With the announcement that Kwesi Appiah will be raising funds for UK based charity TackleAfrica in the Pay2Play event in May, I thought I’d write this week’s blog about Palace players with African heritage.

Kwesi himself is of mixed Ghanian and English descent, which might explain his eagerness to get involved with the TackleAfrica. They run projects across several countries in sub-Saharan African, including Ghana, delivering HIV education to the most vulnerable of communities through the medium of football.

Kwesi has done his time around the lower echelons of the football pyramid, before hitting the big time by joining the mighty Palace. Bearing in mind the genetic make up of the areas around South London, it’s no surprise that Kwesi is the latest in a long line of Palace players with African connections. Here’s my summary of a select few:

Gavin Nebbelling

Big Neb was one of the first players that I used to watch at Palace in the late 1980′s, tightening up the defence along side legend Jim Cannon, or anchoring the midfield. For some unknown reason he always reminded me of Neighbours’ Jim Robinson, but he was actually of South African rather than Aussie descent. Nebbelling actually played his entire pro career in England, after a youth career in Johannesburg with Arcadia Shepherds. He made over 150 appearances for the Eagles before moving onto Fulham and Preston, with a smattering of loan moves in between.

Kagisho Dikgacoi

‘KG’ was Dougie Freedman’s biggest signing when he purchased him from Fulham for £600k last summer after a successful loan spell. Unfortunately the South African international has not quite lived up to his early Palace promised and appears to have been carrying a little extra timber in recent weeks. A defensive midfielder, KG has not quite demonstrated the robustness needed to play that role in the Championship, nor a particular willingness to create or score, although the highlight of his Palace career to date has to be his Zidane-esque goal last term, stumbling onto the ball and pirouetting past the keeper. An established international, KG has 39 caps for Bafana Bafana, scoring 2 goals.

Victor Moses

Victor Moses became the latest high profile graduate from the famous Crystal Palace academy to be sold onto a Premier League team when Palace slumped into administration in 2010. Moses was Palace’s most saleable asset and despite optimistic links with Barcelona and Real Madrid, ended being sold to Wigan for £2.5m. Moses blasted his way through the youth ranks at Palace having arrived from Nigeria as an orphaned asylum seeker.

He’s actually been capped at all age groups from Under 16-21 for England (golden boot winner 2007 U17 Euro Championships), but has recently been flirting with representing his country of birth, Nigeria, at senior level. He made his debut for the appropriately nickname, Eagles, in a friendly against Rwanda in February. This summer will be a big one for Victor Moses. Having recently put in some headline making performances, he has just announced his intention not to renew his contract with Wigan, leaving open the opportunity for a move to a bigger club. Barca and Real are unlikely to be calling but Liverpool, Newcastle or Swansea may come be more realistic destinations.

Wilfred Zaha

The new Victor Moses? If VicMo was the last academy product to be sold on for big bucks, Wilfred Zaha could be the next. Another African immigrant, Zaha was actually born in Cote d’Ivoire and played youth football with ASEC Mimosas who also spawned the careers of luminaries such as Bonaventure Kalou, Didier Zokora, Emmanuel Eboué, Gervinho, Salomon Kalou, and Yaya Touré. Like Moses, Zaha has been tipped for big things, and will surely end up in the Premier League before too long, with Palace, or more likely a team already there.

Bolton made an embarrassingly low bid for Zaha on transfer deadline day, but should the worst happened and Zaha is sold on, Palace fans would like to see the player have loftier aspirations than Bolton, a trotter, he ain’t. Unlike when Moses was sold, Palace aren’t in a position where they will be force to sell, and Zaha is a year into a 5 year contract. Hopefully adding to his tally of games and goals in the Championship will see him develop into a top player. Zaha has already won England U21 caps, and has been shortlisted for Team GB, but it remains to be seen whether he sticks with his current nation or returns to his homeland to realise international ambitions. By the way Owen Coyle….he’s just too good for you.

