'I will tell him this exactly' - The inside story of Jesse Lingard's move to the K-League
manchestereveningnews.co.uk"2024, we coming," was the pledge Jesse Lingard made on New Year's Eve, with the Burj Khalifa as his backdrop on an Instagram post to his nine million followers.
That fact that the 31-year-old former Manchester United midfielder was able to jaunt across to the Middle East at the most demanding time of the football season and with the January transfer looming was symbolic of where his one-time career as a Premier League footballer stood: worlds away.
At that point, it had been over nine months since Lingard - a 32-cap England international - had started a Premier League fixture, Nottingham Forest's 3-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur on March 11.
Rather than turning out at venues like the City Ground, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Old Trafford, Lingard instead used the first half of the 2023/24 season, after being released by Forest in July, to bide his time over his next move by keeping fit with sessions at a sports centre in Newton Heath in between trials at West Ham United and Saudi Pro League side Al Ettifaq earlier in the season.
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