Alex Mowatt ⭑ From A-Z since '92
When, years from now, fans are still remembering screamers by him, Mowatt can be satisfied that he did what he set out to do in football: be noticed.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, then check out all the players featured so far on this page. Or you can keep going below, with Diegalex Mowattadona (just me? fine).
In his late twenties Alex Mowatt has become something the Championship excels in, a lightly grizzled player who combines workrate with outrageous footballing debauchery. At some point he veered from a path that might have taken him to excellence and found his true calling as a local and well-loved entertainer. Those teenage appearances in rapping contests in Doncaster were a sign of things to come.
Leeds United bear the responsibility for how Mowatt turned out, the good and bad. He was raised in the Thorp Arch academy alongside Sam Byram, Charlie Taylor and Lewis Cook, and made his debut in 2013 a couple of weeks after grabbing attention with a swerving free-kick for the youth team against Colwyn Bay. The signs were immediately there: Thorp Arch had come up with another good one.
By the time he was 21 Alex Mowatt was Leeds United's longest serving player and after initially thriving under the pressure of becoming a professional footballer he'd been ground down by successive managers trying to turn his career into a job. Mowatt's best days were when he went on the pitch with the same panache as the kid he'd just been, with the spiked haircut, spitting rhymes and winking at girls as a confident MC of fifteen. That's how he played football, too, by going on stage to make an impression. As a nineteen-year-old Mowatt was soon one of United's most influential players because he went into every game to put his stamp on it, to do something people would remember, to make his mark.
As a path to playmaking that's as good as anything else. Mowatt quickly became the player who would make things happen because he wanted to pull them off. United's midfield positions had been dominated by tacklers like Michael Brown and Rudy Austin, or mild mannered passers like Michael Tonge, Paul Green and Luke Murphy. Mowatt strode in among that lot with the thick black hair and barrel body of a young Diego Maradona, and if he didn't have that sort of consistent talent he at least had the skills to pull off half of what he was trying to do half of the time.
It might seem a stretch to compare Mowatt to Maradona, but this is about what was going on in his brain. He didn't see Ross McCormack and Mathieu Smith in the Leeds attack. He saw Hernan Crespo and Gabriel Batistuta and the prospect drove him wild. The through balls and crosses he sent their way got the best out of them, making more of McCormack's skills and getting use from Smith's aerial power. His first assist was a first time cross belted onto the forward flank of Smith's big head for a fourth goal against Birmingham City.
He started wearing a hair band and he only scored bangers. In 2020 Leeds United uploaded a video of Mowatt's top ten goals out of a total of thirteen, and while I could understand dropping the one against Cambridge in the cup when he nodded in a corner, I'd have stretched to twelve to include a snapshot from the edge of the area at Wigan that hit the corner of the net like a rocket, and the one at Middlesbrough when he tackled the ball in from twenty yards. Those were the only goals in those games, and Mowatt had a habit of making his count: he scored in six games that Leeds won by one, and was the only Leeds scorer in two draws. The second was when he whacked two in against Charlton in a rare midweek at Elland Road worth remembering.