Few things recently have given me as much pleasure as writing about this — the brilliantly dumb and partially successful sporting hoax perpetrated by Ali Dia. It’s one of my favourite sports stories of all time, and I’m only half jesting when I suggest that the Coen brothers might find inspiration in it. It’s a yarn for the ages.
The plot was simple, its brashness profound and the result exquisite. What follows is the ideal sporting hoax – the ultimate, real-life fulfilment of pub banter. It’s the story of Ali Dia, a fake athlete with a genuine Hall of Fame story.
The folklore of his great ruse has been relished by fans for decades, as it’s been embroidered here and simplified there by journalists. But the story requires neither embroidery or neatening – in fact, it’s made more interesting by recording the perfectly interlocking flukes that helped birth it.
So, ladies and gentlemen, please gather ‘round the campfire for the Ballad of Ali Dia.
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It’s November 1996, and the Southampton Football Club are jinxed by injuries and struggling mid-season in the English Premier League. At club headquarters, a curious phone call is received. It’s George Weah – the AC Milan striker and current World Player of the Year – and he wants to commend to the club his dear and talented cousin, Ali Dia.
Ali Dia? No-one’s heard of him. And yet here was the world’s best player testifying to his brilliance and the depth of his résumé: Bologna, Paris Saint-Germain, the Senegalese national side.
Several other clubs, it turns out, have received the same call. Clubs from all over the country and in leagues both high and low on the great totem pole of English football. Harry Redknapp was one, then managing Premier League club West Ham United, and he humoured the caller before hanging up and dismissing it as a prank.
Tony Pulis received a call too. He was more credulous, and I suppose had reason to be so: he was then managing Gillingham FC in the lower reaches of the Football League. “I was shocked to receive a call from someone claiming to be George Weah recommending a friend of his,” he’d later recall to The Guardian. “I wouldn’t have thought a man like Weah would have heard of Gillingham, but we gave the lad a trial and he was rubbish.”
Before the call was made to Southampton, the great and mysterious Ali Dia did finally find a game for an English club. Only one brief appearance, though, and for Blyth Spartans AFC – an amateur club comprised of postmen and bakers. In an “exclusive” story that ran beneath the headline “African ace joins Blyth”, the local Northumberland ‘paper announced the exciting signing: “Boss Peter Harrison revealed today that Senegal striker Ali Dia is in the squad for tomorrow’s UniBond League Premier Division match against Boston at Croft Park.”
Ali Dia did not distinguish himself at Croft Park, at least in the few minutes he played as a substitute, and presumably the non-League side and its few dozen fans didn’t impress themselves upon a man who’d developed an appetite for glory but whose eyes were much larger than his stomach.
After the match, Ali Dia disappeared.
So you can imagine Peter Harrison’s surprise when he tuned into BBC’s Match of the Day a few months later and watched his vanished signing suddenly appear in the English Premier League.
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In 1996, Southampton signed Graeme Souness as its manager. As a player, Souness was a narcissistic thug with a feathery touch. A Scotsman who captained Liverpool when they were the best team in Europe, and who remained indifferent to the contempt his violence inspired in the hearts of opposing fans. Souness lofted trophies just as well as he broke legs and jaws, but perhaps most incendiary to opposing fans was his arrogance – Souness had the air of one of Sergio Leone’s grime-streaked villains.
He was not a man to be messed with, in other words, and an unlikely victim of the weird games of the untalented Mr. Dia. “He’s played with George Weah at Paris Saint-Germain, and last year he was playing in the second division in Germany,” Souness told the press. “We’ve said, come down and train with us for a week or so and see what’s what… When someone like that gives you a recommendation you tend to sit up and take notice.”
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Southampton and Souness had accepted the commendation of Ali Dia – it had come, after all, from the world’s best footballer. But while the veracity of his fabricated resume was harder to check without a sophisticated internet, there were still telephones.
In Victorian novels, I’m always struck by the isolation of its characters, and the relative cost and difficulty of mobility – not only of humans, but of ideas and news. But the phone call from George Weah happened in 1996, not 1896, and Southampton’s desperation or curiosity was such that it offered Ali Dia a trial contract.
