Weston McKennie on how Leeds United abuse could have pushed him into depression

And whilst the attacks on the midfielder were unacceptable, the same interview with The Athletic cast light on why the Whites fans were hostile to him.

The American described 2022-23 as "probably one of my lower points, if not the lowest in my professional career".

The 25-year-old joined on loan from Juventus as one of the high-profile signings of fellow American Jesse Marsch's first season as manager. But he failed to have the impact Leeds hoped for, starting just 16 Premier League matches as the club were relegated, with Marsch sacked in February.

Unsurprisingly, Leeds did not take up their option to make the loan permanent.

His last act as a Leeds player was to be booed off when substituted in the final game of the season, at home to Tottenham Hotspur on the day relegation was confirmed.

It was the abuse he received on social media which seemed to hit hardest.

“I like to think I’m someone that has a thick skin,” he said. “When you get little comments here and there, it’s pretty easy to ignore. But then when you open up your phone and always the first thing you see on social (media) is something negative, it’s hard to ignore it.

“People obviously don’t know what football players go through and the stress football players put on themselves to perform, because it’s not like we want to perform badly. It’s not like we want to lose games. It’s just sometimes you have ups and downs, so it hurts.

“Everyone knows that I’m more thick-boned than than some other players, in that my body shape is the way that it is. But when people started out saying, ‘You fat b******’ and ‘you pig’ and ‘you monkey’ and stuff like that, people don’t really realise the effect that it has on people. I like to be happy and to make people happy, to make people laugh. So that was a little bit hard.

“Luckily, I had my personal chef, Patrick Contorno, who works with me in Italy, and he was living over in England with me and I had my assistant Charles also living with me.

“If you’re in a down mood in England, it can be hard to deal with it because it’s also very bad weather most of the time. It’s rainy and gloomy and it just sets the mood for you to already be in a sad mood.

"I had those guys there with me and it helped a lot. If I was there alone, I would have definitely gone into a state of complete depression because I wasn’t performing. I’m my own biggest critic.”

Any sympathy, though, will be diluted by his admission he saw Leeds as a stepping stone to other things.

“When I went there, my head was more, ‘Okay, I want to go here, perform very well, put up numbers, help the team stay up and then hopefully another Premier League team, top five, comes in and sees how well I’ve played and then they would buy me',” said the midfielder, who showed what he was capable of in the World Cup that fell in the middle of that season.

“Leeds was more of a place I wanted to go to experience something new, the Premier League. But there’s no better place to be seen by Premier League teams than if you’re playing in the Premier League.”

Despite that, he admitted relegation hit him hard.

“It was probably the first time besides the World Cup exit (in December 2022) where I cried, after the last game of the season at Leeds, when we officially got relegated," he said. "I hate to lose and I felt like I really let down the expectations that people had of me going there.”