For some, Eric Dier represents everything good about Tottenham Hotspur over the past decade. He joined the club as a youngster, got better and better under Mauricio Pochettino, and became a hungry, versatile, intelligent player who helped Spurs to their best league finish in 54 years and a Champions League final.
For others, he is a symbol of the team’s decline since those great heights. Someone who should have been jettisoned sooner and who remained a regular starter despite not being good enough — just like the team overall.
As someone who has only ever been described as a model professional, Dier has become an oddly polarising figure over the past few years.
Perhaps now that he is leaving — joining Bayern Munich on loan initially but with an option to sign him permanently at the end of the season — there might be a wider appreciation for what Dier achieved in his near-decade at the club.
Dier is someone who the more you learn about and get to know, the more you respect them. Especially for the way he understatedly upended lazy, patronising stereotypes about footballers. There is an element of relatability there — someone who seems very grounded, someone who has been pictured travelling on the London Underground and taking an EasyJet budget flight.
Many of those in the second camp mentioned above will feel tired of hearing about what a great guy Dier is and one theory is that this almost feeds into why some dislike him — a perception that he was kept on at Tottenham longer than he should have been because he’s regarded as such a good character.
Dele Alli and Dier became close friends during their time together at Spurs (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Personally, it seems unfathomable that in the cut-throat world of elite football, Dier was ever picked on anything other than merit. Even last season, when the criticism came frequently and vociferously from some fans, he still played well enough to be selected in England’s World Cup squad. Plus, as the way he quickly went from starter to outcast over the past few months demonstrates, football is a ruthless industry.
It’s worth saying as well that those qualities which earned him that reputation for being such an important figure in the dressing room are not to be scoffed at.
One memory that sticks out is being at a pre-season friendly against London neighbours Leyton Orient in July 2021 — Nuno Espirito Santo’s first game in charge — and Dier leaping to the defence of 18-year-old team-mate Kallum Cesay, who was pushed over and then squared up to by an opposition player. These things matter. They set the tone in the dressing room and are important in setting standards and creating the right kind of culture at a club (something that many feel at Spurs had been lost in the years preceding Ange Postecoglou’s arrival last summer).
Many other players felt similarly looked after by Dier during his near-decade at the club. Even in more recent times when he was on the periphery, Dier made a big effort with Micky van de Ven to help him settle in. It didn’t matter that fellow defender Van de Ven’s arrival would likely hasten his own departure.
It was the same with Destiny Udogie, who in an interview with The Athletic in November said that Dier, along with a few others, “helped me a lot from the first day. They explained to me how the club works, how you have to behave and play, and areas around north London. So that made it easier for me”.
Cristian Romero is among the players Dier helped settle at Spurs (Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)
Dier was similarly helpful in welcoming Pedro Porro when he joined the club last February, or going a bit further back Ryan Sessegnon, and Japhet Tanganga and Brandon Austin when they became part of the first-team setup.
The fact he speaks fluent Portuguese (Dier moved to Lisbon with his family aged seven and stayed until signing for Tottenham at 20) and Spanish and has such a range of interests — politics, board games, his own app-based business — always made him a central figure within the club. Whether that was playing the board game Catan with Jan Vertonghen or rating films and pizzas with Matt Doherty and Harry Kane, Dier made a big difference to how much his team-mates enjoyed life at Spurs. Dele Alli and Mousa Dembele were also among his many close friends at the club.
In fact, over the past few years when speaking to Spurs players, it’s become almost routine for them to single Dier out as being someone who helped them settle in after signing and/or that they’re good friends with.
“I’m very close with Eric Dier, we came at exactly the same time,” Ben Davies told The Athletic in November 2021.
A few months later, Cristian Romero said to us: “He was instrumental when I joined. We’ve always got on well on and off the field. The fact he speaks Spanish really helps with our on-pitch understanding as well. He was instrumental also in bringing me into the group.
“From the day I arrived, he was really good at introducing me to everyone and making me feel at home as well, so I was grateful for that. But first and foremost, what a great season he’s having — he brings a lot to the team, loads as a player.”
