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# LOI Legends

All time
'You’d get phone calls at 4am, lads would have had a few drinks and this fella is roaring down the phone'
'In my eyes, I was doing enough to warrant a night-out on a Saturday with my mates'
'I ended up working for DHL Express and Zidane went on to manage Real Madrid'
'I was so disillusioned that, believe it or not, I don’t even watch football anymore'
'Sometimes you can feel sorry for yourself but there's no point - I was the lucky one'
'I drew crowds wherever I went. Even when we played away I put a couple of thousand on the gate'
'Things were going really well and what killed me looking back was Ron Atkinson got the bullet'
"I walked down the road. It was the loneliest walk. I said 'there's 20 years of my life'"
'I told Fergie to shove his Manchester United contract and he told me to get out of his office'
"They asked me about Effenberg. And I said: 'If he thinks I was like his father, he played like my mother'"
'Liam Brady ran across to me and said ‘Paddy, your Panathinaikos players are f***ing mad!''
‘We weren't allowed use a soccer ball… GAA would have been the sport in the school’
'I'm honest enough to admit I wasn't good enough to be playing for Aston Villa in the Premier League'
'Ireland was gone as a country. Michael Jackson played Páirc Uí Chaoimh... Next day, I was on a plane'
'Out of the blue, I got a phone call to say Manchester United were interested in me'
‘No other clubs were offering full-time deals... I’d just bought a house and had a kid’
'I genuinely don’t have any regrets. I’m honest enough to realise that I didn’t put in the work'
'The doorbell rings at 4am. It's a taxi with Joe Royle... We ended up having rasher sandwiches in the kitchen'
'I don't think I would get a good reception if I went back to the club and that is disappointing'
'It was getting harder and harder... They pretty much refused to pay us most of the time'
‘It was a scandal! It was revealed afterwards there was skulduggery going on in the background’
'John Giles came to the house... He wanted to get a group of young lads together, the best in the country'
"I was going in training with the youth team and I just thought: 'What's the point?'"
'I told Bobby Robson I wasn’t coming back to England'
'The Irish lads at Leeds were so good to us. They would always be giving us money and stuff'
"You're thinking: 'We're 45 minutes away from the group stages of the Champions League'"
'I was actually offered a new contract but that was taken away when Souness left'
‘People think that football started in Ireland with Jack Charlton, but that’s simply not true’
'That was the beginning of the end at Cork City because the new owners were strange, strange people'
‘I was confident that I was good enough… But I was worried about having a nightmare’
'This is Cork... there's no way those f**kers are coming down and taking the league from us'
'Pat hands me the phone and it was Kenny Dalglish. He goes ‘We really want you to sign’'
'Captaining your hometown club to the league makes all those nights training in the rain and dark worthwhile'
'Ollie Byrne said ‘listen, we’ve got a chance of beating Deportivo’. That was the belief he had'
'I'd given everything to Cork, but there's always that tinge - that little bit of regret'
'It was weeks before I realised that it was actually Eusebio'
"I hated football and was contemplating getting a 'real job'... Then I got called up by Libya"
'You were against Pele and Beckenbauer. It was like going to play in Hollywood'
'We used to kick the s**t out of each other in training but the bond was incredible'
'He said 'there’s no f***ing way you’re leaving this room until you sign the contract!''