Tottenham Hotspur captain Hugo Lloris has said he never considered leaving the club because he is relishing the prospect of playing Champions League football under Mauricio Pochettino's guidance.
Lloris, 29, is currently out of action with a hamstring injury, forcing a break he concedes he may well have needed -- "in my mind and in my body" -- after captaining France to the Euro 2016 final.
The former Lyon goalkeeper cannot wait to return for Tottenham's Champions League campaign though, and he said the thought of leaving Pochettino's side had never crossed his mind in recent months.
"I'm in a project that has really started with Pochettino," he told L'Equipe. "The first two seasons, yes, it didn't go as I would have liked collectively but facing difficulty helped me to make my place.
"They saw that they could count on me. Today the club is on an exciting path."
Lloris had an exciting summer, too, but the France captain feels his side missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime when they lost 1-0 against Portugal in last month's Euro 2016 decider.
France had been favourites to end their tournament in the perfect manner at the Stade de France on July 10. Instead, Portugal became European champions for the first time thanks to an extra-time winner from Eder.
Speaking about that match for the first time since then, Lloris said that the sense of disappointment has been hard to shake.
"In this profession, there's always something afterwards -- new deadlines, the next challenges -- but this bitter taste does not go away," he said.
"To play a final with the French team in France, that will not happen again with our generation.
"We could play finals again with France but this one was special... it would have been fantastic, a culmination. And we started from so far back.
"It doesn't take anything away from what we did, nor what we shared with people, but it could have been so much better."
Substitute Andre-Pierre Gignac came closest to scoring for the hosts when he hit the post in the second minute of injury-time and Lloris admitted that his team started to feel uncertain once normal time had finished.
"I thought we were rather good but there was something lacking in the final 30 metres," he said. "Maybe we needed to do more to go and seek out this win.
"We started doubting during extra-time and the Portuguese took a psychological advantage -- maybe because they had already been through it during the competition."