Man City star Mahrez lifts lid on failed St Mirren stint

Stuart Telford

• 10 Feb 2023 16:32 GMT
• 3 min read

Riyadh Mahrez is now a Premier League winner with Manchester City and Leicester, but he could so easily have been turning out for St. Mirren in the Scottish Premiership…

Mahrez took the tourist route to the top of the game, coming up through the lower reaches of French football with Quimper and Le Havre before Leicester took a gamble on his talent in 2014, paying just €500,000 for his services.

They made a €59.5m profit when they sold him onto Man City four years later, but it might have been St. Mirren profiting had they managed to bolt the winger down in back in 2009.

READ: Man City's 10 most expensive transfers of all time

"I stayed there for two months," Mahrez told City's official website. "So, I left school from January to March to make the trial which should've lasted a week or so.

Mahrez then recounts how he left a pair of treasured boots at the Paisley club's training ground, which he made sure to retrieve before he abandoned Scotland.

Mahrez: 'Scotland drove me crazy'

"These boots were precious to me; these were my only ones. So I said: 'No I have to get my shoes first.' And there was a bike in front of the hotel. I took it. I took his bike and went to the training centre, took my boots, went back to the hotel, dropped off the bike, took the bus and the train towards the airport. Finally, I got back to Paris.

"I'd had enough. It drove me crazy, Scotland. It was cold. It was abuse! It was snowing and everything."

READ: St. Mirren's most expensive transfers

Mahrez has gone on to score 81 goals and provide 58 assists in the Premier League, a competition he has now won four times.

St. Mirren's record sale remains Ian Ferguson, the midfielder who joined Rangers for £1.3m back in 1988.

They are in line to receive significantly more should John McGinn leave Aston Villa for a big sum, though - Hibs, whom he played fore between them and Villa, have a 15 per cent sell-on clause which St Mirren would receive 30 per cent of.