I was really surprised to see that he had no thread here, especially as himself was/still is a die-hard Spurs fan, his son was in the Academy and he was a decent player for us as well. Shame he was so injury prone.
This article was posted in TheAtletic, it's a good read.
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Teemu Tainio played 83 times for Tottenham Hotspur but his connection with the club is much deeper than that.
He was a boyhood Spurs fan when that was an unusual thing to be growing up in Finland. In 2005, he turned down more money elsewhere to fulfil his dream of playing at White Hart Lane. After leaving Spurs in 2008, he returned to being a supporter, attending games with the paying fans. He even worked for the club behind the scenes, as their Scandinavian scout, watching Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg a few years before Tottenham signed him from Southampton.
And until last year, Tainio was the father of a Spurs player too, with his son Maximus in the Tottenham academy. Max, like his father, is a Tottenham fan.
Now the Tainios are back in Finland at FC Haka, with Max making his first-team debut last year. Teemu is manager, preparing Haka for the new Veikkausliiga season that starts next month. He is motivated to get them into the top five this season, but it is clear from speaking to him that his heart remains in N17. He still watches every Spurs game on TV (or, more accurately, he says, “95 per cent” of them). They remain, for him, “my No 1 team in the world”.
It all started for Tainio with the great Ossie Ardiles Spurs team of the mid-1990s, which signed Jurgen Klinsmann, Gica Popescu and Ilie Dumitrescu after the 1994 World Cup and, for a few months, looked like they could turn English football on its head.
Tainio cannot remember the precise moment that won his heart but says that it was that team’s style of play, ultimately, that seduced him. “Every Saturday we had one Premier League game on TV,” he says. “All my friends were Liverpool or Man United fans. But me — and one other guy — became Spurs fans. It has to be because of the way they played.” When the Finnish media came to interview him as a promising teenager at Haka, they were surprised to find his bedroom decorated with posters of Tottenham players.
It was always Tainio’s dream to get to White Hart Lane, but his big career break came with a move to Auxerre in France. He impressed there, helping secure Champions League qualification in 2002 and a Coupe de France triumph in May 2005, but shortly after that, his contract with the Ligue 1 side expired. He wanted a new challenge, and Frank Arnesen, Spurs’ director of football, wanted to make his boyhood dream come true. (Arnesen had taken a teenage Tainio on trial at PSV years before, but he did not make a permanent move.)
Tainio had already agreed to go Tottenham, the move of a lifetime, when another English team (he will not say who) contacted his agent and offered twice as much money. “I said, ‘No thanks, my mind and my heart is already in London’. So I turned them down and I went to Spurs.”
The Tottenham that Tainio joined in the summer of 2005 was a very different place. The 2004-05 season had been a transitional one, with Jacques Santini leaving early on to be replaced by Martin Jol. When Tainio showed up, he admits to being “a little bit surprised” that the team had finished as low as ninth the previous season. But the club had promised him that better players were on their way, and they were true to their word.
Even in the summer that Arnesen left for Chelsea, Tottenham managed to significantly upgrade the squad, signing Aaron Lennon, Lee Young-pyo, Jermaine Jenas and, most significantly, Edgar Davids on a free transfer from Inter Milan.
“So friendly,” says Tainio, asked to describe the club he walked into. “Ever since the first day I got there, they really made me feel very welcome. That was the biggest surprise for me, how friendly the team was and all the staff.”
This was when Spurs were in their old training ground in Chigwell, “where everything was small and close”, and of course the old version of White Hart Lane, the stadium Tainio had grown up watching on TV. “When a boyhood dream becomes true, it’s fantastic,” Tainio says. “It was everything I dreamed of as a fan, such a great ambience. I really enjoyed every single moment I played there, it was something special.”
Tainio vividly remembers his first game there, a 2-0 friendly win over Porto, when Davids was given a standing ovation as he came on in the second half, and hopes were raised of Spurs getting into the Champions League for the first time that season.
Landing Davids, who had won so much at Ajax and Juventus, was hugely important for the club and Tainio remembers the lift that he gave everyone when he arrived. “Of course he was really, really competitive in training and games. He brought a winning mentality to the team. I wouldn’t say that he changed the mentality, but he definitely brought something special to the club.”
