The appearance was for the somewhat smaller Tallinna Kalev Juunior team,

Litmanen, 54, divides his time between Tallinn, where he and his family live, and Helsinki, where he works as a pundit for Finnish TV – the English Premier League in particular is keenly followed by the football fandom of Estonia's northern neighbor.

While he hung up his boots in 2011 and also suffered heavily with Covid, Litmanen said he was tempted out of retirement briefly last fall, to play alongside his two teenage sons, for Tallinna Kalev Juunior.

"Suddenly, they had a small group and as I'd been doing some training on the field, their coach said: 'Is it possible for you to practize with us so we have one player more?',"Litmanen recalled.

"I thought: 'Why not?'" adding that he not only trained, but even played the last 30 minutes of a match – noting that while his sons' teammates may not have recognized him, many of the parents did.

Sadly Kalev lost the match 3:2 to Tallinna FC Zapoos.

The full interview with The Athletic, the New York Times' sports page, published Tuesday, is here.

A native of Lahti, whose club he also played for across two spells in the 2000s, Litmanen won the Champions League with Dutch legends Ajax in 1995 and was runner-up with the team the following year. He was also the top scorer in the Champions League in the same season with nine goals. His time at Barca and Liverpool in the early 2000s was less spectacular, partly due to injury, but he still scored plenty of goals for the Merseyside club, before returning to Ajax. After spells at Fulham and Malmö, Litmanen finished his career in his home country, with HJK. Litmanen is also Finland's most-capped player and was its top scorer until Teemu Pukki, then at Norwich City, overtook him in 2021.

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