Why Leeds United and Sheffield United will have mixed feelings on Ethan Ampadu | OneFootball

Ethan Ampadu has played for both Sheffield United and Leeds United, but opinions on the defender will be very different between these two clubs.

Ethan Ampadu spent a season on loan with Sheffield United earlier in his career, but now he's playing Premier League football with Leeds United and captaining the Whites. Opinions on him differ between South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.

As the captain of a team with two clean sheets from their first three Premier League games (he's only played in one of those due to injury) following promotion from the Championship at the end of last season, 2025 is turning into a very good year indeed for Ethan Ampadu. But getting to this level has been a difficult journey for the 24-year-old defender, and one of the stops on his way to Elland Road was at Bramall Lane with Sheffield United.

Ampadu was still a Chelsea player when he went on loan to Sheffield United in September 2020, but although the player himself performed reasonably well, the team struggled all season and were relegated into the Championship with just 23 points. And now he's hitting new heights at Leeds, as the captain of a team which is now playing Premier League football, the success he's now having could provoke envious glances from Bramall Lane.

"A bullet dodged" - Ethan Ampadu didn't make too many friends at Sheffield United

If relegation is character-building for a young player, Ethan Ampadu should be overflowing with it, because his time with Sheffield United was the first of three consecutive seasons that he spent on loan with clubs who ended the season by getting relegated.

When he first arrived at the club on the 7th September 2020, there was a lot of optimism around Bramall Lane, with Shefffield United having finished the previous, pandemic-disrupted season, in ninth place in the Premier League. But it didn't take very long for that optimism to fade.

By the time they won their first League match of the season against Newcastle United on the 12th January, they were playing their 18th game of the season, had just two points, and were already 13 points from Premier League safety. Ampadu's personal figures weren't terrible. He achieved an average Sofascore rating of 7.01 in all competitions over the course of the season from his 29 appearances, not a bad score for a defender in a team which lost 29 of their 38 League matches that season.

But being a part of that team left a mark, and by the time it was confirmed that he would be spending the 2021-22 season on loan at Venezia, Blades fans didn't have a very high opinion of him, as this lengthy thread from the fan forum S24SU demonstrates, with descriptions of him as "a bullet dodged", "a poundshop Eric Dier", and "rubbish and one of the weaker players in a team that finished rock bottom".

Ethan Ampadu has blossomed into a leader at Leeds United

That time with Venezia didn't turn out to be particularly successful for his team, either. They were relegated from Serie A at bottom place in the table. And the following season, with another Serie A club, Spezia, didn't go much better. They were relegated after losing a play-off to Verona, a match in which Ampadu equalised with the first goal of his senior career before going down 3-1.

He signed for Leeds United for a fee reported to be £7 million in the summer 2024 transfer window, and was an ever-present throughout the 2023-24 season. Leeds missed out on promotion by losing the play-off final to Southampton, but Ampadu was appointed their captain that summer, with manager Daniel Farke praising his leadership skills after carrying the armband during the second-half of the aforementioned campaign.

Knee injuries disrupted his 2024-25 season, but he still managed 29 Championship appearances. He returned from the first of his injuries at the start of December, and the relief of Leeds fans at that point was palpable. Leeds went on to lift the title at the end of the season, and have made a solid start to their return to the Premier League.

A knee injury has also disrupted his start to this season, but his popularity among fans remains unbowed. He also won the 2024-25 PFA Community Champion award for his community service work, an honour which will have done his reputation among the Elland Road faithful no harm whatsoever.

Ampadu was still a week shy of his 20th birthday when he first arrived at Sheffield United in September 2020. He had a lot of learning still to do, and the maturity and leadership skills that he has developed may well be at least partly informed by those three consecutive relegations.

Ironically, his experience at Sheffield United may well have helped him to grow as a player, and as the Blades look up at everybody else from their place at the foot of the Championship table after a catastrophic start to 2025-26, it might well be a cause for regret that they didn't push harder to keep him at Bramall Lane in the summer of 2021.