For more information on the type of work that TA do, and the areas they are involved in check out their website: http://tackleafrica.org/highlights/what-we-do/

If you want to get involved yourself, sign up for one of TackleAfrica’s Football Marathon’s this summer – 12 hour football endurance events in London, Manchester, Lancaster, Brighton and Jersey. To sponsor Kwesi, check out his justgiving site www.justgiving.com/kwesiappiah or text KAPP 38 £10 to 70070.

More info on IPay2Play here:http://www.teamimani.co.uk/ipay2play/

“Some people think football is a matter of life or death… I can assure them, it is much more serious than that.”

For many, Bill Shankly’s sentiments have permeated almost every facet of their lives, from John Westwood, who legally inserted ‘Portsmouth Football Club’ between his first and surname in addition to his 60+ Pompey-related tattoos (including the PFC engraved in his teeth), to more than 35 divorce cases which have cited the Football Manager video game series as a significant factor in relationship disintegration.

That any individual can commit themself to a computer game to such an extent is a point which barely requires consideration, but the fact that Portsmouth have assiduously flirted with extinction over the past 18 months illustrates a broader concern for football fans, whose dedication to the sport is critically disproportionate to what they receive in return. Following a team usually proves to be an expensive undertaking, with season tickets/match-day entrance an account-destroying alternative to forking out for a Sky subscription on top of the costly merchandise and travel expenditure required to be considered a ‘true fan.’

In various scenarios that repeatedly emerge in each and every football calendar, a fans’ firmly held opinions alter and allegiances shift. For example, one fan may opine that their supported club is better than others within its country of origin based on several criteria, then later suggest that the entire league of that country is better than others that exist within the continent, and then support their national side which will almost always contain players from rival clubs that they spend 90% of the year criticising, and 10% selling their car to afford the fee to watch play.

Supporter standards aside, perhaps the most damaging cost to all lovers of the beautiful game is the absence of organised competition which regularly exhibits the globe’s finest talents. In reality, there are roughly between 100 and 150 exceptional footballers on the planet, and although certain players’ statuses are elevated due to completing poignant landmarks for their clubs, – such as loyalty in terms of appearances or scoring a goal which provided the difference between survival and relegation, winning a trophy and being a runner-up etc. – in every generation only a select few can legitimately be regarded as exemplary athletes within their field.

The UEFA Champions League is generally interpreted as the most esteemed stage a footballer can perform on (other than the FIFA World Cup), and its seeding process dictates a top category of eight teams who qualify based on their European performances over the previous five seasons. If we take that each squad contains about 10 world-class players at most, and that a small number of teams containing world-class players will always be just outside the top 8 seeds every year, then we are left with the 100-150 players I referred to earlier. For example, Manchester United – finalists in three out of the past four competitions – have the quality of Nemanja Vidic, Wayne Rooney and Patrice Evra, but also the capable, but far from world-class standard, individuals such as John O’Shea, Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick.

The same could be said for every team: Arsenal – Samir Nasri, Cesc Fabregas and Robin van Persie/Denilson, Abou Diaby and Laurent Koscielny; Bayern Munich – Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery and Bastian Schweinsteiger/Mario Gomez, Holger Badstuber and Daniel van Buyten; Chelsea – Didier Drogba, Fernando Torres and John Terry/Paolo Ferreira, Salomon Kalou and John Obi Mikel; AC Milan – Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Alexandre Pato and Antonio Cassano/Kevin Prince-Boateng, Mathieu Flamini and Ignazio Abate. The list goes on, but you get the picture.

It seems unfair, despite the multifarious reasons such as insurance, employment contacts and sponsorship arrangements, that in every generation of great footballers we are denied the opportunity to see the best in the sport compete with each other, devoid of unequalled influences. The unremitting universal media coverage prior to the recent European Cup Final between Manchester United and Barcelona implied that the globe’s best two teams were battling for the club game’s most prestigious honour. But the hidden rhetoric suggested that the fixture was merely the closest we could get this year to seeing the best players on the same pitch at the same time, an emphasis that was arguably more relaxed than the reportage before each of the five Barcelona v Real Madrid Clasicos last term.

