For Southampton fans, Matt Le Tissier is the embodiment of ‘don’t meet your heroes’

Every rational football fan knows, deep down, that the reality of The Beautiful Game for most people is disappointment and mediocrity.

You only have to look back at the last few summers to see it. The Euros in 2020 and the World Cup in 2018 gave England fans a taste of glory, only to pull it away at the last second and replace it with the bitter aftertaste of heartbreak, disgraceful crowd trouble and shocking online racism, sobering us all up very quickly.

At club level the feeling is even more deeply rooted. While it’s true that you can never experience the sport’s highs without the lows, the fact is, unless your club team is funded by questionable billionaires or investment funds for states with appalling records on human rights, you’re not going to come out on top most of the time.

There is still plenty to love; late winners against fellow relegation strugglers, away days so enjoyable you don’t care about the result so much. But the reality is your team probably isn’t going to win the league, your best players will probably get pinched by bigger sides if they’re any good, and the thrills and spills of title challenges and cup successes are most likely reserved for other people, in other stadiums, in other parts of the world.

It’s something most of us come to terms with relatively early on in our life as supporters. But Southampton, my club, did have someone who dragged us out of the mire for a long time, and lit up my earliest experiences in the stands: Matt Le Tissier.

He was a true genius on the pitch, rescuing poor Southampton teams from relegation time after time in the 90s and scoring the kind of goals that would be replayed countless times in the decades that followed. He inspired endless loyalty and devotion in all who followed Southampton by staying there his entire career, despite it almost certainly hindering his chances in the national squad.

Le Tissier even influenced Spanish legends like Xavi to entertain people and bring out the most beautiful elements of the sport on the pitch, with the current Barcelona manager saying he was “obsessed” with watching the Saints legend as a lad.

Over recent years, though, the man synonymous with the Southampton number seven shirt has changed his image from well-liked, everyman football pundit to outspoken conspiracist in a series of increasingly harder-to-condone Twitter posts. He was already one of the most controversial figures on social media in the football world, questioning the Covid-19 vaccine and government restrictions during the global pandemic. But this week, Le Tissier has found himself the subject of the biggest backlash yet, after sharing a tweet suggesting “the media” was lying about the massacre of Bucha in Ukraine, along with the caption “This” and an emoji pointing to the bizarre claims.

As anyone following the news this week will be aware, hundreds of bodies have been discovered in mass graves and others left rotting in bags since Vladimir Putin’s troops withdrew from the area. Kremlin-backed media have denounced them as an elaborate hoax – a narrative that journalists on the ground have proven to be utterly false – with Russia denouncing news as fake, as a tactic throughout the conflict.

Le Tissier later deleted his tweet and responded by saying he “didn’t advocate war in any way shape or form”, but the damage was done. The official ambassadorial tie between Southampton Football Club and Le Tissier was cut today, with the former player stepping down from his role and addressing the developments – fittingly – in a Twitter post.

“To all the fans of sfc,” he wrote. “I have decided to step aside from my role as an ambassador of SFC. My views are my own and always have been, and it’s important to take this step today to avoid any confusion. This does not affect my relationship with and love for my club, and I will always remain a fan and supporter of everything Saints.

“I can, however, see that due to recent events it’s important to separate the work I believe in from my relationship with the club I have supported and played for most of my life. I will see you all at St Mary’s and will always do anything I can to help the club.”

The “work he believes in”, presumably, relates to his controversial posts over recent years – some of which are utterly indefensible.

In one retweet in September 2020, he compared the murder of Anne Frank with wearing face masks, for which he later apologised. In another, he suggested Christian Eriksen’s on-field collapse at Euro 2020 could be related to the Covid vaccine (it later emerged Eriksen didn’t have the vaccine).

For many people, including myself, he’s gone far enough over recent times to forever taint his exploits on the pitch, as miraculous as they were. And for a one club man like Le Tissier who held such a god-like status at Southampton, it’s devastating.

Southampton fans – like all fans – have their team ingrained in them, with their fortunes indelibly tied to their own lives. Our entire dispositions and moods are inevitably, and involuntarily, determined by their results, and given that Le Tissier is, or at least was, the very fabric of what the club stands for, it’s impossible to disassociate ourselves from it.

I met him once when I was 10 and had a very brief encounter with him outside St Mary’s, where he signed an autograph for me. But over more recent years he’s become an embodiment of “don’t meet your heroes”, or, at least, don’t follow them on Twitter.

It’s not just football, of course, and this is far from an isolated example. Many people will have their own versions of this story. Perhaps it’s the authors of beloved children’s books, the creators of hit 90s sitcoms, or singers in iconic indie bands. Whoever it is, the disappointment they can cause in us all can be really damaging.

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It’s a cold feeling, having your heroes let you down. And while it might seem bizarre given that many of us never even meet them in the flesh, we put our faith in them so resolutely that it can call into question everything we thought we knew. They can come to define certain elements of our lives; our memories are steeped in their image, with entire seasons – even years – seen through the lens of their achievements.

When it comes to Le Tissier, the first reaction people have to hearing his name now won’t be recalling his spectacular, era-defining goals. It won’t be of the great entertainer on the pitch who brought pure, unadulterated joy to people like me, and made their lives that little bit more exciting. Instead, it will be the reaction to his latest controversial tweet and his “important work”.

Football, for most of us, might not offer us the answers and the experiences we hoped it would. But in reality, most fans would take the routine disappointment and mediocrity of the game any day, rather than putting our faith in the few exceptional individuals who give us a tantalising glimpse of genius, only for them to let us down in the end.