The Kalvin Phillips story: A Leeds boy who became a legendPhil Hay
Jul 5, 2022
In the days when Kalvin Phillips had first joined Leeds United’s academy, schoolwork began at 8.30am sharp. Maths and English went on for two hours before the boys were let loose to do what they really wanted to do.
The balance of education and football training satisfied most schools in Leeds and when the club approached them to draft students into the youth development scheme at the club’s Thorp Arch training ground, very few were obstructive. Day release was fine, so long as academic learning continued in some form.
Farnley Academy, where Phillips was a pupil, took a different view, however.
Phillips was in his mid-teens and coming to a professional club later than many kids do, and a letter was sent to him warning that Leeds’ request to take him out of school would be turned down. In the view of Farnley’s headteacher, Sir John Townsley, pursuing a career in football was a waste of the young man’s time; a pipedream, with a high chance of failure.
Leeds fought his corner, and that of another teenager they were trying to take on, a defender named Jake Skelton who, like Phillips, attended Farnley.
Helped by the boys’ parents, the club won those arguments, and the story of how football almost passed Phillips by has been told time and again since, getting more amusing by the year as he climbed the ladder rung by rung: to a professional contract, a senior debut, a baptism of brilliance with Leeds under Marcelo Bielsa, the England squad and now, a £42 million transfer to serial champions Manchester City.
Only through belligerence at the very start has Pep Guardiola now got his man.
That letter from Farnley Academy still exists somewhere, the best example of what Phillips is: an inner-city boy who grew up supporting Leeds and played as a kid on a patch of grass known locally as “the Mushy” in the Armley district of the Yorkshire city. He built himself as a survivor and an achiever, driven in a way that his carefree character and body language disguised.
He leaves a legacy at Elland Road of attainment and support, an academy graduate who was forever interested in those who followed behind him. “You relate to the players who made it before you,” says Romario Vieira, a former Leeds youth-team player who knows Phillips well. “You relate to them more if they can still relate to you. That was him. He never forgot.”
Bielsa predicted during his time in charge that when the time did come for Phillips to leave Leeds — and the facts of life dictated that a player on his trajectory would eventually — the midfielder would do it in a way that kept his reputation intact.
There is a mural of Phillips in Leeds city centre, one of the numerous tributes to the club’s long-awaited promotion back to the Premier League in the summer of 2020 after 16 years in the EFL, and it will remain there untouched, with no bad blood and no deep resentment. Bielsa knew his football and Bielsa could see where Phillips’ rise was taking him.
The video of the two men hugging on the night of promotion two years ago speaks for them both, a moment they would not trade for anything. But without fail, the game moves on.
They will look at Phillips now and say he has it all — the Premier League, the England caps, a World Cup squad place pending and a transfer to one of the richest, most powerful clubs in the world. But until he found his calling with Bielsa, Phillips’ career was all about clearing obstacles.
There was his late arrival to the academy, facilitated by a former Leeds player, Sonny Sweeney, who scouted him playing locally for Wortley Juniors and pushed him in the direction of Elland Road. And there was the dismissive attitude of Farnley Academy, something which made Sweeney laugh.
“Everyone who gets a chance thinks, ‘I’m going to be a football player’, and it doesn’t happen for all of them, I know that,” Sweeney told The Athletic in August 2019. “But telling someone like Kalvin not to have a go? I don’t think you can do that. Not when you’ve got his potential.”
There was also a tight call on whether to award Phillips a professional contract when he reached decision time with the under-18s — a side coached by Richard Naylor, a former centre-back who made more than 400 senior appearances for Leeds and other clubs. Phillips was good, but unspectacular. Other midfielders stood out more. It left the club in two minds.
“Kalvin was with me as a first-team scholar to begin with, and for a while, he struggled to get into the team,” Naylor says. “He wasn’t high-flying. We had Alex Mowatt (now at West Bromwich Albion), Lewis Cook (Bournemouth) and Chris Dawson (sixth-tier Buxton). They were all in that midfield and they were all good players. It wasn’t that Kalvin was on the fringes but at that stage, he didn’t look like the best of them.
“When he was coming round to getting his pro deal, it was a big part of the conversation. It wasn’t nailed-on that he was going to get anything, but I was a big advocate of his. I really liked Kalvin — not just as a player. I thought he had the right things about him to have a professional career — the character and the talent.
“I’m not saying I saw how good he was going to get but I wanted him to get something because he was one of those who worked for everything.”
Phillips (middle left) during his academy days (Photo: LUFC)
Phillips first joined Leeds as a triallist in their under-15s age group, travelling to training with Piteu Crouz, a friend who played with him for Wortley Juniors. The pair were close in those days a decade ago and still are today.
Academy recruits could be nervous, weighed down by the fear that their work and development would lead to nothing in the end. Many of his peers linked up with Leeds at primary-school age, much earlier than Phillips did. He, in contrast, had assumed by then that professional football had left him behind.
