Former Tottenham captain Hugo Lloris has hit out at the club’s chairman, Daniel Levy, in a new autobiography from the Frenchman.
The goalkeeper made 447 appearances for Spurs in a 12-year stint at the club, although he never managed to lift any silverware.
Tottenham came close in the 2019 Champions League final when they were beaten 2-0 by Liverpool in Madrid and Lloris says the squad was annoyed by something their chairman did before the match.
Levy organised some fancy watches for his players ahead of the game, but Lloris and some of his teammates resented the fact ‘Finalist’ was engraved on them.
‘Four days before the final, Daniel Levy called us all together to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club,’ the ‘keeper wrote in Hugo Lloris: Earning my Spurs.
‘At first, we were excited to see the elegant boxes. Then we opened them and discovered that he’d had the back of each timepiece engraved with the player’s name and “Champions League Finalist 2019″. “Finalist.”
‘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.
‘I have considerable respect and esteem for the man and all he has done for the club as chairman – I got to know him – but there are things he is simply not sensitive to.
‘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’.
Lloris picked out another problem that Levy caused, which was letting in cameras and microphones for Amazon’s All Or Nothing documentary.
The Frenchman says no one was happy about the unconvenience and invasion of privacy behind the scenes.
‘Tensions that would only grow following a decision by the club which would affect the team’s day-to-day lives; a decision made without the consent of either the squad or the manager: to install cameras everywhere for Amazon’s series about Spurs,’ he wrote.
‘In light of the sum mentioned – around ten million pounds – we wondered whether those whose season and activities would be affected, all those being asked to mic-up each day, would get a cut. The answer wasn’t slow in coming: no.
‘So when the film crew placed little microphones on some of the canteen tables, we went and sat at other ones. We had to be careful all the time. The only place where we could speak freely was the training dressing room – we’d got them to agree that it would remain out of bounds.
‘Otherwise, they had mics and cameras everywhere – even at some practice sessions, which was no small matter: it was a constraint and it had consequences.’
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