But, still: much as I’m loathe to qualify folklore, dear reader, the signing of Ali Dia wasn’t the scandalously weird gamble it might appear to be. He was signed on a one-month trial for just two thousand pounds and invited to come down and train with the club.
And so he did. Graeme Souness introduced him to the team as George Weah’s cousin, and the players were soon baffled. Even though that first training session was light, it was immediately obvious that he was awful. In fact, he was worse than awful: he just couldn’t play. “In those days, there was a trialist at the club more or less every week,” Egil Østenstad, then a Southampton striker, later remembered to The Athletic. “Scouting and researching players was different in those days.”
They sure were.
There was one other training session, before the weekend’s league match. Naturally, Dia couldn’t help but betray his bizarre inability. “He was very, very poor,” Østenstad said. “It wasn’t just because he had a bad day either.”
And here’s where things get very funny. Ali Dia was slated to play for the reserves team that week, before the first team’s game that weekend, but the match was abandoned for a waterlogged pitch. The surest test of Dia’s fraudulence would have occurred then, in a proper match, but a fortuitous fluke prevented it. Adding to the ambiguity was that the training sessions, so close to the weekend’s league match, were deliberately light – some wondered if they were sufficient test of this new bloke’s talents.
What I’ve never read, though, but still wonder about, is how much Souness’s reputation as an intimidating prick prevented his players from declaring their scepticism to him directly. Did most players have resting on the tips of their tongues some formulation of “Mr. Souness, sir, this George Weah cousin is seriously crap”?
As it is, the credulity of the famous hard man Graeme Souness has become part of the folklore, but the man himself has persuasively argued against it: four years ago, to Sky Sports, Souness told the story again. He said that within five minutes of watching him train, it was obvious Dia was rubbish and that he would not be signed to a permanent contract.
But then his bloody players kept getting injured, and Southampton were now struggling to field a side. And this, for me, is where it gets supremely funny: the convergence of several threads which results in a farce the Coen brothers would admire.
Their elevator pitch of this movie would go like this: One bizarre individual crudely insinuates himself into a Premier League club, and his teammates are quietly baffled. Having now found himself inside the club, our grifter is protected from definitive exposure by the chance abandonment of the reserves game. Now, finally, the club becomes dependent upon him because of their dramatic series of injuries. And all of this happens inside a fortnight.
And so, for the November 23 match at home to Leeds United, Graeme Souness names Ali Dia in the squad. It’s still unlikely he’ll actually play – he’s only named as a substitute and one that’s dearly hoped won’t be needed.
But then the worst happens: Southampton’s best player limps off injured with a thigh strain. Ali Dia, charlatan and fabulist, is not only about to enter a Premier League match but will do so by replacing one of its icons: Matt Le Tissier.
By 1996, Le Tissier had established a reputation as a man of sublime talent but fickle commitment. Le Tissier often ambled around the field like a shepherd strolling his moors, but his first touch was astonishing, and he had a gift for producing the most impossible goals. He was also genius with a free kick, converted 47 of his 48 penalties, and once chipped Peter Schmeichel from outside the box. He also never left Southampton – his loyalty magnifying his particular genius in the hearts of fans who had by now named him “Le God”.
And it was this man, in the 32nd minute, that Ali Dia replaced.
As he ran onto the pitch, Dia surely dreamed of redemption – that the sum of his lies and hustle and delirious ambition could all be melted down here and re-minted in the heat of one moment of brilliance. And then, afterwards, the reality of his con could emerge – he might even laughingly confess it with teammates over beers – and it wouldn’t matter because he had finally proven his talent, and all the weird duplicity that went before it would be forgiven and understood.
But no. Ali Dia was awful. Souness would later remember him as having a talent for always being where the ball had just been. “Like Bambi skating on ice,” remembered Le Tissier. “I just couldn’t believe he was playing there,” Østenstad said.
Southampton lost 2-0, and then Ali Dia – just as he had from his Sunday league club months before – vanished. And so, nearly 30 years later, he remains.
It was a memorable scam, and gorgeous in its way, but its design wasn’t like a Swiss watch. What’s delectable is its lack of sophistication, and how well the madness of Dia’s delusions accidentally complemented, if only briefly, the needs of Southampton Football Club and the direction of the wind.