Although the Catalans succeeded emphatically at the expense of their rivals – disregarding Madrid’s narrow extra-time triumph in the Copa del Rey – they also possessed the highest concentration of world-class talent. In no way am I arguing that great players make a great team, as numerous Bernabeu Galactico projects evince in addition to Liverpool’s sub-standard 2005 Champions League winning side, but that a regularly held competition with only the very best participants represented by only the very best management would provide football lovers with an unrivalled spectacle that transcends club-based supporter enmity.

Surely I’m not the only one curious about how Cristiano Ronaldo AND Lionel Messi would perform in the same team, much like a team with Zinedine Zidane and Francesco Totti at their peaks would be like, or Diego Maradona and Michael Laudrup, Pele and George Best, Paolo Maldini and Carles Puyol etc. etc. The merits of the club game are unquestionable; the transfer auctions, local derbies, league and cup honours and fan devotion, but what if every two years we could enjoy a summer tournament of purely exceptional quality without supporter bias, where the audience attended for the sake of enjoyment rather than enduring customary stress and inevitable heartache?

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The reaction to the FIFA leader’s comments, not least from Sir Alex Ferguson’s office door, was of overwhelming outrage, seeing as Blatter conveyed either a tenuous grasp of history, or simply the unforgivably insensitive use of the term ‘slavery’ in relation to the purportedly unfair treatment of Ronaldo. Eschewing the comparison of historical slave conditions, modern-day slavery is broadly defined as the submission to authority for the purpose of economic exploitation; in other words, a confusingly inaccurate way to describe a professional athlete’s request for the termination of his willingly signed £100,000+ a week contract with arguably the world’s largest firm, in order to make £250,000 a week playing for one of his current employer’s biggest continental competitors.

Despite a reputation for trimming unruly influences, Ferguson tirelessly convinced his star asset to remain at Old Trafford for a further season, when he ‘reluctantly’ scored 25 goals as United reached the Champions’ League final for the second consecutive year following Premier League and Carling Cup triumphs, before eventually securing his protracted move to Madrid in July of 2009. It is widely considered that Real dwarfed their original investment of £80million in terms of shirt-sale income within hours of Ronaldo’s arrival, perhaps loosely exposing the economic exploitation Blatter had referred to a year earlier. I’m going to avoid describing the multifarious allegations of a more sinister nature that have littered Blatter’s presidency, but instead focus on an issue which the Swiss was so comfortable presenting his opinion on, albeit in an erroneous context.

It seems peculiar that the individual who retains a universal scale of influence in terms of football’s governance expressed his support for player protection when each year, thousands of young and vulnerable footballers are misled and manipulated by rogue agents, taken from their homes with the false promises of wealth and stardom, and then left to fend for themselves on foreign soil when the brutal reality is hastily acknowledged. This growing army of migrant talent has become a familiar part of the landscape in several major European cities, with children as young as 9 forced to beg on the streets of Milan or sell fake Prada handbags in Paris just to survive. The outcome these youngsters are guaranteed is as far removed as possible from the glamorous dream sold by Didier Drogba and Michael Essien, whose faces adorn every billboard in the Ivory Coast and Ghana respectively, selling anything from chocolate to mobile phones. But what is driving this damaging and abusive process and what measures are being conceived to prevent its intensification?

The reality, particularly in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where a large number of globally established footballers have been exported recently, is that the greater the success had by West African players in Europe, the vaster number of domestic Africans will believe they can follow this path. This has resulted in a substantial growth in the number of illegal football academies being established in Africa, offering children as young as six the chance to be noticed, with roughly 500 operating in Ghana’s capital, Accra, alone. Around 90% of these ‘centres’ are run by local men who claim to be ex-professional footballers, but in fact have limited experience, and are united in their shared intent on discovering the next Stephen Appiah or Asamoah Gyan; or a multi-million pound resource. Most of them charge subscription rates to the enrolled students’ parents and extended families, who, in several cases, remove them from routine schooling to allow them to concentrate on football full-time. The financial rewards reaped from having a professional footballer in the family evoke a rags to riches scenario of Hollywood proportions, so many consider the risk to their child’s education worth taking.

