Lloris: How I realised Tottenham will always be Spursy

Suraj Radia

• Updated: 7 Nov 2024 20:59 GMT
• 3 min read

Former Tottenham captain Hugo Lloris has revealed the moment he questioned whether the club ‘really want to win’ after being shocked by a gesture from chairman Daniel Levy.

Lloris never won a trophy during his 12 years at Tottenham, with the club often plagued by the tag of being ‘Spursy’ and failing to show the pedigree required for silverware.

Tottenham’s faced off against Liverpool in the 2019 Champions League final and Lloris has revealed that Levy bought watches for the entire squad prior to the match, which Spurs went on to lose after conceding an early penalty.

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The watches were engraved with ‘Champions League finalist’ onto them, prompting horror from Lloris who wrote in his autobiography that it was clear Levy ‘was not sensitive’ to certain aspects of the game.

“Who does such a thing at a moment like this? I still haven’t got over it, and I’m not alone. If we’d won, he wouldn’t have asked for the watches back to have “Winner” engraved instead,” Lloris’ wrote in his book via The Guardian.

“As magnificent as the watch is, I have never worn it. I would have preferred there to be nothing on it. With an engraving like that, Levy couldn’t have been surprised if we had been 1–0 down after a couple of minutes: so it was written.”

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Lloris has admitted that ‘everything was hard after that’, with manager Mauricio Pochettino losing his job shortly after and Harry Kane also considering his future at the club.

Lloris said: “I had the impression that some people from the club and certain players were not sufficiently despondent at having lost. I would have liked people to come up to me and say, “Don’t worry, Hugo. Never again. We’ll give you the means for a comeback.”

“But when I returned to my room on the night of the final, I think I had the same feeling as Mauricio and Harry: does the club really want to win? Real Madrid would never have celebrated a lost final, and we shouldn’t have either.

“Everything was hard after that, for Mauricio and for us.”