Tomas Brolin, the man widely regarded as the worst signing ever made by a top flight club, has lifted the lid on his disastrous spell at Leeds United in the mid-1990s.

The Swede enjoyed a glittering career before his move to England - but within weeks it had begun to crumble as he lurched from one humiliation to the next.

The disastrous stint became footballing legend, and Brolin was voted the second worst signing of all time in a Times poll in 2008. In case you're wondering how he managed to avoid top spot, he was pipped to that accolade by a conman named Ali Dia who talked his way into turning out for Graeme Souness at Southampton.

For years Brolin has kept his own counsel about his ill-fated spell in England, but he has finally opened his heart to Swedish football magazine 'Offside' to explain exactly how things went sour.

So what went wrong? After all, Brolin arrived at Elland Road in 1995 amid plenty of fanfare: he had been a key player for the superb Swedish team which finished third in the 1994 World Cup in the USA, with Brolin scoring three goals and being named in FIFA's team of the tournament.

A foot injury later that year ruined the following season, however, and he arrived at Leeds still fighting to regain his fitness.

Despite those worries, Brolin says he came to Leeds expecting to be the lynchpin of the team following promises to that effect by then-manager Howard Wilkinson:

"The first thing he (Wilkinson) asked me was: 'How much money do you want?' I said the important thing was not the money but what my position in the team would be. He then got out some A4 sheets of paper and started to draw things.

"I was going to be the spider in the middle of the web, pulling the strings in midfield. I was the one who was going to play the decisive pass to Tony Yeboah. Everything was great."

Indeed it was, at least at first: things started well, and after a few matches at his new club Brolin scored both goals in a 2-0 win over West Ham.

The honeymoon did not last long, however, with the Swede temporarily being farmed out on to the wing despite his protestations that he simply did not have the skills to carry off the role.

"It may not sound that bad, to be a wide midfielder at Leeds, but the defensive responsibilities I had... it was not like when I had Roland Nilsson behind me in the Swedish national team. At Leeds I was going to run up and down the right like an idiot. That wasn't me."

In his interview Brolin failed to explain that it was more than just a question of skill: his fitness was still a huge problem - in every sense - as his weight had ballooned during his foot injury and never returned to normal.

Either way, his supposedly temporary switch to the flank was so much to his distaste that after a few games he hatched a plan to force Wilkinson to move him back to the centre: "I decided that I was going to be p***-poor against Liverpool."

The result? A 5-0 thrashing by the Reds in which Brolin was the worst of a bad bunch on the park that day. If anything, however, Brolin's subterfuge was too successful: he started only one more match for Leeds before being consigned to the bench. And he claims that fans have unfairly labelled him as a flop ever since then.

"Everyone thinks I was rubbish all the time at Leeds but there you can question the journalists," he grumbled.

"Against West Ham I scored both goals and was voted man of the match. The fans were singing my name. The papers wrote that I was a success.

"After the Liverpool game the Swedish papers wrote that I was rubbish. And they were right. But nobody – nobody – asked me why. How the hell can you go from being a success to being a disaster in one week? And as I wasn't picked any more, everyone just assumed I was rubbish."

Brolin is clearly still furious about his treatment by Wilkinson, claiming that he was given the runaround: "I am a person who will not take any s***. If someone is lying to me, straight to my face, time and time again, then I lose respect [for them]."

His relationship with Leeds was so bad that he was loaned out to Swiss side FC Zurich and then former club Parma, only returning when George Graham took over and doing so disappointed not to have secured a permanent move during the second of those loan spells.

But things went from bad to worse with Graham, dismissed as "an even bigger idiot" than Wilkinson. The Scottish manager was furious when Brolin failed to turn up for pre-season training (he missed his plane as a bird flew into his windscreen), and when he finally arrived at Elland Road Graham locked the player's passport in his safe. Brolin managed to get a temporary passport to head back to Sweden for a weekend in any case, and when Graham found out he refused to let his man into the squad photo, denied him training kit, and even withheld the credentials he needed to get into the stadium: even though the midfielder was still a Leeds player, he had to pay to get in.

Graham made several public statements denouncing Brolin ("I want players who want to sweat"), as had Wilkinson in the past, with both bosses fining him several times for misdemeanours such as failing to turn up to training and skipping a match to go to his father's birthday party. These incidents helped bury the Swede's reputation still further.

"In hindsight I have thought that it was actually bullying. It was lucky that I decided just to smile about the whole thing from the beginning, otherwise I would have gone under as a person," he explained, adding that it was only when he threatened to expose the behaviour of Wilkinson and Graham in a BBC documentary that the club backed down.

"I think they got nervous. I went to a meeting and demanded back all the money they had fined me and a bit extra to keep quiet," he said. "I also demanded a written document which stated that I hadn't misbehaved, that it was them who had treated me badly. I got that. Finally, I was as free as a bird."

Brolin was given a pay-off and shown the door, though within a few weeks he was back in Premier League action with Crystal Palace. That spell was, if anything, even less distinguished than his time at Leeds. A few months after the end of the 1997-98 season he announced his retirement from the game, with his final appearance coming as a replacement goalkeeper in a Swedish third-tier match for his hometown club Hudiksvalls.

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