Director of football Victor Orta said Leeds United have been keeping an eye on Moroccan sensation Azzedine Ounahi for the past two years.
The 22-year-old helped Morocco reach the semi-finals in Qatar, becoming the first African team to reach that milestone.
The combative midfielder is being coveted by many big clubs after his impressive World Cup performances. One of the clubs that has been linked with Ounahi is Leeds United and Victor Orta admits that he has been coveted by the midfielder for a long time.
“Even my president wrote to me,” Orta told Radio Marca. “’Where was he that we didn’t see him?’ He has been the revelation player. We’ve known him for two seasons. As for his season at Angers, only one thing surprised me: his physical level. He used to be more of a trotter [Spanish word used to describe a more languid, less dynamic player].
“But the emotion [of a World Cup]: Do you feel the same when you put on the Angers shirt as when you know that your entire country is behind you? All this makes us contextualize the representations.
“I don’t want to talk about Totò Schillaci [1990 World Cup top scorer], [El-Hadji] Diouf and all those one-hitters who shone in a World Cup or a European Championship but then their careers weren’t the same.
“Ounahi has played incredible, he has played in an incredible context. Now we have to seek to remove it from that context. He has had a great performance, but signing a player [after watching him for] five games, and I hope he has a wonderful career in the future because he is capable.
“I invite everyone to watch 20 Angers matches. Maybe they’ll tell me that he’s a bit of a different player. But perhaps this will help him to put himself on the other step and follow a different trajectory because he generates that confidence to show himself in the first showcase of the World Cup. But if a sports director says that he thought that Ounahi was going to act like this, he is lying ”. – Orta told the Yorkshire Post.