“He didn’t have the pressure that the other lads in that year group had,” says Lucy Ward, Leeds’ education and welfare officer at the time. “He was living the dream, in his eyes and his family’s. You can easily get overawed by the training ground and everything else, but he was so laid-back he just got on with it.”
Phillips was distinctive, with an unmistakable haircut.
“You’d go and watch games or training sessions and he stood out straight away because of his hair — this massive afro,” says Matt Downing, a player in Leeds’ academy until 2020. “He used to wear these red and white CTRs (football boots made by Nike). It’s the image that sticks in my head — that, and him always smiling. You never saw him unhappy. His smile’s an infectious thing.”
When Phillips first broke into the first team, Downing had the job of cleaning those boots.
“He gave me £250 for Christmas,” Downing says. “I thought that was a sweet tip from somebody who probably wasn’t earning big money from his first pro deal.”
Downing suffered badly from injuries and spent months with metalwork in his left leg to fix a badly broken bone. It became customary to see him climbing gingerly up and down staircases at Thorp Arch, forever in rehab and waiting for a change in luck.
“I don’t know Kalvin personally, in the sense that we’re not close friends, but that was a difficult period for me and he’d always take the time to ask how I was doing,” Downing says. “That was true of other players too, but I know what football can be like — when it starts going really well, you can become a bit big for your boots. It never happened with him.
Phillips was not always the standout player in Leeds’ youth team – apart from his haircut (Photo: LUFC)
“I know that if I saw him outside the training ground now, he’d stop for a chat. He’s a boy who came from the inner city, just a normal lad, and I don’t ever see him changing.”
Phillips’ first-team debut came as a 19-year-old away to Wolverhampton Wanderers late in the 2014-15 Championship season, given to him by then-manager Neil Redfearn.
Redfearn delayed telling Phillips that he would start until the day of the game, Easter Monday, wondering if too much forewarning might rattle the teenager. Deep down, though, he knew the timing of that conversation made no difference. When Phillips was eventually informed, he merely smiled and got himself ready. Redfearn said he knew Phillips would “step in and get on with it”, that there was “no need to prepare (him) in a special way”.
In that period, Phillips was widely viewed as a lesser prospect than some of the other academy players who had pushed into the senior squad: Mowatt, Cook, Sam Byram, Charlie Taylor.
It was the same story in the 2016-17 season, where he was overshadowed by Ronaldo Vieira, the twin brother of Romario, bursting through spectacularly from nowhere. Ronaldo was the sensation but with Phillips, there was less certainty about how far he would go, even if more than one manager admitted privately that while Ronaldo’s physique gave him an edge, Phillips’ technical ability shone through more when you worked with both players together.
In the summer of 2018, a couple of weeks after appointing Bielsa as their new head coach, Leeds took a big decision.
They sold Ronaldo Vieira to Sampdoria of Italy’s Serie A for £7 million — a business decision that helped them finance the purchase of striker Patrick Bamford from Middlesbrough.
“Up until that point there was a lot of similarity between Ronaldo and Kalvin,” says Will Huffer, a former academy goalkeeper at Leeds. “Ronny leaving was a big surprise — although I got the money aspect of it from the club’s perspective. But even if it wasn’t (Bielsa’s) decision, that was the point where Marcelo seemed to put total faith in Kalvin. It was like that big moment where something happens and no one looks back.”
Almost overnight, Phillips became the crux of Bielsa’s team, and blossomed as a holding midfielder without compare in the Championship. “He’s a clever coach, Bielsa,” Sweeney said in that piece from 2019. “He studied videos of Kalvin and saw what he did best.”
Phillips’ team-mates would joke that he was Bielsa’s favourite — and to an extent, that was true.
Bielsa was once heard telling Phillips that it would delight him if he married one of his daughters.
He gave Phillips one of his old shirts from his playing days in the 1970s with Newell’s Old Boys in Argentina, passed over in a Nike shoebox with a personal letter, as a gift after he got called up to the England squad for the first time.
It was Phillips’ mobile which Bielsa rang at the end of his first season as Leeds head coach, the 2018-19 term. Phillips missed the call and so was never sure why his boss phoned, but the assumption was that Bielsa thought he was about to leave the club and wanted to speak to him one final time.
Huffer trained with the Leeds first team through that season and watched Phillips develop at an astonishing rate, rapidly turning into the holding midfielder Guardiola and Manchester City would come to covet.
“He was so full-blooded in training,” Huffer says. “Bielsa had this thing of training like you played, and Phillips was that way too. The thing I started to notice quickly was the range of passing. It was unbelievable. Honestly, just a joke.
“We used to do these drills, almost mechanical drills, in which you’d work the same thing over and over again. When it involved his passing, it was right on point nine times out of 10. Probably more. Some of it was ridiculous and you almost stood back and watched.
