The mess Meslier is in

This should be Illan Meslier's time. This should be the season when it all comes together and makes sense. He's 25 years old. He's played more than 20,400 minutes of senior football — 228 games. He's played well and played badly, known success and failure, and hopefully learned. Goalkeepers aren't like other players, who get chucked in the team as teens to express themselves and become young stars. The first half of their twenties is a goalie's apprenticeship, the second half and beyond is for demonstrating their mastery. Ten to fifteen years of top flight football should be starting, for Illan Meslier, right now.

Instead he's a ghostly presence on the Leeds United 2025/26 squad photo, the fourth goalkeeper. He lost his place to Karl Darlow last season, then Lucas Perri arrived in summer and supplanted them both. Meslier was supposed to leave at that point but none of the moves offered to him struck the right note, while Daniel Farke suggested Perri's injury record as a reason for keeping Meslier around. Injury to Perri has got Meslier back on the bench, at least, but when the new man is fit again, yesterday's Meslier will be demoted to warming up with Alex Cairns and taking a seat in the stands. Next summer Meslier's contract expires and he'll be free to go play elsewhere, a fresh start he needs, but that means these last months with Leeds will be a waste of a good goalkeeper.

And he is a good goalkeeper. Any pundit, any former keeper, any expert who is asked agrees: don't worry about the mistakes. He's 25 years old. All goalies make them. But not all goalies make the saves he's capable of. In 2021/22, when Leeds were in their post-Bielsa decline, I reckoned that despite conceding 79 goals in the Premier League Meslier was my player of the season for the spectacular ways he'd kept that total down. Against Southampton at Elland Road he pulled off an incredible point-blank save to stop Che Adams, who had been given about half an hour to pick his spot, and I called Meslier the Raphinha of our own six yard box. Dire as Leeds were, and as Meslier could be, at least once a game he'd do something exhilarating.

That, and his superb displays in 2020/21 when Leeds finished 9th in the Premier League, have become in retrospect a problem. Not just because they've been buried beneath his more recent errors: football is always asking what you've done for it lately. But because Meslier should never have been in the position where, just after turning 22, he had to stop Teemu Pukki's point blank volley with his face to keep Leeds in the Premier League.

Meslier's unraveling has its sources here, in his initial very public raveling. Not only has he, two years younger than Lucas Perri, played twice as much senior football as him, his 9,600 minutes in the Premier League alone are 600 more minutes than Perri has played in his entire career. The simple truism comes to goalkeepers before others, about doing much too much, much too young, and Meslier has grown up in much too bright a spotlight.