Mateo Joseph, a striker for Leeds United, is working to regain his composure after suffering an ankle injury that prevented him from having an impact at the start of the season.

In comparison to teams in the Championship, Leeds’ attacking options currently appear to be very good, which will delight Daniel Farke.

It does imply that some young people will find it difficult to get many chances to shine throughout the promotion race.

Where is Mateo Joseph?

Joseph, who signed from Espanyol in January 2022 while Marcelo Bielsa was the club’s manager, was already showing to be too excellent for merely under-21 football. He made his Premier League debut last season after making six appearances across all competitions in 22/23.

After a productive preseason, England youth international Joseph looked set to play for the first team, but an injured ankle forced him to miss the opening few games of the year.

He has yet to play for the senior team this season or even the under-21s, but Farke has used him twice on the bench, against Watford and Sheffield Wednesday at home.

After a good preseason was derailed by injury, Farke was questioned about how the striker is doing as he prepares to heal and make an impression at Thorp Arch (via the YEP):

“Yes, absolutely. So I was pretty impressed and pretty happy with him in pre-season. He had great games, also behind closed doors in the friendly against Barnsley, he was excellent but also all the other friendlies.

“Sadly he had this long term injury and as a young player who is just on the way into the first team football it’s never easy if you miss such a big part and you are out for more or less two months and you then need a little bit longer to be back in shape.

“Obviously for him it’s also not that easy because you can’t give just game time away in order to bring him back from this confidence level and in this rhythm. But on the training pitch he looks really sharp and we are also thinking perhaps of giving him some minutes perhaps also whenever possible in the under-21s to give him a bit of feeling for the positioning, but also the feeling for a normal game.

“But, once he is capable to impress that is also a chance to be selected for the traveling squad like he was for example for the last game and we obviously we also had a few injury concerns in the last game with Willy Gnonto and also Patrick was not one hundred per cent available.

“For that, we are happy that Mateo was available and I’m quite sure that in the mid and long term future of this club he will play a pretty pretty important role amd I’m pleased with him.”