Can Djed Spence, divider of manager opinions, find a home at Leeds? - The Athletic 15/9/23

By Phil Hay, Charlie Eccleshare and more

On a concrete block on a bridge over Nottingham’s River Trent, graffiti was sprayed a while back. The message is like a throwaway remark, almost the result of a passing thought as whoever held the can of black spray paint walked past Nottingham Forest’s stadium nearby: “Djed Spence we miss ya!!”

Who knows if Spence has ever seen it in person, or seen it at all, but it is never a bad thing to be appreciated. Forest were the club where he was loved. Forest were the club where he looked at home. There is a frozen-in-time photograph of Spence after their Championship play-off semi-final win over Sheffield United in 2022, of him on the City Ground’s pitch with the stand behind him almost empty, gazing happily towards the Trent End. Those are the moments a footballer wants to bottle, a moment people who are close to Spence wanted him to bottle.

The defender is the quintessential enigma, the breed of footballer who divides opinion. Ask in certain circles and Spence is described as complex, difficult or hard work, more effort than he is worth. Ask others, particularly in the right parts of Nottingham, and he is electric, skilful, a dream of a right-back in top form. Neil Warnock, a manager who failed to warm to Spence, famously said the 23-year-old would be “Premier League or non-League”, his fate determined by his own attitude. The Premier League came calling for him 12 months ago, but now Spence is back in the Championship, starting a season’s loan at Leeds United. A good year ahead is in everyone’s interests.

Warnock has never fully cut loose about Spence, about exactly why he loaned Spence to Forest from Middlesbrough in the summer of 2021. In doing so, he handed a Championship promotion rival the best right-back in the division, a player the fans there, as the flash of graffiti makes clear, would welcome back in an instant. That is what Leeds hope to see in Spence after signing him two weeks ago: the flair and style which made a Middlesbrough cast-off a £12.5million ($15.5m) asset in the space of one campaign.

Those who have tracked Spence’s career say Steve Cooper, Forest’s manager, is the one coach who got him and knew how to make him tick. Cooper cut his teeth as a coach in England’s junior ranks and had a skill for reading young players, of understanding how to handle them. Warnock and Spence had banged heads at the Riverside, unable to see eye to eye and eventually unable to work with each other. Cooper was more inclined to use the arm-around-the-shoulder approach, to drum into Spence his value to a team who conjured the most unlikely promotion from a position at the very foot of the Championship.

Spence, by joining Forest on loan from Boro in September 2021, was closer to home than he had been on Teesside but still a distance from his old stomping ground. A south London boy who grew up in Crystal Palace territory, he played for a local team, Junior Elite, before moving into Fulham’s academy around the age of 12. At Fulham, he was a centre-back rather than a right-back, skilful and athletic and good at bringing the ball out from deep. The academy crop around him was a promising one: the Sessegnons, Ryan and Steven, were in it, playing on either side of the defence. A lack of natural dominance in the air would eventually push Spence into a wider role.

Fulham’s mixed opinion of Spence is something of a recurring theme in the narrative around him. There were points where his levels of application made them wonder if they should let him go but plenty of occasions when his performances persuaded them they were onto a good thing. But as he approached the end of his last year with the under-18s, with his contract about to expire, Fulham chose to release him. Spence described it as “a difficult time, to be let go”. It left him in the limbo all academy players hope to avoid, without a club as the 2017-18 season drew to a close.

That he came onto Middlesbrough’s radar almost immediately was down to Martin Carter, a Boro scout who had identified an opening by homing in on the London market and tracking available young players there. Carter had done enough background on Spence, then only 17, to recommend to Boro that they make him an offer and take a chance on him. Spence would go through three managers in the space of three years: Warnock, Tony Pulis and Jonathan Woodgate. He was stepping out of his comfort zone by moving to the north east of England, living in digs and trying to settle in new surroundings. Woodgate, during his stint as manager, made one specific attempt to look after Spence by inviting him round for lunch on Christmas Day in 2019 to avoid the teenager spending it alone.

At the stage where Middlesbrough turned to Warnock to rescue them from relegation from the Championship in 2020, Spence had already amassed a solid number of first-team appearances without looking out of place. The irony of the friction that developed between them is that in Warnock’s one full season in charge, Spence missed just eight league matches and started 22 times. It was not as if the defender was ostracised from the start, but Warnock was not enamoured with his attitude, seeing Spence as aloof and, at times, uninterested. Conversations between them failed to establish any rapport.

There were individuals at Boro who found Spence to be good company. There were others who thought him impolite or lacking in manners. Observations about his character can be conflicting. As Warnock put it on talkSPORT: “I had a few run-ins with Djed. I had one or two chats with him and a few words were said. He needed to sort himself out.” Their mutual antipathy was summed up by Spence welcoming Warnock to Twitter last year by tweeting a picture of himself smoking a cigar after Forest’s promotion.

Oh, Where’s my Manners! Welcome to Twitter @warnockofficial 😘 pic.twitter.com/uur8r2pyVr

— Djed Spence (@DjedSpence) May 29, 2022

When the 2020-21 season finished, Warnock was adamant Spence should leave and would not be part of his future plans. Boro’s hierarchy, in general, were happy to ship the defender out.

