone to change their mind on Bailey or just you, in your status of SUPERFAN?

[Bad English]

Ooops! How do you feel? :-D

[Axl Rose]

A lovely read.

Credit where credit is due. His dad came across as a bellpiece before, but it was great to read that.

As for Bailey, he's surprised me this season, but was largely underwhelming before. He's been excellent and I'm chuffed for him. Humble pie tastes very nice.

Are we not allowed to say anything negative about players anymore, though? Oh well, I'll carry on being a misery guts 😂

[ROBBO]

Still think Bailey has more to give, consistancy will be his biggest test.

[jwarry]

James Gheerbrant in today’s Times

Almost four years ago I went to Leverkusen to watch a Bundesliga match which must have had one of the densest constellations of young talent seen in a European club match in recent years. Bayer Leverkusen’s opponents were Borussia Dortmund and among the players on show were Erling Haaland, Jadon Sancho, Kai Havertz, Achraf Hakimi, Edmond Tapsoba and Moussa Diaby, none of them older than 21. As it happened, Haaland, the subject of my watching brief, was kept fairly quiet that day and the goal which turned the match was scored by a player a little less hyped, with a little more life behind him.

Leon Bailey is 15 months older than Hakimi, the oldest of that sextet, and that season he wasn’t so much setting the world alight with Bayer Leverkusen as sending his own prospects up in flames: he had had almost as many red cards (two) as goals (three). But a few months later, he hit a rich vein of form, which included a run of nine goals and seven assists in 15 Bundesliga and Europa League games between mid-October and mid-December 2020, and began to be talked of as a potential star.

His path to realising that potential in the Premier League has not been quick or straightforward. His first 1½ seasons at Aston Villa were underwhelming. But under Unai Emery, the 26-year-old Bailey has quietly grown into one of the most influential attackers in the Premier League. This season he is one of only six players to have already recorded five goals and five assists. He has been directly involved in a goal once every 77 minutes and was very unlucky to have another goal, against Sheffield United, disallowed upon VAR review.

Even in the 3-2 defeat by Manchester United on Tuesday, the one recent match where he hasn’t put the ball in the net or on a plate, Bailey still found a way to be involved in a goal, positioning himself directly behind André Onana as John McGinn stood over a wide free kick and distracting him with some hidden-behind-a-hand mutterings, a lovely bit of pantomime mischief. He finds himself in one of those golden periods of attunement where everything comes off, where he can change a game with a thunderbolt or a whisper.

In fact, Bailey’s run of excellence goes back a little further than this season. Since the beginning of March, he ranks fourth among all Premier League players with at least 1,000 minutes played for chances created from open play per 90 minutes (2.03), and first for expected assists per 90 minutes (0.36), a measure of the quality of chances his passing creates. “His potential is amazing,” Emery has said. “Progressively, he’s getting better and he’s humble enough to listen and improve. His qualities and skill . . . sometimes when we play at home, we watch him and think, ‘Wow, what a player.’ ”

Bailey’s moment of ascendancy is the culmination of a long odyssey that has encompassed remarkable hardship and some genuinely startling flights of wing-and-a-prayer optimism and conviction in his own destiny. He was born in Cassava Piece, a tough, dangerous neighbourhood north of the Jamaican capital Kingston, and adopted by a businessman called Craig Butler after his mother decided that she could not provide the environment he needed.

Bailey could not read or write until he was 14 years old. By that time, Butler had taken him, his own son, Kyle, and another young aspiring footballer to Europe, believing that the castles of their dream could not be built on the shifting sands of Jamaica’s underfunded and poorly organised football landscape. They arrived in Austria, trekking through muddy fields to beg for trials at stadiums, and enduring a blurred succession of buses and hostels and canned-tuna dinners. “It was probably the worst time of my life,” Bailey told FourFourTwo in 2021. “It was freezing and we didn’t have enough warm clothes to train in.”