And at the heart of it all was Jol, the avuncular coach who built the first good team of the ENIC era under Daniel Levy. Tainio, like everyone who played for him, speaks warmly of Jol. “He was really, really friendly with the players. When things went well, he was the nicest guy. He gave a lot of confidence to the players, and even if you made one or two mistakes, he didn’t put you down. He said, ‘Do it better next time’. That’s something every player wants, to feel confidence from the coach.”
Jol was at the centre of attention in one of Tainio’s favourite Spurs games, the 1-1 draw at Highbury in April 2006. Robbie Keane gave Spurs the lead when Emmanuel Eboue was down injured, and Arsene Wenger was so angry that he squared up with Jol on the touchline. “It showed us the coach was living the game the same way the players were,” says Tainio. “We were happy to see Martin was up for it.” Tainio remembers that as the Spurs team bus left Highbury, it was pelted by “beer cans and stones” thrown by Woolwich fans, forcing the Spurs players to take cover on the bus floor.
This was when Woolwich and Spurs were vying for fourth place. It all came down to the last game of the season when Spurs went to Upton Park and, frankly, if you are reading this article, you know what happened next. “I have never seen so many sick guys in the dressing room, not before, not after,” Tainio says. “That was something crazy. You could see before the game it is going to be a big battle, seeing a lot of people suffering. I didn’t feel 100 per cent in the game, but I wasn’t as sick as the other players were.”
It was only a few days later that Tainio felt the full effects of the norovirus that struck the rest of the Spurs squad, but by that point, the damage was done. Tainio is able, 15 years on, to be phlegmatic about Spurs missing out on Champions League football that way. “The table never lies,” he says. “It was very bad luck that that thing came during the last game, but the table never lies. That’s what we deserved.”
There was a revenge of sorts one year later when Spurs went back to Upton Park and pulled off a famous 4-3 win. Spurs went 2-0 down, Tainio volleyed one in to make it 2-2 before being out-jumped by Bobby Zamora who headed in Carlos Tevez’s freekick to put West Ham back in front. Dimitar Berbatov and Paul Stalteri won it for Spurs at the end, and Tainio had his place in an all-time classic.
Tainio’s place in Tottenham history was sealed at Wembley one year later. By this point, Jol had been replaced by Juande Ramos, and his Spurs took on Avram Grant’s Chelsea in the League Cup final. Tainio came on for Steed Malbranque in the second half, Ramos telling him to “play with your head, and take your time when needed”.
After Jonathan Woodgate’s extra-time header put Spurs 2-1 up, Tainio knew what he needed to do. With five minutes left, Tainio had a throw-in and took as long as he could over it. Mark Halsey booked him for time-wasting but Tainio still would not throw the ball.
“Joe Cole started yapping something. “I said, ‘Sorry, boy, look at the scoreboard, we’re leading 2-1’. Didier Drogba didn’t like the idea so he started yapping too. I was wasting a good amount of time.”
The incident eventually roped in Younes Kaboul, Michael Ballack and Didier Zokora too, but it wasted a crucial minute, helping Spurs to the cup. And that moment has been immortalised on YouTube (the clip is called “Teemu Legend” and has been viewed more than 135,000 times), and Tainio is still asked about it by Spurs fans whenever he meets them.
Winning that League Cup was the highlight of Tainio’s career, the “cherry on the cake” of Tainio’s time at the club. Because by that point Tainio already sensed that his time at Spurs was coming to an end. When Ramos replaced Jol, Tainio was deployed more often at full-back than in central midfield, where Zokora was increasingly dominant. So even though Tainio did not want to leave his boyhood club, nor did he want to sit on the bench and never play.
So in the summer of 2008, Tainio headed to Sunderland along with Malbranque and Pascal Chimbonda. But that was a “very, very difficult year”, a whole season of “total turbulence”, as Roy Keane was sacked and replaced by Ricky Sbragia. There was a loan to Birmingham City before Jol signed him for Ajax, but his time in Amsterdam was disrupted by injuries.
