‘They always speak about weight’
Kalvin Phillips has opened up about his frustration at constant comments about his weight.
Phillips was labelled ‘overweight’ by Man City boss Pep Guardiola after the 2022 World Cup and the midfielder went on to describe it as the ‘toughest moment of his career’.
Guardiola did apologise for the comment, but the now-Ipswich loanee has revealed the knock-on effect that those words had.
And he also went into detail about how it has been a consistent issue since he was at Leeds under Marcelo Bielsa.
“Bielsa is obsessed with body composition and weights,” Phillips explained on the ‘My Mate’s A Footballer’ podcast.
“And I was on the higher end of the team, if not the highest.
“We had a pre-season where for three weeks I’d go home and I’d literally just have a protein shake for my dinner.
“I just had to keep losing weight, losing weight. He was like that until the last week I was there. He always pushed me to be on a certain weight target.
“I obviously respected it, but I knew that I couldn’t starve myself or dehydrate myself because eventually, I was going to get injured or stop performing.
“Only recently, since I’ve come to Ipswich, have I got to the target, round about, that Biesla set me.
“The manager here is very big on body composition as well and I thought ‘I’m not getting off to a bad start here, I need to make sure my weight’s on point’.”
“It’s just become a narrative with me,” Phillips continued.
“You obviously heard about the time when Pep [Guardiola] came out and said that I was overweight after the World Cup. That narrative on social media just grew and grew into something that it wasn’t.
“Every club I’d go to, the manager and nutritionist, they’d always speak about weight before they’d say anything else. At a point it peed me off a little bit. I was getting quite frustrated with it.
“Now I’ve come to Ipswich and the manager is an unbelievable person as well as a manager. We spoke about all the past stuff that happened in my career. He just said he wanted me to get to where I was when I was at Leeds.”
