TEEMU PUKKI
“They wrote us off. They always do. But here we are.”
Norwich City striker Teemu Pukki has just walked into Carrow Road’s staff canteen, and is surveying the message printed in huge letters on the wall. Although it wasn’t written specifically for him, it couldn’t sum up his fairytale story much better. “Yeah,” he admits to FourFourTwo with a smile, reflecting on a year in which all of his dreams have come true.
Five years after rejection by Celtic, 2019 has been the year in which Pukki has reached the Premier League for the first time, been named Championship Player of the Year, netted more goals in a campaign than any Norwich player since 1956, scored their first top-tier hat-trick since 1993, and become the first Canaries star ever to be awarded a Premier League Player of the Month prize.
After all of that, and a summer in which he married fiancée Kirsikka, he scored the goals that fired Finland to next summer’s European Championship – their first major tournament. Ten appearances in qualifying, 10 goals. “It’s going to be really hard to top this year,” says the marksman with a chuckle.
When Pukki joined Norwich from Brondby in the summer of 2018, he didn’t think that 18 months later the East Anglian club would be flogging merchandise on Finland’s streets, or that they would be holding a ‘Pukki Party’ for 2,000 admirers in a Helsinki nightclub. Both of those things happened on the day of Finland’s qualification for Euro 2020.
Nor did he imagine that he would wind up spearheading a one-man tourism wave, as the people of Norwich clamoured to watch his big