Tainio nearly went back to Finland, only to get an offer to go to MLS to play for New York Red Bulls, teaming up with his old Woolwich rival Thierry Henry. “Can you believe, I played with Henry, who I used to hate?” Tainio laughs. “We kept talking about Spurs and Woolwich, on a daily basis we were talking about old games against each other.” In August 2012, Tainio even played against Spurs — by now managed by Andre Villas-Boas — for the first time in his career, with the Premier League club beating the MLS side in a pre-season fixture.
But even after hanging up his boots, that connection with the club was still there. He has been back to plenty of Spurs games since he retired (he counts six or seven), turning down the option of hospitality tickets to go in with the fans instead. “I always had a really good relationship with the fans, and when I went to White Hart Lane I was always chatting with the fans about the game. I never went to the VIP stand, always in the normal stands, so I could chat with them. It’s a big pleasure. For me, they are the No 1 fans in the world, of course.” He has been to the new stadium too, playing in the legends’ game in 2019.
Wanting to find another way to help the club after retiring, Tainio became one of Tottenham’s Scandinavian scouts in 2015. This meant reporting to Paul Mitchell (and then Steve Hitchen), checking out players in Scandinavia or, at times, midfielders who were playing elsewhere around Europe. And one of those players, Hojbjerg, went on to sign for Spurs.
Tainio saw Hojbjerg playing for the Danish national team in 2016, the year he signed for Southampton, a sign of how long he club had been monitoring him before he joined in 2020. Tainio is a big fan, and sees something of himself in him.
“He is more comfortable with the ball than I was back in my days,” Tainio says. “I can see some similarities, the way he plays. I really like the player. He is a complete midfielder. He reads the game really well. And comparing him from 2016 and now, he has taken massive steps forward. He’s good on the ball, he knows his quality, he plays easy, and reads the game really well. He’s tough. I like the way he’s playing.”
Hojbjerg also brings vocal leadership in the middle of the pitch, something Tottenham have lacked for years. “Like Edgar Davids, you need players with a lot of personality in the team,” Tainio says. “Especially when things are not going your way, you need somebody to step up and say a few words.”
Next month, Hojbjerg will have a chance to emulate what Tainio’s Spurs achieved in 2008 — beating a better-equipped side in the League Cup final. And no one would be happier than Tainio if this Spurs team lift the cup.
This article was posted in TheAtletic, it's a good read.
--------
Teemu Tainio played 83 times for Tottenham Hotspur but his connection with the club is much deeper than that.
He was a boyhood Spurs fan when that was an unusual thing to be growing up in Finland. In 2005, he turned down more money elsewhere to fulfil his dream of playing at White Hart Lane. After leaving Spurs in 2008, he returned to being a supporter, attending games with the paying fans. He even worked for the club behind the scenes, as their Scandinavian scout, watching Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg a few years before Tottenham signed him from Southampton.
And until last year, Tainio was the father of a Spurs player too, with his son Maximus in the Tottenham academy. Max, like his father, is a Tottenham fan.
Now the Tainios are back in Finland at FC Haka, with Max making his first-team debut last year. Teemu is manager, preparing Haka for the new Veikkausliiga season that starts next month. He is motivated to get them into the top five this season, but it is clear from speaking to him that his heart remains in N17. He still watches every Spurs game on TV (or, more accurately, he says, “95 per cent” of them). They remain, for him, “my No 1 team in the world”.
It all started for Tainio with the great Ossie Ardiles Spurs team of the mid-1990s, which signed Jurgen Klinsmann, Gica Popescu and Ilie Dumitrescu after the 1994 World Cup and, for a few months, looked like they could turn English football on its head.
Tainio cannot remember the precise moment that won his heart but says that it was that team’s style of play, ultimately, that seduced him. “Every Saturday we had one Premier League game on TV,” he says. “All my friends were Liverpool or Man United fans. But me — and one other guy — became Spurs fans. It has to be because of the way they played.” When the Finnish media came to interview him as a promising teenager at Haka, they were surprised to find his bedroom decorated with posters of Tottenham players.
It was always Tainio’s dream to get to White Hart Lane, but his big career break came with a move to Auxerre in France. He impressed there, helping secure Champions League qualification in 2002 and a Coupe de France triumph in May 2005, but shortly after that, his contract with the Ligue 1 side expired. He wanted a new challenge, and Frank Arnesen, Spurs’ director of football, wanted to make his boyhood dream come true. (Arnesen had taken a teenage Tainio on trial at PSV years before, but he did not make a permanent move.)
