Jimi Tauriainen, 19, will appear in TV pictures. The Finnish football promise gets to play for the first time in the English club Chelsea’s representative team.
Many Finns in front of the TV screens will surely get excited. However, Jimi Tauriainen’s Pasi-father has received a tip about the matter from an interesting person a moment earlier.
– Chelsea Academy Director Jim Fraser called and was completely in awe. He yelled into the phone that Jim is debuting and this is fantastic! There was an awful lot of noise in the back. We didn’t see it yet at that point, Pasi Tauriainen remembers.
Fraser reports the great moment straight from Chelsea’s iconic home stadium, Stamford Bridge. Tauriainen played a good minute at the end of the match, when Chelsea defeated Leeds in the English Cup match.
– Fraser also had a feeling about that. However, he is a big leader at Chelsea. Fraser is part of Chelsea’s management team. He was also the person who made the final decision to get Jim, Tauriainen says.
Big clubs on the heels, a strict reaction from the Barcelona boss
Jimi Tauriainen moved to Chelsea in the first summer of the corona pandemic at the age of 16 in 2020. According to his father, Jimi Tauriainen was interested in many European football giants.
Juventus and Inter Milan from Italy, PSG from France and Barcelona from Spain were on Jimi Tauriainen’s heels. They also went to Freiburg in Germany, whose Academy at that time Jim’s older brother played for Julius Tauriainen.
– There were so many options that we didn’t have time to visit them all. I went to some of the clubs alone when Jimi couldn’t join. “One of Barcelona’s sporting directors hung up on me when I told Jimi that he had chosen Chelsea,” says Pasi Tauriainen.
Evening newspaper news fresh after the transfer, how the mother’s word had weighed the most in the Chelsea selection. Riitta’s mother was taken by how Chelsea was going to take Jimi’s son into her care.
The road to the current point has not been straightforward. In one winter he got three corona infections, in the second winter he broke his arm and in the third winter he broke his knee at the Finnish national team camp.
Tauriainen moved to London to live with a local family. According to Pasi’s father, there were problems with the first family, even though the second Finnish promise Lucas Bergström lived with Jim and that made it easier to adapt.
However, the corona brought its own challenges. Communication with the club, Jim and the host family did not work in the best possible way. Jimi Tauriainen didn’t always know when the host family would be at home and when they were away. The Finnish promise spent many nights in the hotel as well.
– With the first family, things didn’t go like in the movies. With another family it was absolutely fantastic. I bet Jimi will be doing a lot with them. There is a bit of luck here, where you fall, Pasi Tauriainen describes.
Along with peers worth 20 million euros
Last year, Tauriainen was able to move into his own apartment. He has passed a strict screen when he has risen from the academy team to play even one match for Chelsea’s representative team.
– This is not understood here. Chelsea still spend money. Chelsea has three Brazilian guys of Jimi’s age, each of whom has been paid 20 million euros. A couple of weeks ago, a Jamaican of Jim’s age also arrived, for which roughly 20 million was paid. When this kind of money is spent on juniors, it cannot help but influence the decisions of coaches, academy managers or club owners, Pasi Tauriainen illustrates.
– Already on the academy side, there are many ten million euro guys around. It’s clear that Jim has had a big job convincing these people that he’s worth putting him on the field and that there can be players from here.
Chelsea’s player legend and manager of the representative team at the time Frank Lampard wanted to join Jimi Tauriainen at the time, because he wanted a left-footed player in the midfield, who could carry the ball from the right side of the field through the middle and create a threat at the attacking end.
However, after Lampard, Chelsea has already had three new managers, i.e. the head coach of the national team, in four years. Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and now the freshest Mauricio Pocchettino.
– When you look back on this time, Jimi has been able to convince all these coaches. However, there has always been an illness or injury. He has not been able to break through according to the representation. But now it happened. This is long-term work, Pasi Tauriainen reminds.
Jimi Tauriainen and Frank Lampard posed in joint photos in the summer of 2020.
Social media off after a great stage
The work started in Veikkola. The Tauriainen family moved from Northern Helsinki to Veikkola twenty years ago. When Pasi’s father started holding football practices, the first thing to do was to restore the grass field. A few years later, artificial turf was built.
After that, Pasi Tauriainen was starting his own football club. Jimi, Julius’ older brother, who currently plays in FC Lahti, and many other children from the village were there.
– Jimi and Julius did a lot of work in their own time. I have tried to create the world in such a way that they themselves feel the need to go to the field and do the right things. Even now, as a coach, I try to inspire children to practice, but Jimi and Julius have spent hundreds of emotions on the field, Pasi Tauriainen describes.
Pasi Tauriainen had a long career on the domestic courts and in the A national team. His uncle Elastic and Sprout are also familiar to the followers of domestic football. Coached Jimi Tauriai in the youth national team Erkka V. Lehtola previously told about his funny memory knowing the boy’s blood heritage.
Lehtola described that Jimi had once told on the car trip how Pasi’s father always finds something weak in his son’s game, but “it doesn’t matter because at least it doesn’t get in the way”.
Pasi’s father is grateful for his son’s mature attitude when he heard about the comment. Jimi had also remembered his father fresh after his Chelsea debut and thanked him for his help along the way.
One goal of father and son had been fulfilled.
– My answer was that you can enjoy this for one evening. Then the next day, social media off, and back to full training. You should find new things every day, says Pasi Tauriainen.
They also immediately set new goals. In the same way as HJK’s top striker of the early 1990s, Pasi Tauriainen, did with his own father and Jim’s brother Julius, one month at a time.
However, these goals remain only in the family’s knowledge. Pasi Tauriainen does not want to reveal them to outsiders.
On Saturday, Tauriainen was again on the trip of Chelsea’s representative team, for the first time in the Premier League. The Premier League debut is yet to be made, as Tauriainen watched the entire match against Brentford, which ended in a 2-2 draw, from the bench.
– Nothing has been achieved here yet. When more games start to come, we will only know what kind of player Jimi is in the end, the father underlines.