‘I don’t think people realise’: Phil Hay shares how close Kalvin Phillips came to leaving Leeds

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Speaking on his podcast, Phil Hay has shared just how close Kalvin Phillips came to leaving Leeds United in the summer of 2019.

The defensive midfielder was linked to a multitude of Premier League outfits that summer, and it seems as though he came very close to joining Aston Villa, with Hay sharing that Phillips told him he thought he was going to leave.

Of course, Phillips ended up staying in the end, and now he’s a bona fide England international playing top-flight football for his boyhood club, but it seems as though everything could have turned out rather differently.

Hay was speaking about Leeds’ promotion campaign during his review of the year 2020, and one of his co-hosts asked if Kalvin Phillips would have left if United weren’t promoted.

“Absolutely, yeah. I mean the backstory to that, I think it’s one of the fascinating sub-plots, the fact that he was so close to going to Villa that previous summer, I don’t think people realise that,” Hay said (The Phil Hay Show 52:15)

“We knew that Villa were keen, we knew that they were bigging bid and we knew that Leeds didn’t want to deal, and we knew that they were always hopeful that they could keep him.

“It was only when I spoke to Phillips after promotion at the end of the season where he said ‘there was a point where I thought I was going, there was a point where I thought I wanted to go’ I think there was that thought in his head of ‘is this actually going to happen here and will I regret the fact that somebody is offering me Premier League and I say no’ and I just love the fact he did say no, he stuck around and a year later it happened.”

This may go down as one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ of Leeds’ history.

It’s a redundant point now, but would Leeds have gotten promoted without Phillips in the base of their midfield? It’s hard to confidently say that they would have.

Fortunately, the England ace decided to stay at Elland Road, and now he’s reaping the rewards of his loyalty, playing week in week out for his boyhood club in the Premier League.