This is an important reminder from Romero — that for all Dier drew plaudits for his attitude and personality, he was also a very consistent performer on the pitch.
Signed primarily as a central defender from Sporting Lisbon for £4million in the summer of 2014, Dier made his debut away at West Ham that August. Spurs were reduced to 10 men when Kyle Naughton was sent off after less than half an hour but dug in and claimed an unlikely 1-0 victory when Dier charged forward, rounded goalkeeper Adrian and finished into an empty net.
The travelling fans went mad and Dier was an instant hit.
Dier celebrates his debut goal at West Ham with Harry Kane (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
In that first season, Dier often played as a right-back and was used a bit in central midfield. One standout performance came as a centre-back in the League Cup final against Chelsea when he was tasked with marking Diego Costa. Dier relished the challenge and did an excellent job in keeping the most-feared striker in the Premier League quiet, despite Spurs’ 2-0 defeat. It was a performance that Pochettino admired greatly and raved about in private. “Poch loved him,” as one former colleague, like others speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, puts it.
Pochettino loved him enough to ignore calls to sign a specialist defensive midfielder at the end of that first season together (2014-15) and instead tasked Dier with stepping into that role. Dier started 37 of Spurs’ 38 Premier League games the following year and excelled in his new position as Spurs became surprise title challengers but ended up finishing third. He was described by the UK’s Guardian newspaper in October 2015 as “an emblem of Pochettino’s tenure — ego-free, hungry and tactically flexible”.
Dier made his England debut the following month and was one of Roy Hodgson’s starting central midfielders at the 2016 European Championship, scoring a spectacular free kick in the first group game against Russia.
Two years later, Dier enjoyed another memorable moment for England, netting the decisive penalty against Colombia to secure progress into the World Cup quarter-finals. He thus became the first, and still only, Englishman to score a winning spot kick in a major tournament shootout.
By that point, Dier had enjoyed two more seasons as a key pillar of Pochettino’s team, who came second in 2016-17 with 86 points, then third with 77.
He started 34 league games in the former, mainly as a centre-back in a back three, and then 32, largely back in midfield. On many occasions, Dier would switch between the two roles mid-game, including in a 2-0 derby win against Arsenal in April 2017 that kept alive Tottenham’s title hopes and ensured a ninth straight league victory. “Eric Dier’s ability to play in both defence and midfield meant Spurs seamlessly switched between the systems (three and four at the back), nullifying Arsenal’s major attacking threat and putting themselves in control,” wrote Michael Cox, now of The Athletic.
A month earlier, Pochettino explained how he had “created a system that (Dier) felt comfortable in”.
Dier in action against Arsenal at White Hart Lane in 2017 (Galvin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
That summer, Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United pushed to sign Dier, but Tottenham wouldn’t sell.
He was seen as the ultimate team player, happy to slot in wherever was required, even if it meant he was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. Dier’s selflessness and leadership qualities led to Gareth Southgate considering him as a potential England captain when he was weighing up who to name as the permanent skipper at the end of 2017. Dier had already worn the armband twice under Southgate.
At that time, Sam Walker, the well-respected sports consultant, former Wall Street Journal sports editor and author of The Captain Class, a book about leadership that was devoured by both Southgate and his England rugby union side counterpart Eddie Jones, said: “There is this big focus now in England on Harry Kane, but I think there’s a perfect captain in that team. It’s Eric Dier. The more I look at his profile, the more I see it. He is totally selfless; will shift from midfield, centre-back and right-back at a moment’s notice. You can see his communication style is there when you see him on the pitch with Dele Alli or Harry Kane. He is not a screamer or speechmaker, but I think he can approach everyone.”
The idea that he could approach anyone certainly resonated with his Spurs colleagues at this time. Dier’s bromances with Dele, Vertonghen and Dembele were already well-established
The season after that 2018 World Cup was a difficult one, however.
