'Peed me off' - Leeds United favourite Kalvin Phillips' honest feeling to Pep Guardiola 'overweight' reaction

Kalvin Phillips was left ‘frustrated’ by the constant narrative surrounding his weight in the aftermath of Pep Guardiola’s comments on the matter.

Guardiola said in December 2022 that Phillips returned from the Qatar World Cup ‘overweight’, with the out-of-favour Manchester City man finding football hard to come by for club and country. The City boss has since apologised for the comment, which was based on the former Leeds United man being slightly over his target weight, rather than more generally overweight.

Phillips had been struggling to find form before those comments but things got worse after, with a January loan move to West Ham United proving difficult before he lost his England spot for this summer’s European Championships. The 28-year-old had been on the lookout for a new club all summer and eventually joined Ipswich Town on loan, but admitted his weight often came up in conversations elsewhere.

“You probably heard about the time when Pep came out and said that I was overweight after the World Cup,” Phillips told the My Mate’s A Footballer Podcast. “I think that narrative on social media just kind of grew and grew. Every club that I'd go to, I spoke to the manager and the nutritionist and stuff like that, they'd always speak about weight before they'd say anything else.

“It got to the point where it peed me off a little bit. I was getting quite frustrated with it, but then now I've come to Ipswich, the manager [Kieran McKenna] is an unbelievable person as well as a manager. We spoke about all my past stuff that happened in my career. He just said ‘I'm big on body composition and I just want you to get to where you were when you left Leeds or when you were at Leeds. I think that'll give us a good starting point for you to push on and hopefully get to back, back to where you were.’”

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Back in action

Phillips’ loan move to Ipswich came as a surprise to many but three starts in six games is evidence he made the right decision, having spent so much of the last two years watching on from the bench. The midfielder has been eased back into action and had a minor injury to manage, but is slowly returning to the player Leeds fans know he can be.

Against Aston Villa on Sunday, Phillips produced arguably his best performance in a long time, snapping into challenges and playing a huge part in Liam Delap’s early opener, which was set up by his former Leeds teammate Jack Clarke. And the midfielder is just enjoying being on the pitch again after a torrid recent spell.

“My main ambition was just to get back playing football week in week out and make sure that I'm fit again, and I'm not getting many injuries,” the former Leeds man added. “It’s kind of draining when you know you’re not going to play on the weekend and you’ve still got to go in and train as well as you can and hopefully make yourself better and better everyday.

“With nothing to look forward to on the weekend it’s hard. It just got to a point where I knew that I probably wasn't going to play much [at City] because of the players that play in front of me, which you know, I can't really argue about that.”