Eric Dier and Matt Doherty’s bromance: ‘He’s at my house all the time, eating my food’

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art sits in Samcheong-dong, Seoul. It is a white-walled, high-ceilinged building in a trendy part of town that houses a number of art galleries and stylish restaurants and cafes. An area that a South Korean national and former Seoul resident reliably informs us is a good spot to take a date.

Which feels appropriate, since The Athletic is meeting Tottenham defenders Eric Dier and Matt Doherty to discuss their budding bromance.

It is a friendship that was one of the talking points of the club’s recent Korean tour after videos on social media of Dier rating Doherty’s goatee and the pair tucked up in bed with Harry Kane analysing a Dier goal caught supporters’ imaginations. Pictures of the tour showed that they were pretty much inseparable throughout, and the day before our meeting they spent the morning visiting other, smaller galleries to satisfy Dier’s passion for art. It is one of many interests he has outside of football, which are as varied as politics, tennis and board games.

Indulging in this particular passion today, Dier had requested that our interview take place at the MMCA, to allow him and Doherty to have a look around the gallery first. While at the MMCA, which highlights the works of contemporary Korean artists, Dier picks up a few sizeable art books to add to his collection.

Dier and Doherty’s holidays together, meanwhile, have included visiting the Monaco Grand Prix in May, having also been away in January during the winter break, and a trip to Miami last summer to watch some NBA basketball.

It should be said that Kane is a regular third party in all of this, including on various golf courses and, in Korea, in many other of their activities, as evidenced by the video rating Dier’s goal.

That video showed the trio giving a numerical verdict (importantly, with the precision of a decimal place) on the goal, as Dier and Kane had done for Doherty’s goatee a few days earlier (7.6 from Dier, just 5.5 from Kane).

Both Dier and Doherty speak of a very harmonious dressing room in general and say they clicked with one another straight away after the latter’s summer 2020 transfer from Wolves. “Matt and I spend a lot of time outside of the training ground together,” Dier tells The Athletic. “He’s at my house all the time, eating my food.”

Initially, Dier questions the idea of it being a bromance, but as the pair explain how they view and rate a movie in one of their hotel bedrooms before every game, do pizza reviews, go on holidays and watch endless different sports, he laughs and says: “OK, maybe it is a bromance.”

Though he adds: “I feel bad for H (Kane)… I think it’s more of a threesome.”

When it’s explained to Dier that he and Doherty are going to be tested on their knowledge of one another, he says: “This is funny. I feel like this is a TV programme!”

Doherty says of his relationship with Dier and Kane: “You’d think we would all be friends for life.”

But with Kane elsewhere today, Dier and Doherty settle down to discuss their special bond.

For Dier, Doherty’s arrival at Tottenham was perfectly timed.

His two best friends in football, Jan Vertonghen and Mousa Dembele, had recently left the club (the former just that summer) and in the Irishman he found another kindred spirit — even if temperamentally they are quite different, with Dier more gregarious, and Doherty known for his deadpan sense of humour. Dele Alli is another former Tottenham player Dier is very close to, referring to him as “my brother” when the midfielder left to join Everton last season.

“It’s really nice, because you go through phases in a dressing room,” Dier says. “People come and go. And in one way, with Jan and Mousa, I’d say they’re still my closest friends in football. I speak to Jan pretty much every day. So that doesn’t change.” He then adds, laughing, that: “But obviously, very nice timing in that sense that when Jan left, Matt filled that void.

“It’s funny because my brothers, who I live with, we all say there’s a lot of similarities between Matt and Jan — including their sense of humour. They’ve never met, though. It will be funny when they do.”

As well as that deadpan humour, Doherty is known for his quirkiness, and these qualities have made him very popular at Wolves and now Spurs. He name-checks Benik Afobe, George Saville, John Ruddy, Will Norris and Conor Coady as his closest friends from his Molineux days, as well as  former Tottenham team-mate Joe Hart, who is now with Scottish champions Celtic.

But the nature of football is that players are constantly on the move to different clubs, and so it requires a special bond for team-mates to remain close. For footballers, as with people from any walk of life, you quickly know when you’ve found something special.

“You can’t keep in contact with 20 people,” Doherty says of a lifestyle that inevitably means team-mates — himself included two years ago — are always coming and going. “You don’t have as much to talk about as you’re not in their life as much.

