Ryan Christie believes signing for Bournemouth last summer was "meant to be" after the former Celtic star admitted he turned down the Cherries while at Inverness. Christie left his hometown club in 2015 to enjoy a six-year spell at Parkhead before completing a £2.5million deadline day move to England.
It was the dream start to life at his new club as Christie helped Scott Parker's side complete promotion to the Premier League. However the transfer was a long time coming after the Scotland international was invited to check out the facilities at Dean Court back when he was just a teenager.
Now aged 27, Christie has endured a successful loan stint at Aberdeen where he was nominated for a FIFA Puskas award by the Brazilian press before tasting Premiership title success and European football at Celtic. He has also become a key cog in Steve Clarke's Scotland side and netted against Serbia to help his country qualify for Euro 2020 - giving a famous emotional interview after that playoff win.
Reflecting on his career path so far, he told the Bournemouth Daily Echo : "I was very young, just kind of starting out with Inverness. I think I had made a handful of appearances for the first team. I wasn’t really told that much about it.
"I was still pretty young and just concentrating on my football. My dad kind of said they had put an offer in to Inverness and I was invited down to see the training ground and setup and everything.
“But at that point, I had barely started playing for Inverness. It was my boyhood club and I just wanted to make a mark with Inverness basically, before I looked elsewhere.
"I said no at the time and stayed to play some first-team football, get my feet into football properly. Even from little things like that, you just feel you have a bit of an affiliation with a club moving forward and over seven or eight years down the line – here we are.
"It was nice when I signed and a few people from up top brought that up and said ‘seven years later but we finally got it over the line’. So, it’s nice, it kind of makes it feel like it was meant to be a little bit."
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