Abz, pictured right with coach Deniz Koca, played for Zaza FC

A TALENTED footballer who was stabbed to death was descended from an aristocratic family including a city landlord who once “owned most of Charing Cross”, his grandfather said.

Baron Robert Pouget told Extra that Abdul-Latif Pouget’s great grandfather was George de Vere Drummond, whose land empire had included the Savoy Hotel and Adelphi Theatre. His other grandson, on a different branch of the family tree is Matthew Vaughn, one of the country’s top film producers.

The 20-year-old was fatally stabbed in Clerkenwell a fortnight ago and a man has been charged with murder.

Baron Pouget said that his own son Antoine, the victim’s dad, had brought his own family up in the Muslim faith separated from any trappings of the dynasty’s inherited wealth. He said Antoine’s great grandfather “…owned pretty much the whole of Charing Cross. He was immensely wealthy, one of the main landlords of the city. Only two generations later, we have a young boy being murdered in the street.”

He added: “It is an extraordinary commentary on the way the country is going that you can have somebody desc-ended from one of the richest men in London, only two or three generations away. Massive wealth. Then you have this terrible thing happen to his offspring. There is such a contrast between the life he had and his relatives’.”

The Pouget family has links to the Chateau Pouget, a winery in the Margaux appellation of Bordeaux, France, and ran the Castle Pouget for over a century and a half.

All across the Sunday football leagues in north London, amateur players stood in silence to pay tribute

Baron Pouget said that he did not know his grandson well but had visited him in the “stunning” Royal London Hospital in east London where he died. With “stick, tweed cap and monocle stuck in my eye”.

He said that Abz, as he was known, had “never benefited from wealth of the wider family”, and added: “The British upper classes are funny, they are all split up, that’s how we are.”

He added: “Little Abz’s grandmother was Omega Drummond, the daughter of Captain Drummond… who was first cousin of the Earl of Perth, who owned Drummond’s Bank.

“He owned most of Charing Cross, an extremely wealthy family at the turn of the century, right up to the turn of the 1960s. He inherited the family fortune after the First World War and managed to get through most of it. What was left he gave to his offspring. The one that inherited, George Drummond, is the great-grandfather of young Abz. George Drummond father-ed Matthew Vaughn. He’s done lots of stuff, a top producer. He married Claudia Schiffer.”

Baron Pouget said he himself had gone into the film industry in Paris before starting businesses in this country in cheese, vegan food, and preserves and that he loved to paint.

At the weekend, hundreds of footballers bowed their heads in tribute to Abz.

He was found in Back Hill, Clerkenwell, on October 18 after police responded to reports of a moped crash.

He played high-level football for Zaza FC in the premier division of the Barnet Sunday League – the biggest league in London – that organised a one-minute silence in dozens of fixtures on Saturday. Club secretary Duygu Ozen said: “It was different, it was difficult. We were in mixed emotions we were devastated but proud at the same time. The opponents and the referees were touched too. We had a photo of Abdul on the side supporting his team as usual. The players walked on to the pitch with a banner… some were in tears. We have lost 2-1 but these are just numbers. We were on that pitch for a different reason this time.”