What an absolute wrong'un.
Total nutcase these days. Claims images from Ukraine are falsified, amongst other things.
Though you could argue the worst thing in this article is his drink of choice.
www.thetimes.co.uk
Total nutcase these days. Claims images from Ukraine are falsified, amongst other things.
Though you could argue the worst thing in this article is his drink of choice.
Matt Le Tissier: Government and scientists were interfering in my life
As Matt Le Tissier hosts a live chat on social media, questions veer from his predictions for the Europa League to whether the World Health Organisation is inf
www.thetimes.co.uk
As Matt Le Tissier hosts a live chat on social media, questions veer from his predictions for the Europa League to whether the World Health Organisation are infringing on civil liberties. One minute he is talking about his favourite goal; the next about what to believe from the front line in Ukraine.
Quite how this former England footballer came to be a highly contentious oracle on world events, strangers asking his views about lockdowns and health policy, seems a question worth asking — especially given those wider opinions have caused Le Tissier to resign as an ambassador from Southampton, the club where he has long been adored.
Far from making him take a step back, that controversy after retweeting a post which cast doubt over the validity of a massacre in Bucha — he subsequently deleted it — has left him unbowed. He is more determined than ever to carry on sharing his thoughts, including an hour over Zoom when we disagree about almost everything.
Le Tissier, 53, says that he does not care what I think, or if he has two followers on Twitter or almost 600,000 as he speaks with evangelical scepticism against masks, lockdowns, mainstream media, the government, Sage scientists, pharmaceutical companies and much more besides. He has talked of a need to “tear down the system”, and he is not about to stop.
“If that means I come in for a bit of criticism and I get labelled by you guys in the media who try to paint me out as some sort of nutter then that’s a price I am willing to pay,” he says.
Did we misread him for those years when he seemed more than happy to let his talents do the talking? Was this maverick footballer also a secret campaigner? Did he ever discuss social issues in the dressing room?
“No, never,” he says. “All I did was play my football, have a laugh, spend time with my family.” He cannot remember ever voting in a general election.
There was, though, an independent streak in Le Tissier to be turning down lucrative offers, including one from Glenn Hoddle’s Chelsea. If he was more of a conformist, he might have won a trophy and more than eight caps between 1994 and 1997.
Le Tissier says that he has never minded being a man alone. In one moment of lightness, he talks of being the only Southampton player who did not drink beer. He could not stand the stuff.
“I drink Malibu, something that came in for a lot of criticism in a dressing room full of butch, macho footballers,” he says. “‘Fourteen pints of lager and a Malibu and coke please’. You have to be quite a strong character.”
Le Tissier speaks with pride of “not following the crowd” and he has certainly lived true to that code in the time of Covid. In August 2020, he lost his job as a presenter on Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday though he believes that was more to do with it being “a show with five middle-aged white blokes on it” than his increasingly trenchant views around the pandemic.
“A couple of years ago I felt like something wasn’t right. People were interfering in my life who shouldn’t have been — mainly the Government and scientists. I felt a real sense of injustice and when I feel a sense of injustice I can’t keep my mouth shut. I have to speak up.”
Some will agree with him that the scale of lockdowns was unnecessary; and some followed him in declining any Covid-19 jabs.
But Le Tissier goes much further. For example, when I put to him that we were all responding at the start of the pandemic to images from Bergamo of hospitals overwhelmed by gasping, dying patients, he replies: “Some of those were actors, by the way.” Really?
According to him, ventilators caused harm to patients; PCR tests were entirely responsible for elevating a flu bug into a pandemic; masks a sign not of precaution but of weak compliance. “If you think otherwise, you haven’t really done your research without wishing to sound rude,” he says. He claims to have read many scientific papers, including those which were “suppressed”.
“PCR tests were the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind,” Le Tissier adds. And he is only just getting started.
We end up having a squabble about whether promoting Covid vaccinations should trouble my conscience, and I ask if he is aligned with Novak Djokovic, which is not a comparison he welcomes at all. He says that he wants to “put to bed once and for all” the idea that he is anti-vax. He has been vaccinated all his life but resisted Covid jabs because of a lack of long-term data.
“One thing I object to is that it is always painted as a black and white thing — pro vax or anti vax,” he says, believing that too many of the rest of us have succumbed to fear and brainwashing in a world in which contrary voices have been censored.
Perhaps he is right about the need for more plurality of voices but, then, what about his own ability to see all sides rather than to grasp at anything to reinforce a particular narrative?
Even that retweet about Ukraine, which I suggest could seem highly offensive given the evidence mounting against Russian forces, he regrets only in not explaining a wider context. “The point of the tweet was to say ‘don’t believe everything you read in times of war because both sides use propaganda.’ ”
But surely he is not disputing that Russians have killed many innocent Ukraine civilians in a brutal invasion? He responds by saying that it is strange, given modern technology, that there is not more footage of fighting.
I suggest that we have seen enough images of destroyed villages, towns, even cities like Mariupol? “Some of those images have been falsified, you know that don’t you?”
When I say this is the stuff of far-flung conspiracy theorists, there is a flash of frustration. “If you want to discredit somebody, you just have to say ‘ah, it’s a conspiracy theory’ then you don’t have to actually argue anything. It’s absolute dogshit.”
Le Tissier says that most people he engages with shake him by the hand and thank him for speaking up for the voiceless. Within football, he insists that there are many who show him support privately but do not want the criticism.
“When things blow up like a couple of weeks ago, I get a lot of support,” he says. “It would be nice if they were public but I understand that. Not everyone has the same mentality as me that can cope with the flak.
“I had it most of my career from you sports journalists who would constantly take pot shots at me for not working hard enough, so it’s water off a duck’s back. If you have had 50,000 people at Old Trafford call you a fat bastard and questioning the size of your nose it really doesn’t affect you too much.”
That said, he does have a bite back at Gary Lineker, whom he accuses of illiberalism. “I find it funny that he goes out of his way to criticise me for having an opinion that’s different to his. I have followed Gary on social media for many years and a lot of the stuff I completely disagree with but I have never attacked him for it. But the other way round . . .
“He is meant to be the nice bloke, the woke Gary Lineker, nice and inclusive but he is the one going out of his way trying to dig me out.”
Le Tissier insists that he will not back down. He was on a march in January outside the offices of the BBC against mandatory vaccinations for NHS workers and may attend other rallies.
I tell him it must be exhausting to be scouring the internet so convinced he is being lied to all the time. And what about losing that job at Southampton, for whom he scored 209 goals in 540 appearances? That must have pained him?
“To be honest, it’s no great hardship,” he says. “It wasn’t a great financial thing for me, something that was more of a title, a way of being linked to the club. I am still welcome to go down there.
“So nothing really changes except Southampton don’t get the cancel-culture people ringing in saying ‘you need to sack Matt Le Tissier, his views are harmful to the people’.”