“It (close friendships) doesn’t happen all the time. But this was an easy changing room to come into and it was fast (with Dier).”

Dier is often referred to by Spurs insiders as the glue in the dressing room, which in general is a very happy place right now and free of cliques. He is fluent in Portuguese having lived there for over a decade before joining Tottenham from Sporting Lisbon in 2014, so can happily chat away to the team’s Brazilian contingent, and has also taught himself Spanish.

This proved extremely useful in helping Cristian Romero settle after the Argentine defender arrived last summer.

“He was instrumental when I joined,” Romero told The Athletic in April. “The fact he speaks Spanish really helps with our on-pitch understanding as well. 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.”

Doherty had a similar experience when he joined Spurs, and he and Dier quickly realised they had a connection. They now spend a lot of their time together at the latter’s house.

“I’ve never been to his house,” Dier says. “He’s never invited me round, but he’s at my house a lot.

“I think the thing that connects us the most is sport. We watch a lot of sport together. We went to the Monaco Grand Prix, he was at my house watching Wimbledon. Golf, football… whatever it is, we spend a lot of time doing that together.

“It’s not every day he’s round, but I’d say more than once a week. He likes the food, likes the sauna. I’m obsessed with a sauna and cold plunge. Matt’s joined me on that journey, so he’s round a lot for that.

“I always know when his girlfriend and kids aren’t around because Matt suddenly starts coming over.”

He adds with a grin: “I feel like he’s just using me, really.”

One of the staples of the friendship is the aforementioned ratings system, which is borrowed from American internet celebrity Dave Portnoy, who uses it to evaluate pizza restaurants. Dier, Doherty and Kane met Portnoy last month to review a central London pizzeria and have followed his lead.

“It started with our obsession with this guy’s pizza ratings,” Dier explains. “Matt and I went to Miami together to watch the NBA last year and we went to rate one of the pizza places that he (Portnoy) had rated really highly. We just drive around London and try different pizza places and rate them, and keep the ratings.

“We just get in the car and take different people — my brothers come sometimes, friends come sometimes. Whoever’s there. It’s just organic, and we have fun with it.”

And as Dier said when rating Doherty’s beard: “You’ve got to give decimal points, otherwise you’re an amateur.”

Last season Dier and Doherty, along with Kane, came up with something else to rate. They began watching a film together the night before every game in one of their three rooms, with each giving it a rating afterwards.

The trio rotate who picks the movie each week, and the rule is that two of the three can’t have seen it before. As he’s explaining this, Doherty grabs his phone to consult a note which lists every film they’ve watched together — as well as who picked it, and the ratings it received.

“It started last season, usually in one of our bedrooms, and we rate the movie afterwards,” Doherty says. “It’s not always easy picking one that two haven’t seen as we’ve all watched quite a lot. And there’s a bit of pressure if you pick something and the film rating is quite low. You feel pressure while the movie’s on if they’re enjoying it or not.”

“My style of movie is a bit different to Doughy and H,” Dier says. “We get into some heated arguments about movie ratings. I think the movie that’s caused the most uproar is Uncut Gems — they rated it extremely low.”

“Eric has put on some horrendous ones,” Doherty says. “Uncut Gems, Mad Max… H and I rated that really low. We wouldn’t recommend you see that.”

Dier isn’t willing to take that lying down: “I think H would agree with me that Matt’s movie recommendations have definitely been the worst.”

Friday night will see the trio watching a movie all together in person for the first time since before the Aston Villa game in April, when an injury to Doherty ended his season. After that he still watched the films but had to do so separately, and they called a hiatus on their sessions during pre-season.

Their last iteration of film club as a trio brings back bad memories for Doherty. An omen perhaps for the following day’s cruel injury blow at Villa.

“I picked Mystic River on that occasion, but they really didn’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’d seen it a few times, and thought they’d like it. And when we looked it up, we found out that Sean Penn got an Oscar for it.”

Do they know each other well enough to correctly identify each other’s favourite films? After Dier correctly states that Heat is the film Doherty has given the highest rating to, the latter pauses and says: “His favourite film is, hmm… his favourite film is Inglourious Basterds. He rates it as a 9.9, basically saying nothing can beat it.”

“Yeah, if I’m going off the films we’ve watched so far, it’s Inglourious Basterds,” Dier confirms.

