Youri Tielemans: “There’s nothing definitive or ruled out about whether I’ll stay or leave. But I feel good at Aston Villa — I feel a lot of confidence from the club & the manager..”
Quote from: Tuscans on June 09, 2025, 01:45:50 PMYouri Tielemans: “There’s nothing definitive or ruled out about whether I’ll stay or leave. But I feel good at Aston Villa — I feel a lot of confidence from the club & the manager..”Huh...fuck off to Juventus then and watch your career go to shite. Only messin' but yeah, we'd want, what £55m at least, right ?
I'm hoping the Tielemens quotes are taking out of context/poor translation, as I wouldn't want to be losing him this summer. I wouldn't imagine that is being contemplated.
Midfielder was the players’ player and supporters’ player of last season and is determined to help break the club’s near 30-year trophy droughtThe smile on Youri Tielemans’s face widens as he discusses the time Unai Emery visited him in Quorn, the Leicestershire village he has called home since arriving in England six years ago. “The initial conversation was about my ideas as a player, where I wanted to play and how I saw myself and he quite liked me because he came back a second time,” Tielemans says, laughing. “It was really about understanding each other. And I think we clicked the first time we met.”Fast-forward two years and Tielemans, who joined Aston Villa as a free agent after leaving Leicester, has established himself as an indispensable cog in Emery’s machine. He has been considered a classy midfielder since making his Champions League debut for Anderlecht aged 16 and has proved a dependable force for Villa, an intelligent operator whether sniffing danger or shifting possession. The 28-year-old thinks carefully on and off the pitch, valuing sleep and nutrition; he is teetotal and those close to him highlight the only fizzy drink he may consume is sparkling water.In January, before Tielemans returned to his former club Monaco with Villa in the Champions League, Emery said Tielemans’s “best quality is in his mind, his mentality”.He is an affable, but private character, laser-focused on family and football. He clocked up 60 matches for club and country last season, including 52 starts for Villa. The last match was in Brussels in June, a wild 4-3 World Cup qualifying victory over Wales. Tielemans scored with a sweet first-time finish and laid on Kevin De Bruyne with a magnificent cross for Belgium’s winner.“I always feel like once I’m in that rhythm, I feel the best I can be. When I’m in that rhythm, you just play, recover, play, recover and you just get used to it and hopefully I can do that again.“We’re well tracked by medical and technical staff – there are a lot of things going on backstage, I would say, where you have to just give your body the best chance possible to perform.”A marathon campaign called for some downtime with his wife, Mendy, and their three daughters, aged eight, five and one. So, what did his summer look like? “Just following the kids around, to be honest … that’s a lot of work sometimes,” he says, smiling. “But I enjoy it. I just want to be there for them, to watch them grow up. It’s the main thing for me as a father. They all have their own characters – they’re so different from each other – but when we play together it’s just so enjoyable.”Despite a near-flawless run at the end of last season – Villa won 10 of their last 11 league matches before a final-day trip to Manchester United – hopes of qualifying for the Champions League in successive seasons unravelled with defeat at Old Trafford. The worst bit for Tielemans was he was watching at home, powerless to influence things owing to a calf niggle.“Looking back at last season, there were some games where we lost a few points and you think: ‘How on earth did that happen?’ That’s where this season you want to make sure you don’t lose those stupid points. There were a few games where we analysed them back and said to ourselves: ‘This can’t happen.’”Tielemans does not pinpoint particular matches, but the failure to beat Ipswich and squandering victory against Bournemouth at Villa Park with seconds to play left a sour taste.“There were a few games where the manager was a bit frustrated that he didn’t have all the players available due to injuries and other problems,” he says. “He really wants that availability this season to be able to make changes whenever a player is tired, because that’s what cost us as well.”It is hard to imagine now, but Tielemans had a slow start to life at Villa; the 2023-24 season was four months old by the time of his first league start. Emery described Tielemans’s first season as an adaptation period. What did Tielemans have to change?“It was just that my levels were not good enough at the time,” he says. Was that something he acknowledged then? “No, no,” he says, exploding into laughter. “Once you’re in it, you don’t realise what’s going on. But, looking back, that’s the beauty of life, really; you understand, you try and learn from what’s happened.
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