There was the memorable moment in December 2018 when he scored at Arsenal and started a huge kerfuffle between the two teams by shushing the crowd, but later that month Dier had to have emergency surgery for appendicitis. He was out for more than a month and he later said it completely wiped him out for long periods afterwards. Dier only started five Premier League games between his late January return and the end of that season and none in the Champions League — though he did get on in the final (a 2-0 loss to Liverpool). Which, again, is not a bad thing to have on your CV.
It was also during this time that Dier tweeted his support for a second Brexit referendum, after then Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal was defeated in Parliament for a second time. No other player put his head above the parapet in this way.
— Eric Dier (@ericdier) March 14, 2019
But then, Dier has never been your “typical” footballer.
He studied for a social sciences degree via the Open University and as part of the course wrote an essay on the 2011 riots in the UK titled: ‘If the radical perspective on riots is poverty, unemployment and inequality, what is the conservative perspective?’.
In a 2019 interview with David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham and now also the UK’s shadow foreign secretary, he explained why he had tweeted about the Brexit referendum. “My little brother is very outspoken and he is always asking why I don’t tweet my opinions,” Dier said. “But it goes back to what you were saying earlier about knowing a little about a lot of things. I’m like that. So I wouldn’t want to speak out about things I don’t fully understand.”
In the same interview, for Amy Raphael’s book A Game Of Two Halves: Famous Football Fans Meet Their Heroes, Dier also quizzed Lammy about a wide range of topics including basic-income guarantees, marijuana laws and those 2011 London Riots. Dier added: “I think there’s a complete misconception between footballers as they really are and what people think of footballers. I’m very lucky at Tottenham because I’m surrounded by people who are very bright and curious about the world.”
Dier liked to do things differently. When he spoke to The Athletic for an interview in South Korea in 2022, he asked to meet at an art gallery he wanted to have a look around beforehand. At his north London home, a stylish chessboard on the table, a Mark Rothko print on the wall and a shelf full of coffee-table books spoke to his vibe of assured, cosmopolitan millennial man.
Dier has been less reluctant than other footballers to discuss non-football issues (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
“He’s the most down-to-earth, normal bloke,” says one colleague. “If someone who didn’t know who he was saw him out, they wouldn’t have a clue he was a footballer.”
But despite his varied interests, football has always been his absolute focus. And those difficult few months in and out of the team in 2019 gave Dier some clarity. He decided that he needed to nail down one position and told Pochettino the following summer that he wanted to play only as a centre-back. Soon after, he told Southgate the same.
Dier missed the start of that 2019-20 season after another operation, but he was back in time to start as a centre-back for the final two games of the Pochettino era in the November.
Pochettino’s plan was to partner Dier with Davinson Sanchez, but his replacement, Mourinho, initially saw Dier as a defensive midfielder. He spoke to the new manager and asked for the chance to play for him as a centre-back. Mourinho agreed but his message was essentially that Dier had to prove he was up to it.
Dier made a good start to life in the position in Mourinho’s injury-ravaged team during the months before the first Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020, but the narrative around him at this point was dominated by the extraordinary incident that March when Dier stormed into the stands at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to confront a fan who had clashed with his brother after a penalty shootout defeat to visitors Norwich City in the FA Cup.
He was given a four-game ban, but Mourinho stuck up for him. “I think Eric Dier did something that we professionals cannot do but in these circumstances, every one of us would do,” Mourinho said. “I am with the player and I understand the player.”
An FA Cup tie with Norwich ended with Dier wading into the crowd (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
This is that relatability element again — the general consensus was that Dier had made a mistake, but that most people would have done the same if they’d seen a family member in trouble.
Like Pochettino, Mourinho was a big admirer of Dier — both as a player and as a person. They conversed in Portuguese and when that season resumed in the June after the pandemic-enforced three-month break, Dier impressed as a centre-back, starting every post-lockdown game there either side of serving his belated suspension. He did enough to earn himself a new contract, which would run until the summer of 2024.
Some felt that playing as a defensive midfielder had helped him develop as a centre-back.
“Having the conversation with him many years back, I said that (experience of being deployed in) midfield would make him a better defender when he eventually does decide to make that move,” Ledley King, one of Spurs’ greatest ever centre-backs, who also played at times for them in midfield, said last year. “You see the game a lot easier.
