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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Sport
Richard Parry

Tottenham ‘closest’ Matt Le Tissier came to leaving Southampton as Saints legend admits he ‘supported Spurs as kid’

Southampton legend Matt Le Tissier has said that his proposed move to Tottenham in 1990 was the closest he came to leaving the south coast.

Le Tissier, now a pundit for Sky Sports, is one of English football’s most famous one-club-men, having played for the Saints from 1986 to 2002, making over 440 appearances for the club.

Sky are currently running through a list of the 50 best players to have never won the Premier League, with Le Tissier ranking tenth in their list.

He had offers to leave Southampton though, and when asked what was the most tempting he had to leave the Saints, Le Tissier cited Tottenham.

"That would have been from Spurs in 1990. I was a Spurs fan as a kid – and that was the one that tempted me the most," he told Sky Sports.

"They were the only other club I personally spoke to in my whole career so that would have been the closest [I came to leaving Southampton]."

"Spurs got to the FA Cup final the year after I turned them down."

" [There was] Liverpool a couple of years after that, and Chelsea a few years after that were the other two that showed a decent amount of interest, but I didn’t actually ever speak to them personally. "

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