On Sunday Hugo Lloris will break Tottenham's record for Premier League appearances. But in nine years in north London, how good has he been?
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Underappreciated or overrated – Just how good has Hugo Lloris been at Tottenham?
No player has made more Premier League appearances for Tottenham than Hugo Lloris. Sounds strange doesn’t it?
Lloris’ nine years at Spurs is a solid stint but it’s not extraordinarily long, and perhaps he’s taken for granted too much to be thought of as one of their definitive Premier League players.
But last weekend against Manchester City, the 34-year-old equalled Darren Anderton’s record of 299 Premier League matches for Spurs, and he will break it on Sunday against Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The achievement, though some way off Steve Perryman’s staggering overall club appearance record of 854, reflects Lloris’ durability and consistency — a nine-year spell that started just after Andre Villas-Boas’ arrival and has since taken in the Tim Sherwood interregnum, Mauricio Pochettino’s wonder years, the Jose Mourinho era and now Nuno Espirito Santo.
For six of those years, Lloris has been Tottenham’s captain, ahead of the England skipper Harry Kane, during which time he has worn the armband for France and led them to World Cup victory in 2018. He is the club’s longest-serving player after Kane and one of the last remaining links to the Pochettino team of 2014-19. Whenever he leaves he will go down as a modern club legend.
And yet there is a sense that he is perhaps a touch undervalued and underrated. Not by those within the club who hugely appreciate his calm and quiet leadership — but perhaps among some of the club’s fans. The supporters at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium shouted “Hugooooooo!” a couple of times on Sunday against City, but it’s curious that he doesn’t even have a proper chant (an early attempt to repurpose
KRS-One’s Sound of da Police as “Sound of da Lloris” never really caught on).
To get a sense of Lloris’ evolution as a player, leadership skills and legacy at Spurs,
The Athletic spoke to goalkeeping experts, people close to the Frenchman, the keeper whose place at Tottenham he took, Brad Friedel, and the man whose appearance record he is about to break, Anderton.
“If someone’s going to do it, you want it to be someone like Hugo — a World Cup-winning captain,” Anderton says. “It suggests you have to be some player to break it. He’s been different class for Spurs, a real talisman.”
“His consistency has been truly outstanding,” adds Friedel. “I hope he can keep his fitness up and if so Tottenham should not need a new goalkeeper for maybe another four, five or six years.”
It’s an intriguing prospect, and if he stayed that full duration Lloris would still be playing for Spurs at 40. As it is, he has a year left on his contract and talks are not at an advanced stage over an extension. Spurs would like to keep him, while Lloris will consider his options over the coming months. Signing Pierluigi Gollini on loan from Atalanta suggests Spurs are at least starting to think about a succession plan.
When he does go, Lloris will leave behind a considerable body of work. And as he reaches the appearance milestone, this is a look at Lloris’ Spurs career and an assessment of where he sits in their pantheon of modern greats.
A look at the man, who “when he loses gets very angry”, and the goalkeeper — how he has evolved, and how through small tweaks like “pulsing” on his feet, he gains an edge over his rivals.
Had Spurs’ former director of football Damien Comolli had his way, then Lloris might now be celebrating 13 years at the club and have long since broken Anderton’s record.
Back in 2008, Comolli tasked Ian Graham, now Liverpool’s director of research, with using his company Decision Technology’s data analytics tools to scout Lloris and see if he was at the required level. Graham’s advanced metrics, breaking down the quality of the shots Lloris had faced and where they had been taken from, showed that even at 21 Lloris was an exceptional goalkeeper.
In the end Lloris decided to stay in France, moving from Nice to Lyon, but four years later Spurs made the signing.
Joining Spurs was a big call, one that Lloris’ national team manager Didier Deschamps described as “incomprehensible” soon after. This was partly because Lloris initially could not get in Villas-Boas’ team, and it wasn’t until mid-November that he established himself as first choice.
Lloris was extremely disappointed at the situation, while Villas-Boas had to constantly field questions about why he was starting Friedel over the French captain and big-money signing. There was a sense among some at Spurs at the time that Villas-Boas had wanted to strengthen the squad in other areas.
“Hugo was pretty frustrated,” remembers Friedel, speaking from Miami where he works as a football agent with Promoesport. “He was France’s captain and No 1, and at Tottenham he’s No 2 to a 41-year-old. It couldn’t have been easy.
“But I said to him, ‘They signed you to be the long term No 1, and you will be the long-term No 1.’”