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But for those actually living in the capital, and the rest of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1974 is meaningful for an altogether different sporting occasion. That summer, Zaire became the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to qualify for the World Cup, but their players and fans recall the tournament in West Germany with mixed feelings, despite the achievement of being the first black African representatives on global football’s grandest stage. “I was very proud, and still am, to have represented Black and Central Africa at the World Cup,” says former defender, Mwepu Ilunga. “But we had the erroneous belief that we would be returning from the World Cup as millionaires. We got back home without a penny in our pockets. Look at me now, I’m living like a tramp,” an incensed Ilunga told BBC Sport.

The retired right full-back remains bitter about several aspects of the ‘Leopards’’ campaign, most notably the fact that Zairean officials are alleged to have pocketed his and his team-mates’ wages for the tournament, something Ilunga would only discover mid-way through the group stages. The opening game saw Zaire defeated 2-0 by Scotland, but Ilunga claims that the players were told that they wouldn’t be paid at all, prior to the next match against Yugoslavia. “Before the Yugoslavia match we learnt that we were not going to be paid, so we refused to play,” claims the defender, who has since become a cult footballing icon for running out of the defensive wall to kick a Brazilian free-kick away in Zaire’s final first-round fixture. Unfortunately, the Leopards were thrashed 9-0 by Yugoslavia, having been persuaded at the last moment to attend the encounter, a result that did immense damage to the image of African football.

Following the humiliating defeat at the hands of Yugoslavia, the late Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s leader at the time, intervened directly in the team’s affairs. “After the match, he sent his presidential guards to threaten us,” remembers Ilunga. “They closed the hotel to all journalists and said that if we lost 4-0 to Brazil, none of us would be able to return home.” The unforgivable treatment of Zaire’s players at the World Cup was in stark contrast to the way they had been received following qualification, when Mobutu is said to have gifted each team member a car and a house. “Mobutu’s generals were so jealous of the gifts we were given that he had to buy them a car each, to keep them quiet,” Ilunga said. In their last game, Zaire lost 3-nil to Brazil, which allowed the team to return home free from the fear of retribution, but Africa’s first World Cup showing saw the Leopards record an unenviable statistic of conceding 14 goals without scoring a single one.

Fast forward almost exactly 36 years and 120 minutes, and Africa’s sixth and longest-surviving representative at the 2010 edition of FIFA’s esteemed international tournament are simply a 12-yard spot-kick from reaching the semi-final stage, a watershed moment in the continent’s history. By this point, the global audience had thrown their full support behind Ghana’s ‘Black Stars’ following Luis Suarez’s deplorable goal-line hand-ball, which prevented the West Africans’ justified progression. Their talisman, Asamoah Gyan, who had scored in three of the previous four games, struck the cross-bar with the game’s final kick, and despite redeeming himself by converting in the subsequent penalty-shootout, Ghana were eliminated following a 4-2 reverse.

The country’s desolate onlookers were at least able to assess their players’ performances with a considerable element of pride, despite Ghana just failing to erode the semi-final barrier which no African side has yet been able to. But what are the factors which have contributed to the vastly altered assessment of African national teams? Previously, one or two representatives at international level would be perceived, by the European media at least, as negligible whipping-boys, with less than technically-adept playing staff. This is clearly no longer a widely-held view, evidenced by the number of African players not only competing in Europe at club level, but also at the very highest echelons of European competition.

The succeeding tournament hosted by Korea and Japan was remembered as much for Senegal’s impressive maiden appearance at a World Cup as for Ronaldo’s relentless form, as Frenchman, Bruno Metsu, led the ‘Lions of Teranga’ to the quarter-finals and a heroes welcome in the capital, Dakar, upon their post-elimination arrival. The acceleration of this trend reached a potentially damaging juncture last summer, when five out of Africa’s six attending nations elected foreign supervision prior to the continent’s first hosting of a World Cup in South Africa. Algeria were the only African representative with a home-grown head coach, – Rabah Saadane – but Nigeria’s conduct in releasing manager, Shaibu Amodu, three months before the tournament highlights a much broader concern within African football. “A lot of people [in Africa] still have the mentality that the European knows more,” said Thomas Mlambo, a distinguished television presenter and analyst on the South Africa-based sports network, SuperSport. The fact that Amodu was sacked following not only the remarkable achievement in qualifying Nigeria for the World Cup, but also in leading them to a third placed finish at the African Cup of Nations last year, emphasizes this confusing ‘mentality’ which inspired the Nigerian Football Federation to replace the 52 year-old with Lars Lagerback, who was only available to take the helm having failed to guide Sweden to the finals tournament.

