Former Newcastle midfielder Florian Thauvin has recalled his longstanding feud with Dimitri Payet from their time together at Marseille.
The 31-year-old endured two spells with the Ligue 1 side, playing alongside Payet during both of them.
Thauvin, who now plays for Udinese, first joined Marseille in 2013, the same year as Payet, and the pair did not see eye to eye during their first stint playing together.
They both left to take on the Premier League in 2015, with Payet becoming a mercurial playmaker at West Ham, while Thauvin struggled at Newcastle.
However, in 2017 they would both return on permanent deals to the 10-time French champions and the bad blood between the two reached boiling point.
While opening up on his poor relationship with Payet, Thauvin initially played down the rhetoric that the two were at odds when they reunited.
Florian Thauvin (left) believes Dimitri Payet (right) stabbed him ‘in the back’ while at Marseille
Thauvin (left) and Payet (right) had a contrasting two years between their two spells playing together at Marseille
‘It was going really well for the first two years, for me, there is no problem,’ Thauvin told the Zack en Roue Libre show.
However, that feeling soon changed and as time went on, old feelings came flooding back in.
‘We continued, and sometime later there was a problem at the club with Dimitri,’ he added.
The relationship between the two reached breaking point when Marseille’s results started to go downhill under Andre Villas-Boas after his arrival in 2019.
On one occasion, Thauvin – who won the World Cup with France in 2018 – claims that Payet embarrassed him in the dressing room by calling him out in front of all of his team-mates.
The pairs feud started in 2013 when they both joined Marseille for the first time but worsened over time
Thauvin recollected: ‘(Payet said) “Flo, if you have a problem, tell me because you are playing for yourself, you have to respect the team”.’
The ordeal crushed the midfielder, who was so hurt by Payet’s words that he felt like the former Hammer had ‘stuck a knife in my back’.
Thauvin went on to leave the club in 2021 while Payet continued at the Orange Velodrome for a further two years.
While the two had their differences, they were both pivotal in the club’s run to the 2018 Europa League final, which they lost to Atletico Madrid.