Much of the dressing room didn’t know what to make of Lloris. Fiercely driven and intelligent, the son of a corporate lawyer mother and a banker father, Lloris was well-liked but reserved. Which felt a bit surprising for the French captain.
“Brad never stopped talking, whereas Lloris was more circumspect,”
former Tottenham captain Michael Dawson told The Athletic in 2019. “Hugo would give me little information, little positional tips. Not shouting and bellowing. He was pretty quiet. A very thoughtful character, very intelligent.”
“Some days you would hardly know he was at the training ground,” adds Friedel.
As a goalkeeper, Lloris stood out for how quick he was off his line. It’s interesting given how he has now been superseded by Ederson and Alisson, but at that time Lloris, along with a young Manuel Neuer, was seen as being at the vanguard of the sweeper-keeper movement. More on his evolution later.
“I don’t like to wait for the game to come to me,” Lloris told
The Athletic’s Oliver Kay in December 2012. “I like to attack the ball, to play quite high up the pitch and to close the attacking players down where possible.”
Generally Lloris’ speed was a great asset in sweeping up opposition attacks — but even in the early days there were mistakes. Charging out against Liverpool in March 2013 for instance gifted Stewart Downing an equaliser in an important game Spurs went on to lose 3-2.
When Lloris erred, colleagues saw an important part of the player’s character: his extreme levels of introspection.
“You can see him going into coaching one day,” says one dressing-room source. “He analyses everything. He’s his biggest critic and completely meticulous.”
It’s common practice for Lloris to pore over mistakes with the Spurs goalkeeping coaches, and Friedel was struck by how self-critical the Frenchman could be. He remembers Lloris being “dejected” after conceding a few goals in consecutive games and explaining that at Lyon he had four or five things to do in a whole match, compared with four or five every 10 minutes in England. Friedel reassured him that this was simply how the Premier League was and that every team conceded a flurry at some point.
“He’s a really levelheaded guy, so he quickly grasped that,” says Friedel. “He’s intense, he wants to do well, but he’s quiet.”
Given how quiet Lloris is and was, he may not seem like the most natural captain — the title he was officially given by Pochettino in the summer of 2015, having worn the armband for much of the previous campaign anyway in the absence of official club captain Younes Kaboul.
But leadership comes in many different forms, and in style Lloris is viewed more like one of his most popular predecessors Ledley King.
“As a captain I’d put him more as a Ledley type, because Ledley wasn’t vocal either,” says Friedel. “They are both leaders by performance, how they conduct themselves.
“Though when Hugo needs to say something he will.”
Doing so is partly why Lloris is so well-respected as a leader. After the France team were in open revolt following the 2010 World Cup for instance, Lloris, still only in his mid-twenties, was chosen as the national team’s captain.
At Spurs, as we have seen with incidents like his evisceration of the squad’s attitude after the Europa League “disgrace” at Dinamo Zagreb in March or his berating of Son Heung-min last year, Lloris speaks his mind when he really feels something.
“To see him come for Sonny that night… you don’t want to see team-mates argue and I love Sonny and think he’s a real team player, but if you’re not quite at it defensively then you need to be called out,” Anderton says. “We had it with David (Ginola), who was incredible but some nights he might not want to run back.
“But that’s what a leader is. Someone who calls it out no matter who it is. You think Roy Keane would allow that? I thought it was different class. That’s why he’s the captain. He has a real presence.”
The questioning of Son was actually foreshadowed by an incident in 2011 when, after Lyon conceded two late goals in a draw with Nice, Lloris let rip as he walked down the tunnel, raging at how his team had thrown the game away.
“Hugo is very smart but he can lose his temper,” says Vincent Duluc, a journalist for L’Equipe who been close to Lloris since they met in 2008. “When he loses he gets very angry. He
hates to lose, hates to lose, hates to lose.
“A lot of Spurs players are not like that.”
Lloris takes losing so badly that he once said he used not to speak to his wife for three days after defeats. Now they have children he jokes that his silence is down to three hours.
He has also become more vocal on the pitch — a feature of the behind-closed-doors matches was Lloris’ constant instructions.
“He has tended to be the head coach’s lieutenant, who will feedback to the players things from him,” says one dressing-room source. “He’s always played a very important role in that respect. He doesn’t align himself with any particular group. He mixes with everyone.”
Lloris is so well thought of at the club that he is also one of the few players to have the ear of the chairman Daniel Levy.
