Leeds have confirmed today that Bradley Johnson will have moved on by the start of next season, and Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion are reportedly interested in signing the midfield player.
Leeds manager Simon Grayson told the official site “It’s disappointing that it looks like Bradley won’t be re-signing. We felt we made the player a suitable offer. I’d like to thank Bradley for his contribution while I’ve been here, but the contractual situation that we work in nowadays means that players have the ability to make choices such as this. This is a situation we wanted resolving as a club because we are looking ahead to next season and planning ahead.”
So Johnson and his agent have turned down Ken Bates’ final offer, thinking that he can get a bigger contract elsewhere. Nobody in football would consider Stoke and WBA to be bigger clubs than Leeds, but as long as we’re still in the Championship it’s going to be difficult to compete for players once Premiership clubs get involved, because of the vast amounts of money they get from broadcasting.
It remains to be seen how Johnson will fare in the Premiership, but like many Leeds fans I doubt that he’s good enough to play at that level. I think at best he was an average player in the Championship and that if he goes to a Premiership club he can look forward to a fair bit of bench-warming. I’m far more concerned about the impending departure of Neil Kilkenny.