Many will have questioned the decision to remove a coach who had spent two years conditioning the team, and succeeded in meeting his short-term objectives, with a manager who had recently failed to accomplish a similar target and with almost no knowledge of the country’s footballing traditions and philosophy. Amodu was actually sacked in a replica scenario prior to the 2002 World Cup and is unlikely to accept a fifth stint as Nigerian head coach should the opportunity arise. An Ivory Coast fan described the unusual racial barrier most African coaches face, and perhaps goes some way to explaining the seemingly irrational choices many African football federations have made recently: “The players have more respect for whites,” says Bienvenue Kehedi, a 26 year-old student in Abidjan. “An Ivorian can’t assert their will against the players because he tries to keep on the side of all the players and is scared of taking tough decisions.” Although European leadership may have assisted a few African nations in achieving their World Cup aspirations before last summer, the continent’s relatively poor showing at the 2010 tournament was interpreted by many as a sign of African football’s static development based on the dependence on foreign coaches.

The 1995 World, European and African Player of the Year, and Liberian legend, George Weah, has claimed that overseas influences are only serving to harm the progression of the sport in Africa. “In 1999, I addressed international coaches at FIFA and I said it; they come to Africa to coach but they are not the right people for the African team because they are not developing our players, they are just making the money, come for vacation and that’s it,” the former AC Milan forward stated.
Weah implied that the Ivory Coast’s, Cameroon’s, Algeria’s, Nigeria’s and hosts South Africa’s premature elimination should act as a wake-up call to provoke a change to the continent’s process of pursuing European management. “The European coaches are not the best for Africa. Some agree with me, some they don’t. Look at the statistics of the World Cup, since Africa started hiring European coaches, only the Africans coaches have done well,” Weah concluded.

The three-time African Player of the Year (1989, 1994 and 1995) may be right in some respects, but the continual appointment of foreign coaches embodies a natural corollary to African players’ increased presence in the European leagues. The employment of European coaches makes sense considering a large number of modern African national teams consist of mainly European-based players, evinced by a Sven Goran-Eriksson selected Ivory Coast squad containing just one Ivorian-based player out of 23 – the third-choice goalkeeper. There is certainly a growing feeling amongst many Africans that a change in organizational structure at the Confederation of African Football (CAF) is required to assist the development of the presently insufficient, and future, African coaches. With a campaign being led by Weah, arguably the continent’s most recognized footballing and political exemplar, it is not inconceivable to imagine prospective World Cups being contested by African nations guided by African managers. “We have to believe in ourselves, believe in our people. Give them the support to be trained and to develop our teams,” pleads Weah. “The CAF needs to wake-up, we need an institution for coaching in Africa. Our people don’t need to go to Europe, they need to stay in Africa and train.” Weah is certainly fighting a valid cause, because in spite of Africa’s varying successes under foreign managers, it would be catastrophic to witness a repeat of Ghana’s Serbian coach, Milovan Rajevac’s, inexcusable despair following the Black Stars’ 1-0 victory over Serbia in last years’ tournament. Africa’s sudden and meteoric ascension to the top of European football’s consciousness must not halt now, and with a burgeoning pool of talent swarming every region on the continent, it is time for the national federations to cultivate the hidden coaching talent to avoid future disappointment, and maintain the extraordinary progression.