“You’ll remember the games in Bielsa’s first season when Marcelo substituted him early. We’d see Kalvin afterwards and it was never toys-out-the-pram or sulking. He had a way of getting on with it. I felt like Marcelo really valued him in that sense.”
kalvin-phillips
(Photo: Laurence Griffiths/PA Images via Getty Images)
So many of the players who came through the Leeds academy with or after Phillips have tales to tell about him.
He had a naturally funny side to his character, someone who was never far away from practical jokes — staff at Thorp Arch talk about the time a first-team player’s car was quietly driven from the training ground to the car park of the prison over the road, making it look like it had been stolen.
But there was a considerate side to him too, and Huffer got an arm around his shoulder from Phillips when he made his sole first-team appearance for Leeds at age 20 in a 2-0 home win over Bristol City in November 2018 — a debut brought on by Bielsa losing both of his two experienced keepers to injury.
“He was the one who came up to me in the dressing room,” Huffer says. “The message was, ‘Enjoy this. You’ve worked for it, you’ve been at the club since you were eight years old, make the most of it.’ Kalvin’s attitude was basically, ‘Listen, mate, there’s no pressure on you. There’s pressure on us but not you. You’re 20, and it’s your first game’. It helps to be told to have fun because, let’s face it, I was feeling pretty nervous.”
Huffer thinks for a second when he is asked to name Phillips’ biggest strength. “Good energy,” he says. “Loads of good energy, all the time.”
Romario Vieira, who never made a senior appearance for Leeds, left the club in 2018 and has since had spells in non-League with Gateshead and Tadcaster Albion, texted former academy team-mate Phillips after news of his move to City broke a fortnight ago. Phillips had kept in touch with him and his brother Ronaldo. “I just said to him ‘Proud of you, bro. Sky’s the limit’,” Romario says. “He was away on holiday but I got a message back, asking how it was going for me.
“He doesn’t lose contact with people and he doesn’t leave you behind. I mean, he leaves you behind in football because he’s so good. He’s become a beast. But not personally. You don’t become someone he can do without. No word of a lie, what you see is what you get.
“You know that isn’t always true in this industry. Players make it and they can become different but he didn’t lose touch with what he’d been through. If you needed to speak to him, you could speak to him. We were on the path he’d been on and he actually cared about us getting there, too. Any time you spoke to him, he knew where you were at, which is important because football is so up and down emotionally. It’s good one day, it’s bad the next. He liked seeing lads do well.
“Even him and Ronny, they were fighting for the same place for a while but it was never a rivalry, never a competition. It was more like a very good friendship, and it still is. It made them feel good when either of them did well.
“City’s the best move out there (for Phillips), I don’t see anything better. But I’m telling you, he’ll be the same Kalvin. The same smiley Kalvin.”
Kalvin Phillips
(Photo: Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
Life, naturally, is changing for Phillips.
He will earn big money at the Etihad and for parts of last season, he was followed around by a documentary crew. But Bielsa saw something he loved in the midfielder, an attitude he would call “an amateur spirit”.
Phillips grew up in Wortley, in central Leeds, and showed no inclination to move elsewhere or hide away as his career took off. He would joke about his sister, an employee with the prison service in London, teasing him over how cushy the life of a footballer was. Family and locality seemed to make him happy.
“It’s funny,” Downing says. “I do some PE work in schools now and everywhere you go, someone there knows Kalvin. Someone’s related to him, someone’s friends with him, someone knows his mum, someone’s seen him around, someone has a story about him… In his shoes, I guess it would be easier to be a really private person but that community thing about him, the inner-city lad, it seems like it’ll always be there. It’s how he is.”
Some six years ago, Ward bumped into Phillips in the Nike shop at the Xscape leisure and shopping complex in Castleford, near Leeds.
Ward no longer worked for the club and had not seen Phillips in a while. He looked down that day and seemed a little lost. He was nowhere in the pecking order under Leeds’ then-manager, Steve Evans, and was unsure about what to do next; of whether to stay or whether to ask to leave. Realistically, he saw little option but to go out on loan, even though Leeds were no better than a middling Championship team.
“I walked away from that feeling a bit sad but I did give him a little pep talk,” Ward says. “I told him, ‘You’ll be at the club longer than the current manager. So stay ready, because you need to be ready’.”
Phillips stuck with it, Bielsa appeared in the summer of 2018 and everything fell into place.
Somewhere and somehow, it was written.
lad from Essex who when we were playing younger players under Redfearn used to get very dismissive of the likes of Cook, Taylor and Mowatt. He peaked when Phillips appeared with a series of spiteful "not good enough" comments very time he touched the ball. After a couple of verbal set to's with him me and my mate changed season ticket seats for the next season. That lad (I say lad he must in his late 60's) was a manifestation of an element of our support with no patience with younger players. No idea how he has coped with the last 4 seasons but if he doesn't think Phillips has been pivotal on the pitch then his loss.
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by City64 » Mon Jul 04, 2022 11:04 am 
