Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Brenden Aaronson has today become the latest rat to flee the Leeds United ship after helping it sink into the Championship. The American, more etiolated than an old stick of celery, has joined Bundesliga outfit Union Berlin on loan for the year. Few will miss him. In his first and, hopefully, last season in a white shirt, Aaronson contributed one goal, a tap-in against Chelsea, and three assists in forty appearances. A pathetic return for an 'attacking' midfielder who set the club back more than £20m and evidence of his total inability to adjust to the rigours of English football.

Aaronson will face off against fellow flop Robin Koch, who has likewise gone out on loan for the season. He's joined Eintracht Frankfurt after three seasons in West Yorkshire, from which I'd struggle to recall more than a few decent showings on his part. Either the standard of German football has dropped off in a rather dramatic way or there's a great deal of money to be paid peddling hallucinogenic narcotics to Bundesliga club executives. Who cares? At least we won't have to watch Koch chase butterflies while Rotherham and Plymouth break through our lines.

You do have to wonder what Jose Mourinho and his recruitment team have been on lately. They've now signed Diego Llorente twice in the space of a few months. The scatterbrained Spaniard first joined Roma on loan in January, after a calamitous run of games that saw him cost Leeds multiple goals through individual mistakes that would make the likes of Giuseppe Bellusci and Roque Junior, those defensive doyens of days past, blush. The twelve outings Llorente made for the capital club between then and the end of the season clearly haven't put the Not-So-Special One off, as they've taken him on loan again. Serie A must be awful nowadays.

Like many of us, I'm not at all sorry to see these sackless, spineless so-and-sos leave the club. Their departures will doubtless have freed up money regards the wage budget, for one thing. Nonetheless, buggering off before cleaning up your own poo is reflective of a rather poor attitude and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, whether it's a corrupt Conservative prime minister who pays less tax than you or I do or some idiot who earns a fortune to boot a ball around. Some small part of me hoped, naively, that they would at least have the grace to help fix the mess their performances helped to create. No doubt some of their equally useless former teammates will follow them out of the door, but I suppose it's no bad thing.

If Herr Farke's time in Norfolk is anything to go by, he has little time for players who have risibly high opinions of themselves. He looks rather like a Bond villain and has, if not the voice, for his is actually quite lovely, the ruthlessness to go with it. This was evident during Norwich's 2020-21 Championship-winning campaign when he dropped Emi Buendia and Todd Cantwell for a huge match against Bournemouth because he was less than impressed with their efforts in training. He'll want players who are fully focused and who'll fight for the shirt. How we could have done with some of those last season.

Photo: Action Images

Lorralorimer added 19:09 - Jul 9 Fully agree with everything said here. The fact that these overpaid, under-performing specimens aren't even prepared to redeem themselves and give back to the club they helped take down, says everything about what motivates players like them. Giving your all for a club during the bad as well as the good times is what endears players to fans and seals their affection for a lifetime. These players either don't know that or they simply don't care – I think we know which of these two applies. So good riddance – they won't go with my blessing and neither do I wish them well with their new clubs. If they prove as dismal as they did at Leeds, they may come to appreciate how great was the club they left behind and what might have been.

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