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FootballFanCast.com WORLD Exclusive, Robbie Savage’s Face in a Baby Scan

Stamford Bridge in March last year offered its regular exhibition of Champions’ League knockout football as Chelsea welcomed back Jose Mourinho, who slipped away at the end of an expertly masterminded Inter victory without celebrating, as promised, in view of the fans who once worshipped him and would undoubtedly love the chance to do so again. Despite the customary Mourinho sub-plot escalation, the global audience wasn’t salivating at the Portuguese coach’s wisdom in its entirety, as over 4,000 miles away in East Africa, Kenya’s burgeoning legion of football followers were patiently anticipating a far more poignant appearance.

With five minutes remaining, and a 3-1 Inter lead seemingly enough to send the Italians through to the quarter-finals, Mourinho removed Wesley Sneijder, and replaced the Dutch forward with Nairobi-born Macdonald Mariga, the first Kenyan representative in the history of the Champions’ League. Mariga’s story isn’t all together unfamiliar, although it has been revealed this year that the midfielder earns $1.3million a year, the most of any East African player by a distance. But what encouraged Mariga’s journey from his agricultural background in Nakuru, playing in front of a diminutive crowd for Kenya’s national military team, to securing the attention of hundreds of millions of spectators from all corners of the globe, not to mention sharing occupational residency with Samuel Eto’o and Didier Drogba?

The aforementioned experienced contrasting emotions that night not least due to the result, but also since Drogba was dismissed for an unnecessary assault on Thiago Motta following Eto’o’s match-winner. Nevertheless, both had already cemented their statuses in their home continent as both athletic and political icons long before Mariga confirmed his place amongst his country’s most admired sporting paladins. The strikers are hailed as much for their charitable endowments as for their celebrity, with Drogba immortalized in the Ivory Coast for effectively ending five years of civil war, but how did either achieve such influential prominence having emerged from the humblest of beginnings? Youth academies have naturally played a significant role in exporting the continent’s precocious talents for the opportunities of greater exposure playing in Europe’s wealthier leagues, but their structure and organization is far more complex than the development facilities Premier League fans are used to. On the surface, this process appears to assist young Africans in the pursuit of their footballing ambitions, but the reality is far more brutal, and the coordination of several academies is only serving to harm the future of football in Africa.

Since the turn of the millennium, European fans, and particularly those who follow Premier League clubs, have witnessed a sudden infiltration of Ivorian talent, principally attributed to the MimoSifcom Academy near the country’s largest city, Abidjan. MimoSifcom is the official development facility of ASEC Mimosas, perhaps the Ivory Coast’s most famous footballing institution, and represents one of the few academies which demonstrate an authentically-African philosophy. The academy was one of the first structures of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa when founded in 1994, and its extant values mirror those of its European counterparts in that MimoSifcom provide hopeful thirteen to 17 year-olds with an academic as well as footballing education. The idea, as with any academy of this nature, is to promote promising candidates in to the Mimosas first-team, but with the mid-term intention to export the most gifted individuals to Europe in order to recover the costs of training young players and to sustain a steady flow of replacements for the successful graduates.

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It was a largely under-strength Swedish outfit which took on the Africans at the neutral venue in South Africa, but Erik Hamren’s side did enough to come away with a victory.

Helsingborg striker Alexander Gerndt opened the scoring on 34 minutes after he crept in behind the Botswana defence to put Sweden into the lead.

But the Africans hit back just two minutes after the restart when Joel Mogorosi found the back of the net to level the match at 1-1.

Former Southampton midfielder Anders Svensson settled the matter in the 74th minute, burying his strike to give Sweden back the advantage and ultimately the victory.

Sweden have one more friendly match, against Cyprus in February, before they resume their Euro 2012 qualifying campaign against Moldova on March 29.

The 28-year-old South Africa international, whose three million-pound move from Everton was completed on Wednesday, will inject even more guile into a Spurs midfield that already features the likes of Gareth Bale, Rafael van der Vaart and Aaron Lennon.

The north Londoners are in fifth place in the league table, eight points behind leaders Manchester United, who they held to a goalless draw in their most recent Premier League outing.

