Janssen: I left Tottenham Hotspur to “be appreciated”

Vincent Janssen is no longer a Tottenham Hotspur player, having secured a move to Liga MX side Monterrey last summer, but he’s always remained a favorite here at the Cartilage Free Captain paragraph factory. Thicc Vin has never really opened up about his departure from Spurs, but considering he spent much of his final year at Tottenham training with the reserves before being brought into the team towards the end of the 2018-19 season, it’s not hard to puzzle out that he wasn’t exactly happy with the way things were going.

But now he’s opened up a bit about his time at Tottenham in an interview with Dutch football outlet VTBL. The video interview’s entirely in Dutch, so enter the Evening Standard with a translation.

“It was not the period I was hoping for at Tottenham. As a 22-year-old boy from AZ it was a great step, but I didn’t get the minutes that I expected. Also, I did not reach my potential.

“Ultimately you want to play again, be a footballer and be appreciated.”

At Monterrey, Janssen joined a Liga MX side that already had a solid striker in 29-year old veteran Rogelio Funes Mori, but in his first year Janssen slotted neatly into the role of an impact substitute. He had 10 goals and 2 assists for Monterrey after joining mid-season, and helped Los Rayados to their first Mexican league title in nine years, in the process earning the nickname “El Toro” by fans and providing some incredible celebration shots of him in a cowboy hat.

And it sure seems as though Janssen doesn’t regret the move across the sea from Europe to Mexico.

“The Mexican league is very good and the standard is high. It is better than the Eredivisie. That’s my opinion. Here there are a lot of international players that come from this part of the world and there are two that come from Europe, of which I am one.

”It is a completely different way of playing football and it certainly isn’t bad in terms of quality. If you look at our team, you’ll see national team players from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.”

We don’t always track former Tottenham players that closely after the leave the club, but we make an exception for Thicc Vin. He’s a lovely guy who left the club in bad circumstances, but he sure seems to have found his happy place in Mexico. Mess with El Toro, you get the horns.