Signed by Leeds in 2017 on a free from Juventus, Ouasim Bouy has been anything but a success at Elland Road.
The midfielder has never actually featured for the now Premier League club, instead being sent on loan to CyD Leonesa and PEC Zwolle between 2017-19.
Since then, he’s just kind of sat around, trained, and done very little.
An Ajax Amsterdam youth product, Bouy is part of a long and sad list of Dutch footballers who left their respective clubs at a young age to try their luck abroad with little success.
AD in Holland look at this, and include the Leeds flop, getting some jabs in there along the way.
Swapping Ajax’s U19s for Juventus’ in 2012, Bouy ‘has been under contract with Leeds United for years, consistently without playing’, adding he’s a ‘boy who changes clubs more than he does underpants’.
However, ‘if you consider Bouy as a very average footballer, an average professional footballer like there are thousands’, then his career isn’t all that bad.
As they put it, ‘he has played at Juventus, Hamburger SV, Panathinaikos and Leeds’, all the while earning ‘nice pocket money, too’.
That’s the gamble when it comes to the life of a footballer, and sometimes reputation at young age can go a long way in making a career worthwhile, at least financially, especially when your agent is Mino Raiola.
AD state that of all the players who left Holland early, it is the route directed by the super agent ‘with the most removal vans’, but also ‘with the least business risk’.
The latest in this group is Brian Brobbey, who will leave Ajax in the summer, and if the forward ‘turns out to be just a player of the level of PEC Zwolle or ADO Den Haag’ in six years time, is that really such a bad thing?
At least, ‘with Raiola you have a certainty: even if things do not go completely as you dreamed, you always have a nice pension’.
In Bouy’s case, with a contract at Elland Road coming to an end in the summer, it’ll be interesting to see where goes from here and whether the agent can work his magic once more.