In France, Lloris is hugely respected as the man who captained France to the World Cup in 2018. But some feel he is quite closed in how he presents himself. “Off the record, we speak about life and every subject, private and public,” Duluc says. “He’s really clever, really interesting.”
Soon after being officially named Spurs captain in the summer of 2015 was probably when Lloris came closest to leaving the club, as Manchester United sniffed around for a possible David de Gea replacement. Pochettino and Levy would never have sanctioned the move, but loyalty is a prerequisite to lasting so long at a club.
“Clubs would have been lining up to take him over the last decade,” says Anderton, who attracted interest from Manchester United and Liverpool while he was at Tottenham. “But he’s stayed at Spurs and been one of our best players year in, year out. It says a lot about his loyalty.”
After being named captain, Lloris became a key member of the Tottenham team that made huge strides in the next few seasons. They became Champions League regulars and in 2016-17 finished second in the Premier League with 86 points. Lloris made a number of crucial saves, and as well as the team’s leader was – along with Kane, Christian Eriksen, Jan Vertonghen and others – among its most consistent performers. The Spurs defence conceded the joint-fewest in the Premier League in 2015-16, the fewest the following season, and the third-fewest in 2017-18.
At the end of that campaign, Lloris won the World Cup with France. It was a triumphant moment but one that was followed by an instant comedown.
Lloris was found to be more than double the legal limit for driving in August 2018 in an incident that shocked the club and the sport. Lloris is understood to have struggled to deal with the emotional letdown of scaling football’s summit, and he endured a mixed season in the year that followed. Spurs’ decision not to strip Lloris of the captaincy or dish out a substantial punishment meanwhile caused tensions in the dressing room, as some felt it gave the impression that for certain individuals the rules didn’t apply.
The season ended with Spurs losing the Champions League final, and it shouldn’t be forgotten how many critical interventions Lloris made to help get them there. Like the heroics at Borussia Dortmund, the penalty save against Sergio Aguero in the quarter-final, and a similarly important stop to deny Kevin De Bruyne in the return game at the Etihad (in amongst all that, Lloris saving Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s 90th-minute penalty in the north London derby proved to be vital in Spurs qualifying for the Champions League ahead of Woolwich). These moments were ultimately overshadowed by Fernando Llorente’s hip, the VAR call against Raheem Sterling and Lucas Moura’s Ajax hat-trick, but were all pivotal.
The problem was that Lloris’ great saves were interspersed with big errors like rushing out of his goal and being sent off against PSV. Or bundling in Toby Alderweireld’s own goal away at Liverpool — a mistake that led former Spurs midfielder Jermaine Jenas to call for Lloris to be dropped.
By the following season, the unfortunate elbow injury that Lloris suffered away at Brighton in October 2019 was seen by some as offering him and the team the chance to reset.
Certainly Lloris felt exhausted by the previous few years. Exhausted by being one of the very few leaders in the dressing room, and constantly being relied upon to lift the others. Of course that’s the job of a captain, but Spurs is acknowledged to be a quiet dressing room without many who share Lloris’ ferocious will to win. “Spurs haven’t had those kind of characters for a while,” says one former colleague.
Lloris felt let down and burdened by the pressure. To an extent those issues have not gone away — as he alluded to in Zagreb — but he benefited from having a few months out and getting to spend proper time with his wife and two children.
Since coming back to the team last January, Lloris has rediscovered some of his best form — a sign for his advocates of his mentality. “You can tell his mental strength when he has a tough patch, but everything’s fine the next game,” Friedel says. “That’s the sign of mental strength, which is one of his biggest qualities.”
“Some players have a different mentality in training and then can’t really deliver in matches,” according to Dawson. “Hugo was just as good in matches as in training, if not better.”
Last season, Lloris certainly appeared to be close to being back to his best. He was top of the Premier League charts for
goals prevented, which calculates how many goals a keeper concedes compared to how many the expected goals (xG) model would anticipate them letting in. According to this metric, Lloris essentially saved five goals more than he was expected to, given the quality of the on-target shots that he faced — those with minus numbers conceded that number more than the on-target shots expected goals (xGOT) model would anticipate them letting in.
And looking at goals prevented across his Spurs career, we can see that overall, Lloris has outperformed expectations across most seasons. He had a bit of a shaky start in the first year and was about par for the course (-0.9) in 2017-18, but has largely kept out more than he was expected to. In 2016-17 that number was a ridiculously good 10.2 goals prevented.