Doherty adds: “He thinks the first 20 minutes is the greatest opening scene in movie history. It’s clearly not the greatest opening scene in movie history.”

Though there are disagreements over how individual films are rated, both agree that it’s a great, fun way to relax on the night before a game. At the time of our conversation, the choice for this Friday, and whose room at The Lodge will be the venue, were still TBC.

Continuing the ratings theme, among the many responses to the goatee video were previous haircuts of the pair for both to rate.

Since Doherty has pretty much had the same haircut forever, these largely centre on Dier, and it felt irresponsible to waste the opportunity to put a couple of these in front of the pair to rate.

Starting with this one:

“How would I rate that?” Doherty says. “It just looks strange. I’ve only ever known him with that weird V that he has. He looks quite posh there, like a schoolboy. But he’s a grown man.

“Ah… I’d probably say that’s a 6.2.”

Dier largely agrees. “I’ll rate that one — at the time it looked alright, that picture ain’t doing it justice — a 6.1.”

Next up is this one…

“That is just scandalously bad,” Doherty says. “He must know that’s bad. That’s so bad. That’s, like, 4.1.”

Dier disagrees. “That’s solid, man. That was a lockdown haircut. Dele did that. My brother did it a few times as well. I’d give it an 8.1. I liked it, personally.”

And then comes the piece de resistance…

“I can’t believe the photo you have,” Doherty says, shaking his head.

Dier bursts into laughter at what he sees.

“Yeah, I used to have a mullet,” Doherty says. “I used to love having that mullet as well. To the point where I actually considered getting it back. It seems to be back in. I just don’t have the patience anymore. I need to just let it grow.

“Rating? You have to take my age into consideration here. That’s probably a… I’m going to give that a 6.2. That’s maybe generous but it’s me, so I’m going to give myself a good score. Eric’s going to rate that so low.”

Dier regains his composure and says: “That is… The mullet’s coming back a bit. I don’t mind the mullet, but on top I don’t know what’s going on. So I’ll give it a… I’ve got to be honest, that’s a 0.6.”

The pair similarly don’t see eye to eye when it comes to some sporting debates — including the one over the greatest men’s tennis player of all time.

“For Eric, it’s Rafa Nadal,” Doherty states correctly when asked to name Dier’s sporting idol. “He always calls him the GOAT (greatest of all time). I don’t agree. I think it’s Roger (Federer). Statistically, it could end up being Novak (Djokovic), but crazy you have all three of them in the same era.

“Imagine if it was only two of them, how many they’d each have.”

“Rafa, across any sport, is my sporting icon,” confirms Dier, whose father Jeremy was a tennis player. “So the last couple of days we’ve been having a lot of heated debates about this. Though I think he’s just (backing) Roger to wind me up.

“But the nice thing about the first week of pre-season is Wimbledon’s always on, so you train, watch Wimbledon, train, watch Wimbledon.”

As well as watching sport together, Dier and Doherty also compete against one another — mainly at golf.

“H is the best at golf,” Doherty says. “I’m probably second, Eric’s third. H plays off scratch, I play off six, Eric about eight. So the standard is pretty good. It’s not like we’re chopping it around there. We’re actually having pretty competitive games.”

You get the sense from the way Dier and Doherty like to gently needle each other that whatever they played would be competitive. Given Dier’s love for board games, do he and Doherty ever do battle over the likes of Catan (the very popular, and very complex, strategy game), as he used to with Vertonghen?

“With Jan and my brothers, because there were four of us, we used to do a lot of board games at either house,” Dier says. “Catan is the greatest board game in the world.

“With Matt, I’ve been trying to get him onto backgammon. That’s where I want to start with him.

“Board games… I feel like I’d be cheating on Jan if I played board games with anyone else.”

Not for the first time, Dier breaks into a broad grin, and, as we finish up, he and Doherty are led away to pose for photos. Cue more smiles.

It certainly feels like a happy Tottenham dressing room at the moment, and in among all the ferocious preparation they’ll have done for Saturday’s Premier League opener at home to Southampton, we also know that Dier and Doherty — along with Kane — will have enjoyed a restful, if possibly slightly argumentative, evening the night before.

Dier and Doherty were speaking at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. During Tottenham’s pre-season tour in South Korea, the players were out and about engaging with Korean fans and immersing themselves in the local culture.