After passing through the Slovakian club Trencin, Bailey eventually landed at Genk in Belgium (a club with an extraordinary record of developing young talent, having also moulded Kevin De Bruyne, Leandro Trossard, Kalidou Koulibaly, Wilfred Ndidi and latterly Sander Berge). During his childhood in Jamaica, he once saved his adoptive father from a riptide, Butler told The Athletic, and Bailey’s journey in football has been characterised by an awareness of the currents and undertows that can drag a promising career into peril and leave it at sea.
“As a young player you want to start on a normal level and not just because of the name of the club,” Bailey has said. “You want to develop in the right environment; around the right minds and mentality . . . The most important thing as a pro is taking things a step at a time and not rushing to the top too quickly. Because once you get there, where do you go next?”

The wise patience of this approach, and the contrast with Sancho, the superior player when both were in the Bundesliga, who made that more fraught and freighted move to a bigger, more unforgiving club in Manchester United, feels salient.

It must be a wonderful feeling for Bailey now to be able to bask in the warmth of his pomp, knowing how hard the path to this point has been. And it is also surely true that stories like his are a key part of the Premier League’s inspirational appeal.

Just as the home-grown, dyed-in-the-wool players in the English top flight — Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford — fulfil an important role in providing that link between matchgoing fans and the teams they support, so the players from the furthest and least represented reaches of the Premier League’s empire — players such as Bailey, South Korea and Tottenham Hotspur’s Son Heung-min, Brighton & Hove Albion’s Pervis Estupiñán of Ecuador and Luton Town’s Marvelous Nakamba from Zimbabwe — are a vital strand of the league’s rich tapestry, offering the fans in front of televisions half a world away a sense of attachment to the remote, rain-swept competition played out there.

The Premier League is a prism for many things, but its role as a global theatre for human resilience and determination is one of its most essential and accessible functions. Bailey’s hard-won, richly earned success provides another reminder of how our national spectacle is enriched by those carried here only by a dream of their own place among English football’s fields of gold

[ChicagoLion]

I think he has been one of our better players this season and consistent which is unusual for a wide man, I'd imagine the posters that were saying "he's a wrong un and should be first out of the club in January" have had a change of heart.

Yes. What fucking idiots those posters were.

Oh, hang on…..

I would like to see upgrades on Bailey and Buendia, Bailey offers very little when fit and Buendia keeps giving the ball away cheaply.

Oh and…

Bailey offered very little and we certainly need an update, imagine how much better we will be when Emery gets his type of players in.

Just to check - is it alright for everyone to change their mind on Bailey or just you, in your status of SUPERFAN?

Brilliant

[Risso]

Hoist by his own petard. We've all got things massively wrong about players, or changed our opinions for the better or worse. But if you're going to be a better-fan-than-yow, best try to remember what you said yourself in the past before having a go at others.

[Villafirst]

Some posters on social media are already sniping at Jacob Ramsey for being crap since he returned from injury almost forgetting how good he was before that injury. Tielemans was being targeted before and Carlos is now deemed useless after a poor performance at Man United. Seems that there always has to be a scapegoat.....

[Scratchins]

Some posters on social media are already sniping at Jacob Ramsey for being crap since he returned from injury almost forgetting how good he was before that injury. Tielemans was being targeted before and Carlos is now deemed useless after a poor performance at Man United. Seems that there always has to be a scapegoat.....

The 1st I remember was Geoff Vowden. One of his team mates told me that they said to him that if he could go into the stands and see the people abusing him and imagine the life that they lead then he wouldn't worry about it. It's a Midlands thing, there has to be something to moan about (and I am a Brummie).

[VillaTim]

Let's be honest Bailey was poor for 2 years and it's only since UE came here that we are starting to see a player.

[PaulWinch again]

Let's be honest Bailey was poor for 2 years and it's only since UE came here that we are starting to see a player.

Injured for a massive chunk of the first year and Gerrard.

[Villafirst]

Let's be honest Bailey was poor for 2 years and it's only since UE came here that we are starting to see a player.

Injured for a massive chunk of the first year and Gerrard.

Yes, totally agree. The right manager along with good coaching and Bailey is looking like a real player now. I hope these so called fans have patience with Moussa Diaby........again already some are saying he's not good enough. He's almost in Bailey's position now pre UE. I still think he'll prove to be a great signing, I trust UE's judgement over these critics all day long.

[PaulWinch again]

I also think he’s another example that it can take time to settle in a new country.