Lloris’ shot-stopping has never been in doubt — a consequence of his world-class speed and reflexes. “He is
incredibly quick,” says Friedel. “His initial sprinting actions and saves from close range are exceptional.”
“It’s a joke really when you see his speed and athleticism up close,”
Tottenham goalkeeper Brandon Austin told The Athletic last year.
Backing his reflexes, Lloris likes to stay close to his line to give himself as much reaction time as possible. He also does something known in goalkeeping circles as “pulsing”.
“His set position and the way he positions himself and moves his feet is exceptional, alongside incredible reflexes,” explains John Harrison, a freelance goalkeeping data analyst. “The main thing I see from Lloris is what goalkeepers call pulsing feet. You see a lot of goalkeepers like David de Gea jump up off the ground pre-shot as it’s about to come in, land and then try and make the save. That’s OK if the jump’s small. Research has shown that you get more explosive movement if you do a pre-shot little hop.
“But Lloris is really good at just pulsing on the balls of his feet, so rather than having any big jumps where you might get problems like losing reaction time because you’re in the air when the ball’s coming towards you, he’s really good at pulsing to make sure that while he is springing he still has contact with the ground in case of any deflections or swerve.
“The save against Chelsea last November in the bottom corner is a really good example of the benefits of how he does this. Other keepers just don’t get to that.”
At around 0.15 of this clip, you can see Lloris’s pulsing feet:
And to understand why Lloris likes to stay close to his line, look at what happens when keepers are too far out and don’t have enough reaction time.
First we have
Ederson failing to keep out Erik Lamela’s well-placed but not hugely powerful effort in 2019.
And then
Aaron Ramsdale gets caught out by Kane in January.
Not that staying so close to his line doesn’t come without drawbacks. Looking at one-on-ones in particular, Harrison has identified that whereas Lloris is best in class when it comes to overall shot-stopping, he is around average when it comes to stopping one-on-ones.
“But interestingly if we split them into long range (greater than 14 yards out) and close range (less than 14 yards out) he is actually overperforming vs long range and underperforming vs short range and they are cancelling each other out,” Harrison explains.
“This is because of the strategy he employs in one-on-ones where he much prefers to wait in his six-yard box and react to the shot (circles) rather than rushing out and engaging the striker (other shapes) and attacking the ball.
“This is a great strategy when the one-on-one is a long way from goal (as it means the striker has to try a ‘proper’ finish — i.e. he can’t curl it in or lob the goalkeeper but rather has to try to smash it into the corner which is clearly a harder finish, and if they do opt for the side-foot or chipped finish the goalkeeper has a great chance of making the save.) But it is a poor strategy when the striker gets close to goal as there simply isn’t enough reaction time to save most shots, even if they are pretty close to the goalkeeper’s silhouette.”
There are a few examples of this — including this one from August 2019, when Lloris doesn’t come out to close down Newcastle’s Joelinton. By staying close to his line a hard finish which isn’t close to the corner manages to beat him for pace.
Something similar happened the following week for Alexandre Lacazette’s goal in the north London derby.
Sometimes Lloris gets away with sticking to his line and backing his reflexes — like in January against Liverpool when up against Sadio Mane.
Mane plays a one-two with Mohamed Salah…
Here, “most goalkeepers would rush out but Lloris holds his position,” Harrison says.
“He makes a miraculous reaction save to keep Mane out but the statistics show this was not a good decision.”
When Lloris does engage, the results can be better. In the next example, against Fulham in January, “Lloris does brilliantly to rush out off his line and form an upright premeditated barrier close to the striker,” Harrison says. “This fills most of the effective goal area from the view of the striker and allows Lloris to snuff out the shot.”
Ademola Lookman plays in Ruben Loftus-Cheek…
This time Lloris sprints out of his goal to narrow the angle.
By the time Loftus-Cheek goes to shot, Lloris is only a couple of yards away from him.
“If Lloris could incorporate this strategy more into his game his effectiveness at stopping close range one-on-ones would improve,” Harrison says.
In general, we can see that over the last few years, Lloris has played tighter to his line and stopped rushing out from his goal so frequently. Using data from FBref, which gives the number of defensive actions outside the penalty area (per 90), as a proxy of a “sweeper-keeper”, we can see that Lloris’ darts outside his own box have more than halved compared to what he was doing in 2017-18.
Among the goalkeeping fraternity, it’s been noted that Lloris now rushes out less than he used to, and generally likes to stay close to his line. Sometimes this can be to a fault — think of the goals conceded to the likes of Everton’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin, West Ham’s Fabien Balbuena and Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino last season (see below) where Lloris remained rooted to the spot.
