If English players have long shunned the French championship, several subjects of His Majesty have recently arrived in Ligue 1 in recent years, like Angel Gomes, CJ Egan-Riley or Mason Greewood at Olympique de Marseille, Tyler Morton or Ainsley Maitland-Niles at Olympique Lyonnais or Eric Dier at AS Monaco.
Before the former Spurs player, you had to go back almost forty years to find any trace of English players on the Rock. In the summer of 1987, two players from Three Lions
signed with the Principality club: Mark Hateley, arriving from AC Milan, and Glenn Hoddle, also arriving from Tottenham.
The confrontation in the Champions League between ASM and the London club was also an opportunity for Arsène Wenger, at the origin of his signing on the Rock, to say all the good things he thought of the former playmaker. “I had watched a lot of Glenn's matches on K7 videos and each time I said to myself: 'Damn, his passes are beautiful…'”, he explained in particular in a long article in
The Team.
“They (the players) quickly understood that they were dealing with an exceptional player, with his vision of the game and his quality of passing with both feet… Glenn is in the top 10 of the players I have managed and I was lucky enough to come across some good ones,”
he continued, remembering an anecdote about Georges Weah, who arrived in Monaco a year later: “When Glenn was injured, the first thing George asked me was, 'So when is Glenn coming back?' » »
Arsène Wenger's big regret
While Monaco is crowned champion of France, Glenn Hoddle is named best foreign player playing in D1 by France Football. The following season, if Monaco had to settle for third place in the league, it would score no less than 20 goals in all competitions. Alas, the beautiful story is coming to an end. The fault was a serious knee injury which plagued the end of his career and pushed him to leave Monaco after three years at ASM to become a player coach at Swindon, in the English D2.
“The months before his departure were hard to live with, we felt completely helpless in the face of his injury. We realized that we were losing a fantastic player,” Arsène Wenger remembered again. And his former teammates were not left out, Luc Sonor seeing in him
“the best teammate” with whom he played and Marcel Dib calling him “Picasso, a guy capable of winning a match with a stroke of genius. »
