The story of how Aly Dia duped Southampton’s management into giving him 53 minutes of Premiership football in 1996 is one that has over the years refused to go away. The man himself has remained very elusive, despite many efforts by the media to track him down and establish some accurate facts, but in November 2016 the Bleacher Report journalist, Kelly Naqi, visited his parents in Senegal and his son, Simon in Paris (who was then playing for St Quentin one of his father’s early clubs), and finally spoke to Aly Dia himself on the phone to hear his side of the story.

Based on Kelly’s article and interview and some thorough research by other Bleacher journalists, here is the Aly Dia story such as it is. He started playing professionally in France’s 5^th tier but moving to Finland it is alleged by those who knew him then, he introduced for the first time his supposed connection to George Weah,

(Aly’s parents claim their daughter was friendly with Weah which is how Aly knew him)

and on the back of that was awarded a £250 a week contract, making his debut as a sub on 30^th April 1995. For his next game, in June, at home to Ives he started and according to the Finnish paper Helsingin Sanomat he was caught offside ten times and spent most of the game ruining his own team’s attacks. He played the entire match which his team lost 3-1. He started in FinnPa’s next match away to FC Jazz and the same paper this time described him as being “invisible” in the first half, after which he was substituted.

On June 21 he made his fifth and final appearance and after that, he suddenly vanished leaving his club flat in a mess and a bar bill unpaid at a local hotel.

He resurfaced in Helsinki and played three games for PK-35, a club from Kakkonen in the second tier Eastern Division but only made three appearances after which he made a move to Germany and had a few games for Lubeck, then in Germany’s second tier. At some stage, he came to England and had a few trials with lower-league teams and one appearance for Blyth Spartans. What happened next, after he signed a month’s contract with Southampton, depends on who you believe.  Matt Le Tissier remembers thinking Aly had won a prize of some kind when he witnessed his performance on the Saints’ training ground. But Graeme Souness’s assistant, Terry Cooper, reckoned that Dia – presented to Southampton as somebody who’d played with Weah at Paris St Germain –

“looked OK in the small-sided games.”

When a midweek Combination match v Arsenal was rained off, the chance to see Ali in an eleven-a-side was lost. So with Le Tissier carrying an injury and three other strikers out, Ali was on the bench, come Saturday, for the game v Leeds. After 32 minutes, he came off it to replace a hobbling Le Tissier.

He almost scored immediately but was denied by the Leeds ’keeper. After that, he sought to disguise his inability by “running everywhere the ball wasn’t,” as Le Tissier puts it. With five minutes remaining, Souness pulled him off.

Dia’s recollection is slightly different. He told Kelly Naqi that a friend introduced him to a UK-based, African agent by the name of Bachir Suleman in 1994, and it was Suleman who arranged Dia’s contract with Southampton. What’s more, Dia said he trained with the Saints for a month-and-a-half before entering that Premier League match against Leeds United. Contrary to reports, the team didn’t just assess his football talent through observing him in five-a-side, the day before the game.

“I trained against the first team, on the reserve team, for two weeks,” Dia insists. “[Southampton] knew my abilities. There was a final game before the Leeds game—11 on 11—and I scored two or three goals. I was on fire. I earned the spot to be there.

Souness said, ‘You are in for tomorrow, be ready.’ I was not expecting to start. Then the next thing you know, Le Tissier gets injured and I go in. No warm-ups, I just go in. “Dia says people can think what they want about his performance in the game; he gave it his all, and he has no regrets.  “I have a clear conscience. God is going to be our judge.”

So ended what has surely become the most talked-about 53-minute cameo in the Premier League’s history. He came on as a sub, four days later, for the Reserves but was then released by Southampton. He headed for the north-east, for a few games each with Gateshead and Spennymoor and to gain a Business Studies degree from Northumbria University going on to earn his Master of Business Administration from San Francisco State University in 2003. His father, a retired diplomat who worked for the embassy in Dakar before being transferred to the Senegalese embassy in Paris, proudly allowed Kelly Naqi to photograph the certificate.

After graduating in the States, Aly then spent many years working in the business sector in Qatar before relocating to London in 2016 which was where he spoke to the Bleacher Report from. Today, with pedigrees available for checking on the internet and with players producing DVDs of their performances for their agents to peddle, no club is likely to be embarrassed, surely, by the kind of chance that Southampton took on Dia. Embarrassed? “We never mentioned what happened again,” Cooper told Four Four Two. Indeed – readers of Souness’s managerial memoirs will find no reference, whatsoever, to his role in creating the Legend of Aly Dia.