Hugo Lloris has revealed that the gift of a watch engraved with the words “Champions League finalist” from Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy made him question if the club “really want to win”.
Lloris spent 12 years in north London, including a long stint as club captain, but failed to help Spurs to a trophy during his tenure.
His time at Tottenham included two League Cup final defeats and a 2-0 loss to Liverpool in the 2019 Champions League decider, with Lloris beaten from the penalty spot early on after a controversial Moussa Sissoko handball.
But the Frenchman had been left unsettled ahead of kick-off by a presentation from Levy to the playing squad simply celebrating the side for reaching the final.
And Lloris feels it perhaps betrayed a problem with the club’s mentality that their long-serving chairman appeared happy with second best.
“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,” Lloris recalls in his forthcoming autobiography Earning My Spurs, as serialised by The Guardian. “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.
“At the post-match reception at the hotel, 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 [Pochettino] and Harry {Kane]: does the club really want to win? Real Madrid would never have celebrated a lost final, and we shouldn’t have either.”
Lloris made his final appearance for Spurs in April 2023, joining Los Angeles FC. The goalkeeper is France’s most capped male footballer.
