“People thought I was lazy” – Leeds flop explains long Covid to blame for recent struggles

When Marcelo Bielsa was still in charge at Leeds United, the club brought in Jean-Kévin Augustin on loan from RB Leipzig, with the condition that the move would be made permanent should the Elland Road side get promoted back to the Premier League.

Now, you’ll all be aware that the Whites did return to England’s elite, but they were delayed by Covid in doing so, which has led to a whole kerfuffle of payment arguments, which has just about been resolved.

In the meantime, the player was released by the German side, went to Nantes, where he really struggled, only to find out it was all due to long Covid, according to the player himself in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.

Now at Basel, the Leeds flop, who only ever made three appearances for the Elland Road residents, is getting back into shape and finding his love for football again, but he recalled how hard it was for him, feeling his body had ‘escaped him’.

Describing himself as a ‘footballer again’, he said: “People thought I was lazy, or that I couldn’t be bothered.”

It reached a point where Augustin was collapsing and struggling to breathe after exercises while his teammates barely broke a sweat, originally blaming the small amount of game time he had at Leeds and Monaco, only to realise it was more serious than that.

He added: “Putting football to one side broke my heart. The illness deprived me of the sport that I was playing since I was five years old.”

Unable to play for around 10 months, the striker tried everything to get back into shape, and was lucky to have a manager with Nantes’ second team in Stéphane Ziani who was very patient and understanding.

Augustin said: “Sometimes, I told him I couldn’t do it anymore. He would tell me to do what I could, to stay at home when it really wasn’t going well. All that time when I felt lost, to hear him say that he would always be there for me, it really helped me.”

However, he also believes the experience made him far stronger mentally than he was before: “If I hadn’t had long Covid, I might still have that mentality that played some tricks on me in the past.”

He is now in Switzerland, with Basel, where he has made 15 appearances in all competitions, scoring three goals along the way, but has yet to start and finish a game, with the most minutes he has played in one match being 74.

The former Leeds forward might not be where he was before physically, but he certainly feels like he’s getting there.