“Most people there don’t know the etymology of it, so I find myself explaining it,” says Josh Wileman, who was Leeds United’s South Korean supporter group contact.
Mr Wileman, originally from Hemsworth in West Yorkshire, moved 5,000 miles away to South Korea in 2017, where he spent most of the next eight years as an English teacher, before returning home last month.
He says that when he was 12 years old, Smith’s trans-Pennine transfer was his first footballing “heartbreak”.
“It wasn’t nice to be reminded of that, I suppose, when I first heard the phrase,” Mr Wileman laughs.
“It was in my first year out there. I’d never heard it before I went.
“The first person I was working with was from Barnsley and he was really into his football, so he was the one who explained it to me.”
“Leeds days” is believed to have first sprung up on Korean online forums in the 2000s, after one of the country’s best players – Park Ji-sung – joined Manchester United a year after Smith.