Certain sources spoken to by The Athletic, all of whom asked not to be named to protect existing relationships, questioned whether it suited Boro to paint Spence as a problem because of his exceptional impact at Forest; the application being maybe Boro had dropped the ball by allowing him to leave rather than making his presence there work. But another person with knowledge of his loan to Forest said what happened next was a “curveball” and a surprise to Boro. The Teesside club did not expect Spence’s form to explode as it did. They did not anticipate that he would return from Nottingham with Tottenham ready to sign him for a deal worth up to £20m. Spence bombing out of the Riverside was the making of his reputation.

Glenn Hancock, one of his old school teachers, had experience of the sort of authority Spence was comfortable with. “Djed responded well to strict teachers who wouldn’t nag him and gave him encouraging feedback,” Hancock told The Athletic, and he wondered if Cooper had found that sweet spot. It helped, too, that Forest used a 3-5-2 system, tailor-made for Spence to attack down the right with the freedom to employ his full skill set. Spence started 38 regular league games for Forest and all three matches in the play-offs, culminating in a victory over Huddersfield Town in the final. He was the perfect player for his role, the perfect signing. Leeds have a different system to Cooper’s, a back four as opposed to a back three, and Warnock questioned how suited Spence really was to the former. But nothing in Leeds’ analysis of him doubted his ability. Gretar Steinsson, United’s technical director, had thought seriously about pursuing Spence in his time as part of Everton’s recruitment staff.

Half a season at Forest was all it took for Spurs to get interested. By January, Spence was telling other players in Forest’s dressing room that Tottenham was a future option for him and fairly likely to happen. The deal was done at the end of the 2021-22 season, soon after Forest’s promotion. Brentford were strongly rumoured to be tracking him and some in the game have since asked privately whether that might have been a better option for Spence, but from Middlesbrough’s perspective, he was always going to Spurs that summer. It was merely a matter of talking Tottenham up to a price they were happy with. Boro’s support were unhappy at the loss of a footballer so obviously suited to the Championship, but internally, Boro were happy to take the cash.

Spence’s introduction at Spurs, though, was far from ideal. However the move came about and whoever instigated the approach to Boro, Tottenham’s then manager, Antonio Conte, made it clear that the driving force behind the signing was not him. “Spence is an investment of the club,” Conte said. “The club wanted to do it. I said, ‘OK, this player is young but he showed he can become a good, important player for us’. The club decided to buy him.” It was hardly a glowing endorsement or the first time something like it had happened at Tottenham. Jack Clarke’s £10m move from Leeds to Spurs in 2019 was a deal for which Mauricio Pochettino, one of Conte’s predecessors, seemed to have no enthusiasm at all.

For several months afterwards, Spence kicked his heels. To date, he has played seven minutes of first-team football for Spurs. He went out on loan in January to French side Rennes, where he made a small number of outings alongside fellow loanee Joe Rodon. The pick of his displays was in a 2-0 away win over Paris Saint-Germain, an afternoon on which Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi were kept quiet.

Rodon, like Spence, came to Leeds on loan this summer. Leeds and Spurs have a strong executive relationship, particularly between Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and Leeds CEO Angus Kinnear. United were able to take Rodon on a season’s loan despite Spurs initially asking for an eight-figure permanent offer. They secured Spence just before the deadline for a loan fee of around £1m, a major coup in their eyes.

Lesley Ugochukwu played with Spence and Rodon at Rennes. “I got on well with Joe and Spence, probably more off the field with Spence because he is closer to my age,” Ugochukwu said. “They’re people who showed me the British mentality.

“Rodon has a strong mindset. I remember we were not in the starting XI in training and we were losing and everyone was giving up. You could hear Joe shouting ‘come on, guys. Be strong’. This guy never gives up and that’s inspiring. With Spence, we liked to laugh together. He’s a cool man and relaxed. I really liked those guys.”

Spurs underwent another big change in the dugout in June with the appointment of Ange Postecoglou from Celtic. The club’s tempestuous partnership with Conte had ended in March. Postecoglou had a look at Spence in pre-season but omitted him from every friendly. Spence spent time training away from the main group having not played since April 1 because of injury. Spurs still believe in his potential and, in line with what happened at Forest, think he is best suited to operating as a wing-back on the right of a three-man defence. One source said that greater application would help Spence gain more minutes on the pitch at Tottenham. From an early stage, it made sense for him to head out on loan this season, his chances limited by the presence of Pedro Porro and Emerson Royal, but the door in north London remains ajar.

When Spence travelled up to sign for Leeds, his mother Aisha came with him. She is considered by those around him as a hugely positive influence and a rich vein of support. After Forest’s win over Sheffield United in the play-off semi-finals, she ran onto the pitch with Forest’s crowd at the City Ground and was videoed on the shoulders of a fan chanting: “Warnock said that Spence was shite… now he’s fucking dynamite!”. Warnock has since claimed his warning to Spence that he could as easily be non-League as Premier League helped to make “the penny drop”. But there is no love lost.

Daniel Farke, Leeds’ manager, would count himself as a disciplinarian, but no signing at Elland Road was completed without his approval this summer. The suggestion of Spence got the green light from him, not least because there might not be a better right-back anywhere in the Championship and Spence himself needs a chance to flourish again. When he left Fulham all those years ago, a very young Cody Drameh was coming through behind him. Spence’s arrival in West Yorkshire a fortnight ago saw Drameh depart Elland Road for Birmingham City two days later, effectively ending his career with United. Small world.