My First Spurs Christmas - Ryan Sessegnon

Our ‘My First Spurs Christmas’ series is back this week, with Ryan Sessegnon in the hot seat today. In the lead-up to 25 December, we catch up with some of this year’s new signings to find out about their plans for the festive period and how they’ve celebrated in the past. Ryan joined us over the summer from Fulham...

Ryan Sessegnon

England Under-21 international, joined us from Fulham in August, 2019

What will you do on Christmas Day?
“As a squad we meet up a bit later for training on Christmas Day so the family will come to my place in Hadley Wood for a little bit in the morning, we’ll have some food, open some gifts and then I’ll go off to training. There’ll be maybe seven or eight people in the house but my mum will be cooking – I’m not a good cook at all!”

How does this differ from past Christmases for you?
“This is my first time living alone. In previous Christmases I was still living at home in Morden in south London and, again, I would usually train later on, so the family would be at home, we’d eat our food, exchange gifts and then I’d meet up with the squad at Fulham. We trained in the afternoon and then travelled to wherever we had the game on Boxing Day.”

What is traditional at Christmas in your family?
“The usual type of thing – dinner, Christmas games. Just traditional Christmas stuff.”

What is your favourite festive meal?
“My family background stems from the Ivory Coast so for me, I like all kinds of fish, chicken, couscous and traditional African food like attiéké and foutou, which is like mash. We do have the more traditional British roast as well, but we kind of do a mix and match where we bring everything together and have it on a big table where you can pick food out.”

What do you wish for at Christmas?
“Three points against Brighton on Boxing Day!”

What was your most memorable gift as a child?
“A BMX bike. Me and my twin brother Steven got one each and that was when we first started to ride a bike – we started learning together. Mine was red and his one was blue. We’re unidentical twins so, to be fair, there was never much confusion at Christmas. When we were younger we looked a little bit alike but as we’ve grown, we look nothing alike now!”

Look out for more instalments of ‘My First Spurs Christmas’ over the weekend, featuring some of the new faces from both our Men’s and Women’s squads. Tanguy Ndombele and Hannah Godfrey gave us their answers earlier this week – look out for Spurs Women left-back Siri Worm tomorrow...