It has been reported that Leeds – who will play in the Premier League next season after winning automatic promotion from the Championship – are considering stepping up their interest in the Belgium international striker.
Chelsea have made the 26-year-old striker available for transfer this summer, with the player earning £100,000 per week as salary, according to the report.
Good signing for Leeds United?
Patrick Bamford is a very good striker, but the former Chelsea and Nottingham Forest man needs competition.
Batshuayi has not really been a great success at the Blues, but he is a very good striker who will give Leeds head coach Marcelo Bielsa an option.
However, it is hard to see Leeds hand the striker a weekly salary of £100,000, which he is currently getting at Chelsea.
According to WhoScored, Batshuayi made one start and 15 substitute appearances in the Premier League for Chelsea this past season, scoring one goal and providing one assist in the process.
Complicated relationship
The Belgian worked with Bielsa at Marseille, and it was a complicated relationship.
Batshuayi told Onze Mondial in April 2018, as translated by TheBootRoom: “He didn’t speak to me, he never spoke to me. And me, it pi**ed me off because I was doing sick training, I worked like crazy, but he didn’t talk to me. And yet he always took other people to talk to them.
“In fact, it is all or nothing. Either he picks you up and talks to you for 40 minutes, or he doesn’t talk to you at all. But looking back, I tell myself he knew who to do this with. Some needed this support. Me, he understood my personality, he knew that I could draw on my resources.
“I’ll tell you something. One day he told me something shocking. For several months, he hardly spoke to me. And the time he came to talk to me, he just said, ‘When you go out of here, you’re gonna go for 40 million’. He just told me that. In my head, I said to myself, ‘But he’s crazy’. In the end, he was right.”
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