During the mid-1990s, there were few better attacking midfielders on the planet than Jari Litmanen.
The game’s first bona fide Finnish superstar, Litmanen was the talismanic presence in the all-conquering Ajax side that won the 1995 Champions League and 12 other trophies during his seven-year spell with the Dutch giants.
Litmanen on his Leeds United snub
“During my time in the army, I visited clubs in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and England,” Litmanen tells FourFourTwo. “Someone arranged a week for me at Leeds. I played one reserve game and trained once with the first team, but English football back then was completely different.
“Even if they’d offered me a contract, I would have said no – it wasn’t for me. It was a lot of long balls, too much football in the air, not the kind of game I could play.”
When Litmanen left Ajax in 1999, he reunited with his former boss Louis van Gaal at Barcelona – another club he had gone on trial with as a youngster.
“In the first week, I trained with the second team, then there was a break in the Spanish league and many of the players were on holiday,” he recalls. “One evening, the phone rang in my hotel room. Someone said: “Hello, are you Jari Litmanen? This is Johan Cruyff, I’m the coach of Barcelona. Do you know me?”
“I thought someone was messing with me, but he said, “Tomorrow you’re coming to train with us, is that OK?” I said yes, thinking I was going to train with the second team.
“Then he told me, “No, with the first team.” Suddenly, I was training alongside Hristo Stoichkov, Michael Laudrup, Pep Guardiola, Andoni Zubizarreta, Jose Mari Bakero… it felt surreal, an amazing experience.
“After the last session, Cruyff said, “You did well, I like you – keep working hard and in a couple of years you’ll get your chance somewhere.”
“Barcelona already had three foreign players – Stoichkov, Laudrup and Ronald Koeman – so there was no space for me in the squad.”
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