Tainio had already agreed to go Tottenham, the move of a lifetime, when another English team (he will not say who) contacted his agent and offered twice as much money. “I said, ‘No thanks, my mind and my heart is already in London’. So I turned them down and I went to Spurs.”
The Tottenham that Tainio joined in the summer of 2005 was a very different place. The 2004-05 season had been a transitional one, with Jacques Santini leaving early on to be replaced by Martin Jol. When Tainio showed up, he admits to being “a little bit surprised” that the team had finished as low as ninth the previous season. But the club had promised him that better players were on their way, and they were true to their word.
Even in the summer that Arnesen left for Chelsea, Tottenham managed to significantly upgrade the squad, signing Aaron Lennon, Lee Young-pyo, Jermaine Jenas and, most significantly, Edgar Davids on a free transfer from Inter Milan.
“So friendly,” says Tainio, asked to describe the club he walked into. “Ever since the first day I got there, they really made me feel very welcome. That was the biggest surprise for me, how friendly the team was and all the staff.”
This was when Spurs were in their old training ground in Chigwell, “where everything was small and close”, and of course the old version of White Hart Lane, the stadium Tainio had grown up watching on TV. “When a boyhood dream becomes true, it’s fantastic,” Tainio says. “It was everything I dreamed of as a fan, such a great ambience. I really enjoyed every single moment I played there, it was something special.”
Tainio vividly remembers his first game there, a 2-0 friendly win over Porto, when Davids was given a standing ovation as he came on in the second half, and hopes were raised of Spurs getting into the Champions League for the first time that season.
Landing Davids, who had won so much at Ajax and Juventus, was hugely important for the club and Tainio remembers the lift that he gave everyone when he arrived. “Of course he was really, really competitive in training and games. He brought a winning mentality to the team. I wouldn’t say that he changed the mentality, but he definitely brought something special to the club.”
And at the heart of it all was Jol, the avuncular coach who built the first good team of the ENIC era under Daniel Levy. Tainio, like everyone who played for him, speaks warmly of Jol. “He was really, really friendly with the players. When things went well, he was the nicest guy. He gave a lot of confidence to the players, and even if you made one or two mistakes, he didn’t put you down. He said, ‘Do it better next time’. That’s something every player wants, to feel confidence from the coach.”
Jol was at the centre of attention in one of Tainio’s favourite Spurs games, the 1-1 draw at Highbury in April 2006. Robbie Keane gave Spurs the lead when Emmanuel Eboue was down injured, and Arsene Wenger was so angry that he squared up with Jol on the touchline. “It showed us the coach was living the game the same way the players were,” says Tainio. “We were happy to see Martin was up for it.” Tainio remembers that as the Spurs team bus left Highbury, it was pelted by “beer cans and stones” thrown by Woolwich fans, forcing the Spurs players to take cover on the bus floor.
This was when Woolwich and Spurs were vying for fourth place. It all came down to the last game of the season when Spurs went to Upton Park and, frankly, if you are reading this article, you know what happened next. “I have never seen so many sick guys in the dressing room, not before, not after,” Tainio says. “That was something crazy. You could see before the game it is going to be a big battle, seeing a lot of people suffering. I didn’t feel 100 per cent in the game, but I wasn’t as sick as the other players were.”
It was only a few days later that Tainio felt the full effects of the norovirus that struck the rest of the Spurs squad, but by that point, the damage was done. Tainio is able, 15 years on, to be phlegmatic about Spurs missing out on Champions League football that way. “The table never lies,” he says. “It was very bad luck that that thing came during the last game, but the table never lies. That’s what we deserved.”
There was a revenge of sorts one year later when Spurs went back to Upton Park and pulled off a famous 4-3 win. Spurs went 2-0 down, Tainio volleyed one in to make it 2-2 before being out-jumped by Bobby Zamora who headed in Carlos Tevez’s freekick to put West Ham back in front. Dimitar Berbatov and Paul Stalteri won it for Spurs at the end, and Tainio had his place in an all-time classic.
