Burnley tried to sign me, but I wasn’t familiar with them at the time.

Even though they are a Premier League team now, in 2005, a player they attempted to sign asked, “Where’s that?” since he had never heard of Burnley.

Leroy Lita said that Burnley had attempted to sign him, but he was unaware of their existence.

The 38-year-old journeyman striker Lita’s four-year tenure with Reading is what made him famous. His goals helped propel the Royals to the Premier League after they moved to the Madejski Stadium in 2005, setting a new Championship points record of 106 in the process.

Speaking recently on the Under The Cosh podcast, Lita revealed that other second-tier teams were also interested in recruiting the 20-year-old from League One Bristol City. “Burnley entered,” he remarked.

“They were in the same league as the Championship. I had never heard of Burnley,” Lita frank said, drawing amusement from hosts Chris Brown, Jon Parkin, and Chris Brown. “I was like, ‘where’s that?'” she continued.

Lita continued her statement by addressing the Robins’ attempts to keep him in Bristol. He had just won his England under-21 debut after scoring 29 goals in a season for them.

“They called me into a meeting to this fancy hotel, I think the chairman owned it, something like that,” he continued.

In comparison to what I was on, they’re sitting there writing me numbers and saying, ‘That’s decent innit. He began writing more figures, and I was sitting there like, “Yeah man, I’ll just have to talk to my agent.” I was dead cool.

“I’ve been walking around saying, ‘Just sign da ting, could’ve got this, could’ve got that.'” My agent provided me with excellent advice. Don’t sign anything, he said.

They were probably a little taken aback that I didn’t jump out of my seat or anything, but I had a lot of other ideas going through my head.

“I walked out and called my agent, ‘you know what they just wrote down on a piece of paper’. He said ‘relax, you’ll get more than that when you move’. And he was right. Got a lot more than that.”