“As someone who played midfield a fair bit, from centre-half you are facing the game and have a lot more time. Having played in midfield, it gives you a different feeling with players running from midfield. I felt, for myself, the game became a lot easier.”
It certainly looked like Dier had learned valuable lessons from his time in midfield at the start of the 2020-21 season.
He was excellent in the first half of that campaign and in the September, when Spurs had the highly unusual Covid-enforced schedule of two games in three days, Dier was the only player Mourinho started in both. However, he did have to leave the pitch during the second game at home against Chelsea because “nature was calling”. And really, is there anything more relatable than that?
Dier was named man of the match and singled out for praise by Mourinho before the defender posted a picture of the toilet in question with the caption “The real M.O.M”.
Dier recovered from that escapade to help Tottenham climb to the top of the table as he formed a solid centre-back partnership with Toby Alderweireld.
Maybe this, though, is what Spurs fans meant when they felt he wasn’t quite at the required level. Because ultimately, those two were too slow as a pair and the wheels eventually came off. Mourinho was sacked in the April of that season and Dier’s form dipped to the point Southgate, such a big fan of his, overlooked him for Euro 2020 selection (a tournament delayed because of the pandemic until the summer of 2021). Southgate was so acutely aware of Dier’s value to the dressing room that he wanted him in the squad, but he decided that ultimately his performances didn’t merit a place.
This was a major disappointment for Dier, but he rebounded impressively the following season — first under Nuno and then Antonio Conte (two more managers who valued him highly).
Playing as the middle centre-back in a three (as he had done under Pochettino and very occasionally for Mourinho), Dier excelled for Conte.
He ended that 2021-22 season having helped keep 16 clean sheets from his 35 Premier League matches, with no player from outside the Liverpool and Manchester City squads managing more. In the three matches he missed, Spurs conceded seven goals. With Dier marshalling the defence, Spurs conceded just five goals in their final 11 matches and two in their last six to surge to what had looked an unlikely top-four finish.
Dier said during the run-in that he had never had a season where he’d performed at such a consistently high level.
For a while, Dier appeared rejuvenated under Conte (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Dier performed well enough that he was in Southgate’s World Cup squad, earning high praise from Conte along the way, but overall, 2022-23 was a very difficult season. There were individual errors, like the one that let in Mohamed Salah against Liverpool in the October, and in general, Dier and Spurs suffered badly in a dismal campaign that saw them finish eighth.
There were still glimpses of the tactical intelligence Pochettino had eulogised, like in the 1-0 February win against Manchester City when he stepped out of defence to almost man-mark Bernardo Silva. But generally, it was a trying year, which ended prematurely for Dier with groin surgery, ruling him out of the final game. He had been nursing the problem since the start of the World Cup, which might help to explain why the second half of the season was such a struggle for him. Not that there was much sympathy from his many critics.
Postecoglou’s arrival from Scottish champions Celtic in June heralded the beginning of the end for Dier, who the new head coach did not deem part of his plans. He came on in the 4-1 home defeat against Chelsea in November, playing in that notorious high defensive line and having what would have been a spectacular goal disallowed for a narrow offside, but that was one of just four Spurs appearances for him all season.
Clearly, it was time to move on and what an opportunity he has now, joining one of the elite clubs in Europe.
Having spent much of his youth in Portugal, Dier has always wanted the opportunity to play abroad again and surely few would begrudge him this opportunity.
“We had a very good connection and he played under so many managers and they always picked him,” says his former Spurs team-mate Kevin Wimmer. “He’s a Tottenham legend. He’s been there for so many years and always doing a good job, very professional and also a very good guy. For sure, he was very important for the team, including in the past few years. And a great character.”
Love him or not, Dier has been one of the most important players in Spurs’ recent history — one of the last surviving members of the Pochettino team.
And it’s fine not to like him, as a player or a person. Though on the latter point, he watches Seinfeld, so you would be wrong.
Now 29 and after almost 10 years at Tottenham, the time is right for Dier to move on.
(Top photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
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