Newcastle are in ninth place in the league, eight points behind Spurs. In their last league fixture they held sixth-place Sunderland to a 1-1 draw in the Tyne-Wear derby at the Stadium of Light, and have claimed seven points from their past three games.

Alan Pardew’s men will, however, be keen to reverse the 2-0 loss they suffered at White Hart Lane last month.

Pardew is still waiting on the fitness of star striker Andy Carroll, who missed the Sunderland game with a thigh strain, meaning Irishman Leon Best could again partner Shola Ameobi up front, with Dane Peter Lovenkrands another option.

Defender Ryan Taylor and winger Hatem Ben Arfa are long-term casualties and are certain to miss out, while Cheik Tiote is out through suspension.

Redknapp has little news from the treatment room to concern him ahead of the clash, with only long-term absentees Jamie O’Hara, Ledley King and Tom Huddlestone unavailable.

In further positive news for Redknapp, defender Jonathan Woodgate emerged unscathed after making his long-awaited comeback from a groin injury when he played for a Spurs XI in a 9-2 win over Queens Park Rangers in a training-ground friendly on Tuesday.

Spurs were reported to have paid the Merseyside club a fee of three million pounds for the 28-year-old’s services and Pienaar, who was in his last year under contract at Everton, has signed a four-and-a-half year deal with the Londoners

“We are delighted to announce that we have reached agreement with Everton and Steven Pienaar for the player’s transfer to the club,” a statement on Spurs’ official website read.

Spurs boss Harry Redknapp told Sky Sports News he was glad Pienaar had chosen to ply his trade at White Hart Lane instead of Chelsea, who were also keen to land the South African international.

“He’s a good signing. He’s a good footballer, I think he’ll fit into the way we play great and I’ve always liked him,” Redknapp said.

“He has a good attitude, a good trainer, a good player. I know David Moyes loved him at Everton and it was unfortunate he decided not to stay.”

“But in the end I think it is a fair deal – Everton got a decent fee in the end for him, Chelsea were in for him, and I think he spoke to Chelsea and he came and spoke to us and he’s decided to come here.”

Pienaar is expected to line up for his new club against Newcastle at St James’ Park on Saturday.

The South African international has been in the middle of a bidding war between Spurs and Chelsea, with both clubs having offers accepted by Everton for the 28-year-old.

But Pienaar travelled to north London to complete a medical at White Hart Lane on Tuesday and is expected to be unveiled as a Spurs player in the coming days.

“To end speculation I am going to Spurs,” Pienaar’s Twitter post read. “I’ve had brilliant years at Everton and it will always be a special place in my heart.”

With his contract set to expire in July, Everton were determined to get something for Pienaar and manager David Moyes revealed the club had accepted a bid for him from an undisclosed club at the weekend.

It is believed both Tottenham and Chelsea tabled bids in the region of three million pounds for the South African international, but Pienaar ultimately chose to link up with Harry Redknapp’s side.

Pienaar joined Everton from Borussia Dortmund after a successful loan spell and has also spent time with Dutch giants Ajax Amsterdam.

Pienaar, 28, is already negotiating personal terms with Chelsea after the English Premier League title holders met Everton‘s asking price, believed to be three million pounds.

The former Ajax and Borussia Dortmund midfielder has been heavily linked with a move away from Goodison Park after failing to sign an extension to his contract, which expires at the end of the season.

While reluctant to sell, Everton have been forced to arrange a transfer to prevent losing Pienaar for nothing when his contract expires.

Pienaar joined Everton on-loan from Dortmund in 2007, before Everton agreed a permanent deal with the Bundesliga club worth approximately two million pounds in 2008.

He was voted the club’s player of the season in 2009/10.

“Everton can confirm they have agreed terms with Tottenham over the possible transfer of Steven Pienaar,” the club said in a statement on Monday.

“Confirmation of the agreement with the north London club comes just days after a bid for the South African international was accepted from Chelsea.”

“Pienaar, who is out of contract with Everton in the summer, has been given permission to discuss his personal terms over a possible move away from Goodison Park.”

“His current contract expires in the summer and a new deal from Everton has been on the table since early in 2010.”