It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Inter Turku this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Inter Turku know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Inter Turku. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Inter Turku have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Eetu Huuhtanen was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Squad28 Sep 2026
8 new faces, and Inter Turku are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Vincent Ulundu is on it.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Jean Botué signs something — a contract at Inter Turku or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Inter Turku, and both men came out saying it was fine.
A conversation in the manager’s office, and a commitment that came out of it. Promises like that are cheap to make and expensive to break, and Juuso Hämäläinen has written the date down.
Two hours a week with a tutor, which is the least glamorous thing at Inter Turku and the one that decides whether a foreign signing is still here in two years.
Lukáš Prokop, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 7.88
A mark of 7.88 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
At 21 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Janne-Pekka Laine was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“We earned that. I asked them for a reaction and I got one, and now I want the same again on Saturday.” Lukas Taylor on a 2‑0 afternoon that pleased him more than he was prepared to show.