The Lucas Perri Leeds United reports was supposed to be finished by now. Twelve months after arriving from Lyon for £16m as the club’s new No.1, the Brazilian spent Saturday afternoon at the City Ground with No.23 on his back and a seat on the bench, watching James Trafford keep the clean sheet that won the Whites their opening game of the Premier League season. Torino have been circling. A new back-up has been scouted. Every arrow pointed one way.
Then Daniel Farke stood up at Monday’s Carabao Cup press conference and muddied all of it. As things stand, the Leeds boss said, Perri is the club’s No.2. With seven days of the summer window left, that is not a throwaway line — it is a manager publicly declining to write off a £16m goalkeeper the rest of football had already moved past.
How a £16m No.1 ended up on the bench
Perri, now 28, joined Leeds last summer to take the gloves, and for the bulk of the campaign he did exactly that, staying ever-present between the sticks whenever he was fit. The turn came in January. After a run of errors, Farke made the big call and replaced him with Karl Darlow, who then played every single minute of United’s final 12 league games. Perri’s football was reduced to the FA Cup, and by the time the season closed he was a No.1 in name only.
A goalkeeping department rebuilt from the studs up
What happened next stripped the department back to almost nothing. Darlow’s contract expired and he left for Manchester United on a free as back-up. Illan Meslier departed too, joining Arsenal in the same understudy role. That left Leeds with precisely two senior goalkeepers — Perri and Alex Cairns — and an urgent hole at the top of the pecking order.
The hunt ended in record-breaking fashion with Trafford’s arrival from Manchester City for a club-record fee. He has repaid it immediately: a Hisense Player of the Match award on a debut at Forest in which, per the Yorkshire Evening Post‘s Lee Sobot, he was “the main difference maker” and “exuded a calm confidence between the sticks”. The official squad list published on 21 August confirmed the hierarchy in black and white: Trafford took No.1, Cairns has 21, Perri moved to 23.
‘As it stands’ — the three words doing the heavy lifting
All of which makes Farke’s Monday answer more than routine presser housekeeping. As reported by the Yorkshire Evening Post, Perri is said to be set for Torino, with his exit understood to have been held up by an injury — the reason Cairns started the friendlies until Trafford got up and running. Yet Perri was back in the matchday squad at Forest on Saturday, sitting behind Trafford as the recognised back-up.
Meanwhile the club has not stopped looking. Eintracht Frankfurt’s Michael Zetterer is the latest goalkeeper Leeds are known to be keen on, with no fee or agreement confirmed in any of it. Nothing here is settled, which is precisely why “as it stands” matters. Farke was describing today’s dressing room, not signing a guarantee for 1 September.
The cup night that could tell us more
Leeds are back at the City Ground tonight for a Carabao Cup second-round rematch, kick-off 8pm, and cup ties in August are traditionally where a No.2 gets his night. Farke has already signalled rotation, with Willy Gnonto and Ilia Gruev listed as doubts and Gabriel Gudmundsson still out with a muscular problem, though the YEP’s own predicted line-up keeps Trafford in goal on the grounds that a new signing simply needs the minutes.
Twelve months on from being handed the No.1 shirt, Perri is in the strangest position of his Leeds career: publicly backed as the second choice, widely linked with the exit door, and still very much a Leeds player with a week of the window to run. Whether he is in the Elland Road tunnel come September or somewhere in Turin, Farke has made clear the Whites are not pushing him towards it.
