da bet sport： Twenty years ago today, Southampton were tricked into signing Ali Dia after he claimed to be the cousin of African superstar George Weah. Incredibly, he actually made a Premier League appearance.
da fezbet： Handed a one-month deal and coming off the bench to play against Leeds, Ali Dia lasted just 53 woeful minutes on the pitch before being hauled off and the con was later revealed, with the situation not being as it seemed.
Graeme Souness’ punt on an unknown prodigy looked to be a poor signing immediately, as Matt Le Tissier explained to The Daily Mail.
‘This guy turned up on the recommendation of George Weah. George Weah’s cousin and George had said this guy is pretty good, give him a try. Graeme Souness was manager at the time. He (Dia) came down on the Friday morning, trained with us and played in the five-a-side and to be honest, didn’t look very good.’
‘We thought that’s fair enough, trialists come and go and I just thought this was going to be the same thing. This guy, we’ll never see him again, he’s not particularly good. But he turned up for the game the next day. We were playing against Leeds.’
Picking up an injury after 33 minutes, Le Tissier was subbed off and one came Dia- and this is where the story starts to get really, really odd, as the striker soon vanished into the wind a few days later.
‘He ran around the pitch like Bambi on ice. It was very, very embarrassing to watch. Souness actually had to take him off again because he was actually that bad.’
‘I have no idea if he was George Weah’s cousin or not. I don’t think he was. He was just chuffed to get out on the pitch and play. I think it was a great wind up from someone who came up with this idea.’
‘He turned up the next morning for treatment on an injury, the physio was telling me. So Sunday morning he turns up, has a bit of treatment, he leaves and then we never see him again. He never came back. He just left. Nobody knows where he went. Never to be seen again.’
‘It was very odd. Not quite sure how a man of Graeme’s experience fell for that.’
Just two weeks after signing ‘George Weah’s cousin’, Dia was released from his deal and the full details of the situation then emerged; he’d never played for Senegal, he’d never been on the books of Paris Saint-Germain and he certainly wasn’t the cousin of the 1995 World Player of the Year.
Incredibly, Dia had tricked the same trick on a number of Football League sides with no success before Souness’ Southampton, desperate to fight to avoid relegation from the Premier League, fell for the greatest con football has ever seen.