Paul Lambert has revealed he had the best clubs in Europe chasing him in the wake of his stunning display for Dortmund in the 1997 Champions League Final.
But a combination of a family illness and the persistence of Celtic boss Wim Jansen resulted in the Scot returning home within a year of that triumph in Munich. Speaking to the Off the Record podcast, Lambert said: “After the Champions League Final, I had the option to go anywhere in Europe. I had teams phoning: ‘come here, come here’. It was incredible.
“My answer was always ‘no, this club has given me what I have today and I’m really happy here’. Then there came a point when my son wasn’t keeping too good. He had a thing called febrile convulsions, which can affect kids when their temperatures can become so high that they have convulsions. It was happening more and more frequently. Celtic came in. They’d asked me a few times at the beginning and I’d said no to them as well.