Tainio’s place in Tottenham history was sealed at Wembley one year later. By this point, Jol had been replaced by Juande Ramos, and his Spurs took on Avram Grant’s Chelsea in the League Cup final. Tainio came on for Steed Malbranque in the second half, Ramos telling him to “play with your head, and take your time when needed”.
After Jonathan Woodgate’s extra-time header put Spurs 2-1 up, Tainio knew what he needed to do. With five minutes left, Tainio had a throw-in and took as long as he could over it. Mark Halsey booked him for time-wasting but Tainio still would not throw the ball.
“Joe Cole started yapping something. “I said, ‘Sorry, boy, look at the scoreboard, we’re leading 2-1’. Didier Drogba didn’t like the idea so he started yapping too. I was wasting a good amount of time.”
The incident eventually roped in Younes Kaboul, Michael Ballack and Didier Zokora too, but it wasted a crucial minute, helping Spurs to the cup. And that moment has been immortalised on YouTube (the clip is called “Teemu Legend” and has been viewed more than 135,000 times), and Tainio is still asked about it by Spurs fans whenever he meets them.
Winning that League Cup was the highlight of Tainio’s career, the “cherry on the cake” of Tainio’s time at the club. Because by that point Tainio already sensed that his time at Spurs was coming to an end. When Ramos replaced Jol, Tainio was deployed more often at full-back than in central midfield, where Zokora was increasingly dominant. So even though Tainio did not want to leave his boyhood club, nor did he want to sit on the bench and never play.
So in the summer of 2008, Tainio headed to Sunderland along with Malbranque and Pascal Chimbonda. But that was a “very, very difficult year”, a whole season of “total turbulence”, as Roy Keane was sacked and replaced by Ricky Sbragia. There was a loan to Birmingham City before Jol signed him for Ajax, but his time in Amsterdam was disrupted by injuries.
Tainio nearly went back to Finland, only to get an offer to go to MLS to play for New York Red Bulls, teaming up with his old Woolwich rival Thierry Henry. “Can you believe, I played with Henry, who I used to hate?” Tainio laughs. “We kept talking about Spurs and Woolwich, on a daily basis we were talking about old games against each other.” In August 2012, Tainio even played against Spurs — by now managed by Andre Villas-Boas — for the first time in his career, with the Premier League club beating the MLS side in a pre-season fixture.
But even after hanging up his boots, that connection with the club was still there. He has been back to plenty of Spurs games since he retired (he counts six or seven), turning down the option of hospitality tickets to go in with the fans instead. “I always had a really good relationship with the fans, and when I went to White Hart Lane I was always chatting with the fans about the game. I never went to the VIP stand, always in the normal stands, so I could chat with them. It’s a big pleasure. For me, they are the No 1 fans in the world, of course.” He has been to the new stadium too, playing in the legends’ game in 2019.
Wanting to find another way to help the club after retiring, Tainio became one of Tottenham’s Scandinavian scouts in 2015. This meant reporting to Paul Mitchell (and then Steve Hitchen), checking out players in Scandinavia or, at times, midfielders who were playing elsewhere around Europe. And one of those players, Hojbjerg, went on to sign for Spurs.
Tainio saw Hojbjerg playing for the Danish national team in 2016, the year he signed for Southampton, a sign of how long he club had been monitoring him before he joined in 2020. Tainio is a big fan, and sees something of himself in him.
“He is more comfortable with the ball than I was back in my days,” Tainio says. “I can see some similarities, the way he plays. I really like the player. He is a complete midfielder. He reads the game really well. And comparing him from 2016 and now, he has taken massive steps forward. He’s good on the ball, he knows his quality, he plays easy, and reads the game really well. He’s tough. I like the way he’s playing.”
Hojbjerg also brings vocal leadership in the middle of the pitch, something Tottenham have lacked for years. “Like Edgar Davids, you need players with a lot of personality in the team,” Tainio says. “Especially when things are not going your way, you need somebody to step up and say a few words.”
Next month, Hojbjerg will have a chance to emulate what Tainio’s Spurs achieved in 2008 — beating a better-equipped side in the League Cup final. And no one would be happier than Tainio if this Spurs team lift the cup.