As Mane goes to cross, Lloris is tight to his line.
Even after the low centre comes in he stays at home, backing himself to make a close-range stop.
But he can’t reach the cross, leaving Firmino with a tap-in.
This strategy can often work well for Lloris, however. What he tends to do is step back onto his line if he thinks he can’t reach a cross where he backs himself to then make the save. Doing so when facing headers is a smarter strategy since headed shots at Premier League level are around half the speed of normal shots — on average around 25-30mph compared to 55mph.
This example against Manchester City’s Ruben Dias last November illustrates this well:
Lloris is initially a few yards off his line as the cross comes in.
But as Harrison explains: “Once Lloris decides not to come for the cross he backs off to his line to maximise his reaction time and he vitally keeps his body weight forwards.
“The key to this save was his pre-shot footwork and his tidy set position which made the save far easier.”
As well as being more conservative with his starting position, Lloris also passed out from the back a lot less under Mourinho than in the final years under Pochettino. This may have been a contributing factor to his uptick in form, given Lloris doesn’t have the passing range of an Alisson or Ederson.
The Athletic’s resident goalkeeping expert and former professional keeper Matt Pyzdrowski has a theory that the way the Brazilians redefined the goalkeeping role put pressure on Lloris to play out more than he was comfortable with.
Undoubtedly Lloris has weaknesses and makes errors — and perhaps because his mistakes have sometimes come in high-profile games and looked clumsy, they’ve attracted greater scrutiny. In many ways that’s just the life of a goalkeeper.
The key for any keeper, according to Friedel, is playing to your strengths. Lloris has done more of that since returning from injury in January 2020 and the improvement has been evident.
As we look ahead, we can say for certain that Lloris will complete a decade at Spurs next summer. Beyond that, Lloris will decide what’s best for him and his family. A return to France has been suggested before, but the only viable destination right now would be Paris Saint-Germain, who after signing Gianluigi Donnarumma are not in the market for a new keeper. We should get clarity in the next couple of months as neither Lloris nor Spurs will want the uncertainty rumbling on into the new year.
Whatever happens, Lloris will leave Tottenham extremely well regarded. He may not have always been spectacular, but just look at the struggles endured by Woolwich and Liverpool (pre-Alisson) brought about by not having a solid goalkeeper, so too Chelsea with Kepa Arrizabalaga between 2018-2020. Very often, not really noticing your keeper is a positive and for Spurs, apart from a few blips, goalkeeper has not been a position they have had to worry about for the last nine years.
“With Hugo at Spurs the goalkeeper position is hardly ever spoken about, and that’s a good thing,” Friedel says. “They have a top-quality goalkeeper, who they know will generally be fit every single time, and you know the performance you’re going to get.
“And you know that if he does make a mistake, you can count on him the next game. You don’t have to worry about confidence issues.”
Anderton believes that Lloris is “so underrated it’s frightening”. He adds: “There was a spell under Poch when he was unbelievable. That was when Harry and Dele (Alli) and all the other stars were coming through, and it kind of went unnoticed that he was making great saves and being man of the match in so many games. We were winning a lot of points because of him.”
The counterargument is that those high-profile errors have stopped Lloris being right up there with his peers, likewise the lack of trophies with Spurs.
But his numbers stack up against his main rivals since he arrived in the Premier League. Certainly when it comes to shot-stopping.
The goalkeepers union of Friedel, Pyzdrowski and Harrison all put Lloris in the top 10 or 15 Premier League keepers of all time. Pyzdrowski thinks he’s “underappreciated” partly because of the particularly strong era of goalkeepers he’s been a part of — Alisson, Ederson and De Gea in particular. Someone like Pepe Reina was considered amongst the very best of the previous generation, but he had fewer years at the top than Lloris.
“I’m genuinely really pleased for him and Tottenham that they found a long-term goalkeeper,” says Friedel. “When I came in I was a stopgap and it’s not easy to find a long-term consistent goalkeeper.”
Lloris is certainly well-respected by almost all of the club’s followers, but maybe it won’t be until he returns to the club for a legends game after retiring that he’s fully appreciated.
For now though he has certainly made a big impression on the man whose club Premier League record he is about to break. “Congratulations,” is Anderton’s message. “When he breaks it on Sunday I’ll be delighted for him.”
To all the people that wanted Harry Kane as Captain instead.........
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