'Breakout' - Ex-Leeds United man calls for action with emerging Whites star and team must

Young striker Mateo Joseph regularly impressed from the bench during United’s 2023-24 Championship campaign yet the Spain youth international still ended the campaign still awaiting his first league start. Joseph, though, featured very prominently in pre-season and the 20-year-old was finally handed a full league debut in last month’s league opener at home to Portsmouth.

With Patrick Bamford injured, Joseph has now started all four of United’s league games so far this season and the Spain under-21s international bagged his first goal of the new campaign in last weekend’s 2-0 win at home to Hull City.

Former Leeds midfielder David Prutton has been impressed with Joseph’s progress and believes the youngster has the potential to become this season’s regular first choice no 9 but feels a flurry of goals now needs to be added to his game.

Prutton, though, has called for patience with Joseph and for the striker position not to be a “bone of contention” in order to help the youngster in a “breakout” campaign. Speaking to the YEP, Prutton declared that Leeds need to find more goals from deeper positions and also become more dangerous at set pieces.

Assessing Joseph, Prutton reasoned: “There's potential there. But the potential obviously has got to turn into something pretty concrete. For him and the club and team, you'd like to think that this would be his breakout season, where he announces himself as the man that leads a line with the requisite goals to boot.

"I understand the change in nature of what a 'forward' is. It's not just about goals, it's about what it brings. But while it's a bit of an old fashioned thing to say, if you call yourself a striker, a striker has got to score goals. That's the position that he finds himself in.

"Yes, there's so much that comes into that, it's not just the positions that he finds himself in, but it's the service that he gets from the players in and around him and the way that the team plays. It's a challenge to him. I know that that kind of striker role for Leeds is highly coveted and and it's had some hallowed names in it but it's also had some names that you potentially didn't know too much about that suddenly started pulling up trees and did a job up there.

"You can't be too quick to say someone hasn't done X, Y and Z so let's see what it does and don't let it become that bone of contention if it's not hitting the ground running straight away because it's building up to that.

"It's been said for some time that a potential pitfall for Leeds is not spreading the goals around them. I still believe that. Are they getting enough from set pieces? No. Do they get enough from players that are not out and out strikers or forwards? Possibly not. So it's a collective.

"I understand your eyes are drawn to the centre-forward and the ten possibly playing off him but again, I do stress that it is a collective."